There's another slightly related aspect that a lot of people tend to overlook, that being the ability to capitalize your costs.
Expense always gets pushed out as far as possible. R&D costing too much? Push it to CAPEX. CAPEX costing too much? Push it to OPEX.
Unfortunately humans are fantastic at being able to create systems where by we can easily defer anything that doesn't suit us right now.
This being said, I have no idea how NASA capitalize their assets. Accountants being accountants leads me to believe it's either squeezed into the same way as everything else, or there's some esoteric standard invented just for them.
Expense always gets pushed out as far as possible. R&D costing too much? Push it to CAPEX. CAPEX costing too much? Push it to OPEX.
Unfortunately humans are fantastic at being able to create systems where by we can easily defer anything that doesn't suit us right now.
This being said, I have no idea how NASA capitalize their assets. Accountants being accountants leads me to believe it's either squeezed into the same way as everything else, or there's some esoteric standard invented just for them.