Boeing and Lockheed Martin are dissolving their joint Space Shuttle operations venture and leaving NASA with a half billion dollar pension mess.

The New York Times sez:

With the demise of the shuttle program, United Space Alliance will be left without a source of revenue to keep its pension plan afloat. So the company wants to terminate its family of pension plans, covering 11,000 workers and retirees, and continue as a smaller, nimbler concern to compete for other contracts. Normally, a company that lost a lifeblood contract would have little choice but to declare bankruptcy and ask the federal insurer, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, to take over its pensions. But that insurer limits benefits, meaning not everyone gets as much as they had been promised. United Space Alliance’s plan also allows participants to take their pensions as a single check and includes retiree health benefits, neither of which would be permitted by the pension insurer. ... The pension fund now has about half the amount needed. The president’s budget proposal for the 2012 fiscal year requests $547.9 million for NASA to provide the rest. That is nearly 3 percent of the agency’s total budget and just about what the Science Mission Directorate at NASA spent last year on all grants and subsidies to study climate change, planetary systems and the origins of life in the universe.

NASA will have to spend 3 percent of its total annual budget to rescue the pension fund of this private venture.

The combined profitability of Boeing and Lockheed is about $6 billion a year.

They ain't going to be asked to chip in.

I'm sure that this is all quite legal ...

Create a spin-off entity, promise workers benefits, close the company when profits ceases ... and then pass all the expenses on to the Guaranty Corporation or another part of government. (And then deliver your annual billions in profits to shareholders without incurring an expense.)

I'm glad that some part of government is able to step in and make good on the promise that Boeing and Lockheed made to these workers. We have tough times ahead. These folks will need the compensation that was set aside in their name while they worked.

But something really stinks about this. It points to something essentially wrong with the way our system has been set up. It's enshrined in our system. The bigwigs can always walk away leaving the rest of us holding the bag.