The mothings change...

My point stands, that for a private company it doesn't
matter how much it spends, as long as it makes a
profit doing so. For a government agency however, the
only way for it to get more money is to extract more
from taxpayers.

I guess that I should have said that for a government
agency there are only costs, and no revenues. The
only way for a government agency to bring in more
money is for it to extract more from taxpayers. Any
money that is made by any government agency (through
licensing or what have you) goes back into general
revenues for the entire government.

As far as business opportunities with those agencies
goes, a business would be irresponsible to enter into
those sort of agreements, as funding for such programs
is dictated by politicians far from the programs, and
can be shut down on a whim.

Ed

--- Jake wrote:

> I don't think this is necessarily true at all... It
> may be hard to see
> the benefits because neither NASA nor ESA produce
> commercial products,
> but they do license and sell the rights to the
> technologies for them..
> Not only that but private companies pay these
> agencies to do R&D for
> them.. They kinda have the market cornered in this
> area (for now at
> least).. Both ESA and NASA have links to all kinds
> of business
> opportunities on their websites...
> I believe they make tons of money from these
> ventures.. How could they
> not?? These people are not stupid..
> How much it is annually and where it all goes to is
> anybodies guess.. I
> assume it goes back into the budget as it should in
> any government
> agency.. I doubt that's what really happens to it
> all, but that's
> another issue..
>
> The real winners are already the private industries
> and ultimately
> supposed to be the people as far as the improvements
> that it makes in
> our lives.. The cost for research in these areas is
> so tremendous that
> it limits the involvement to only a few private
> companies even remotely
> capable of doing it.. I think government funded
> agencies must pave the
> way for the private sector to have something to
> build from..
> That's really the way it's always been with
> expansion, and will probably
> remain for any foreseeable future...
>
> --- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Ed Minchau
>
> wrote:
> >
> > This is the difference between the governmental
> space
> > programmes and the private efforts. For a
> government
> > program, there are only costs, no benefits, but
> for a
> > private program there are profits to more than
> offset
> > the costs (otherwise the company goes out of
> > business). For a private company, it doesn't
> matter
> > how much money things cost, as long as total sales
> > exceed those costs. And that's a side of the
> equation
> > that a government simply cannot balance.
> >
> > Ed
> >
> > --- ANTIcarrot dante_feditech@... wrote:
> >
> > > A ESA official called Gerhard Haerendel, who is
> > > chairman of that agency's
> > > exploration directorate's senior advisory
> committee,
> > > has recently come to a
> > > startling conclusion: That a return to the moon
> and
> > > Mars could cost up to
> > > half a trillion dollars! One can't help but
> wonder
> > > if he took ninety days to
> > > reach this conclusion.
> > >
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2007/06/05/214397/moon-and-mars-pro\