12 Mar
2013
12 Mar
'13
10:06 p.m.
On 03/12/2013 01:35 AM, mc68010 wrote:
Which proves nothing regarding current ownership of old NASA hardware.
No, it wasn't by mistake. It was all done by legitimate government policy.
On 3/11/2013 10:29 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
Which proves nothing regarding current ownership.
mc68010 wrote:
It does sort of say NASA on it. It is actually right on it. I think a case could be made that these are
government property
I don't think a case can be made for that without digging up actual
records. At this point the government would need to prove that it is
their property.
Irrelevant. The government buys billions of
dollars of stuff every
year that is "never meant to be sold", and eventually it all gets
sold, unless it's classified, in which case it is declassified then
sold or scrapped. (Sometimes after declassification there's no value
other than as recyclable materials.)
I have more than one friend with stuff they shouldn't have. Stuff they
bought at auction. It is more bureaucratic error. Classified and some
even up to the nuclear level. It slips through all the time.
Even if it could be shown that they didn't explicitly intend to sell
it, they would also have to show that it wasn't abandoned, since
abandoning property with no demonstrable intent to recover it
forfeits ownership.
That was by mistake. If NASA decided they wanted them back I imagine
they could be taken
back.
Not likely. NASA surplused by public auction an incredible amount of
stuff from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. There's no
reason to believe that this wasn't legitimately surplused.
What is really amazing is how sloppy the bookkeeping during the Apollo
program was. They were in such a hurry they just didn't care.
They kept track of the things that needed keeping track of, for at least
as long as they needed to be kept track of. (With some mistakes, as
occur in any human endeavor.)
Eric