Slashdot Mirror
Google Founder Offer $33M For Use of NASA Airship Hangar
theodp writes "The Mercury News reports that NASA is considering an offer from Google's billionaire founders to provide '100 percent' funding to save Hangar One. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt have, through a company they control, proposed paying the full $33 million cost of revamping Hangar One, once home to the Navy's giant airships at Moffett Field, in return for use up to two-thirds of the floor space of the hangar to house their fleet of eight private jets. In October, the Googlers struck an agreement with NASA Ames calling for the use of their 'co-located' Alpha fighter jet to, among other things, help NASA mitigate wildfires and study global warming."
I suspect it's a bit more convoluted. The shell company that technically owns the jets and that will be using 2/3rds of the hangar has an odd relationship with NASA, refurbishing old jets, from small fighters to Boeing 767's, and turning them into "science" planes. It's more like this company is subsidizing the government. Sort of.
That "sort of" is what's intriguing. The jets are being refurbished, thanks to a massive pool of unaudited money, for vague "science" missions. The closest thing that comes to mind is Hughes and his odd relationship with the government: that entanglement produced the Glomar Explorer ostensibly for deep-sea mineral research but really for a CIA program to recover a Soviet submarine. The Google-NASA public-private partnership for "science" or "research" may be a way of hiding expensive and highly experimental espionage programs from auditors by keeping programs off the public books. The flights so far have included "observation" of a returning ESA space vehicle, so they have the capability to monitor signals from an inbound object; maybe also satellites? If you think all this sounds a bit paranoid, consider that Google and the CIA have some similar investment interests.