Petra, John answered a lot of your question. The NSF also has Feb 15 and Aug 15 target dates for ocean-going projects. I am working on one for the Feb 15-because of weekend and holiday it is Feb 18 this year. It takes me about 2 weeks full time to put together a good proposal-this one is a little less because it is a resubmittal, and the first time a similar proposal was written, it took 2 of us about 5 person-weeks. There is no point in submitting a proposal that is not almost perfect-it will not get funded. And, most NSF proposals have to be of global significance-something exciting. We actually did well with gthe global significance part of this last time.
Chris