During the Apollo missions of the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA’s director of procurement, Ernest Brackett, recognized the importance of public sector capabilities in successful contracting and setting favorable terms of reference. He warned that if the agency stopped investing in these capabilities, for example by cutting R&D spending, it would no longer understand its own environment, not know who to collaborate with, or be unable to write the terms of reference for doing so. It would, in his words, be “captured by brochuremanship.”[56] The absence of internal digital capabilities and
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