thank you for your time, What in your view is the hardest problem in interplanetary exploration and what does JPL do to solve it.

We need to educate more managers and artists in this country. Engineers we can always import, already trained.

True, I've seen programs heavily underbid and staffed with recent college grads with very little programming knowledge. The goal was to produce non working product to then milk the O&M contract for years and years.

Accenture, IBM, Booz Allen , Lockheed Martin , SAIC are all very similar when it comes to large project execution. The name of the game is to win a proposal by any means necessary then control the costs. In a large project it is never about the developers, what makes or breaks a large gov project is the quality of the functional analysts and tech management. If conflicting reqs and features can be argued down the proj will succeed.