All posts by Rand Simberg

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Innovators Need Not Apply

The Orbital Space Plane will be built by the usual suspects.

NASA/MSFC intends to negotiate additional scope under existing contracts, and solicit and consider proposals under a limited competition, only with the Lockheed Martin Corporation, The Boeing Company and a team consisting of the Northrop Grumman Corporation and the Orbital Sciences Corporation, for the design, development, test, delivery, and flight certification of an Orbital Space Plane (OSP).

And so another multi-billion-dollar boondoggle begins…

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Remembering A Rebel

Lee Dye, former science reporter for the LA Times, has a tribute to Oliver P. Harwood, who died a couple of months ago. [Thanks to emailer Larry Brown for the tip]

I worked with Ollie for about five years at Rockwell, up until he retired in the late eighties, and I, along with some of his other former colleagues (including Rex Ridenoure), was privileged to attend a wake for him on July 20, in which we also performed a truncated version of our remembrance ceremony in his honor.

People who think I’m a curmudgeon on NASA and the space program never met Ollie. He was the ultimate aerospace designer, and had a wicked sense of humor. The phrase of his that I’ll always remember is this: “I’ve been working for the government for so long, that they’ve now made me so useless that they owe me a living.”

I never had a strong opinion about his design concepts for the space station, one way or the other, because I always felt that the problems of the space station program went far beyond design–the basic premises of the program itself were so fundamentally flawed that it never had a chance of being successful, at least by the standard of advancing the frontier of space. Like the Shuttle, because it was decided that there would only be one, it became a jack of all trades, and not only is not a master of any, but is not even particularly good at them.

Ollie, cynical as he had become by the time I knew him, never really quite understood that the purpose of the space station program was not to build a space station. We were both frustrated by the system, but I wasn’t as willing as he to put up a fight over it, because I knew it was futile, and I wasn’t a year or two from retirement.

Was he mistreated by Rockwell management? Probably, but he put them in a no-win position. One of the other things you quickly learn in management at a major aerospace corporation is that the customer is always right, regardless of how mind-bogglingly stupid their plans and goals are. Rockwell’s Space Transportation Division was a wholly-owned subsidiary of NASA, and when JSC said jump, our response was, appropriately, “how high”? As a veteran designer in the industry, Ollie knew well the old saying, “find out what the customer wants, and trace it.” NASA didn’t want innovation, or new ideas, at least none that wouldn’t fit neatly into the political constraints that drove the program, and Ollie’s certainly didn’t do that.

…in 1993 he began circulating an essay briefly outlining his thoughts on why the United States shouldn’t start construction of the space station because it was a lousy design. He argued, once again, that NASA needed to learn how to listen better.

As I reread that manifesto recently, one argument leaped out at me. The space program isn’t NASA’s, Ollie argued. It belongs to all of us.

And somewhere along the way, NASA and the corporations who do its bidding have, as Ollie said, “forgotten that the best way to succeed in business is to give the customer his money’s worth.”

Sadly, Ollie never understood that the American people have never been the customer for the space program, and probably never will be as long as it consists only of government disbursing pork. But in a few years, people are going to start thinking about building hotels, and other space platforms for private purposes. And when they do, Ollie’s ideas may finally get the hearing that they deserve. He’s gone now, but may his designs live on.

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Morons On Parade

Senator Chuckie “Putzhead” (to use Al D’Amato’s term) Schumer teams up with his pallie across the Hudson, the apparently ever-increasingly senile Frank Lautenberg, to destroy the model rocket industry. They’re fighting to keep Senator Enzi’s bill from becoming law. The headline of the press release is typically stupid and false:

Lautenberg, Schumer Join Forces to Stop Republican Attempts to Pass Legislation That Would Make it Easier for Terrorists to Build Missiles in US

Well, it’s true that Lautenberg and Schumer are joining forces, but the rest of it is ridiculous, as I’ve previously discussed.
There are many better and cheaper ways of building weapons than using model rocket propellant (which is not, no matter how many times the Senators repeat the lie, an “explosive”).

To quote the aging junior Senator from New Jersey:

“Sometimes the things you see in Congress make you scratch your head in wonderment.”

Indeed, but his irony detector must be severely on the fritz. As is the case with yesterday’s bloviating about “making bets on death,” I don’t know what’s worse, to think that they’re really this brainless, or that they think that we are.

War Commentary

Useful Idiots

Glenn’s already noted it, but it’s worth broadcasting this far and wide. Here’s an insider’s view of the “peace” movement and how it made itself an unwitting dupe for one of the most brutal dictators in the last few decades, all for the hatred of Amerikkka.

To be perfectly frank, we were less concerned with the suffering of the Iraqi people than we were in maintaining our moral challenge to U.S. foreign policy. We did not agitate for an end to sanctions for purely humanitarian reasons; it was more important to us to maintain our moral challenge to “violent” U.S. foreign policy, regardless of what happened in Iraq. For example, had we been truly interested in alleviating the suffering in Iraq, we might have considered pushing for an expanded Oil-for-Food program. Nothing could have interested us less. Indeed, we even regarded the paltry amounts of aid that we did bring to Iraq as a logistical hassle. When it suited us, we portrayed ourselves as a humanitarian nongovernmental organization and at other times as a political group lobbying for a policy change. In our attempt to have it both ways, we failed in both of these missions.

We were so preoccupied with our own agenda that we didn’t notice or care that the regime made use of us. When critics asked us whether the group was being exploited by the Iraqi regime, we obfuscated, and in so doing put Saddam and his minions on the same level as the U.S. government…

Tonight, I caught a portion of one of the HBO series “Band of Brothers.” It was the one in which the troops come across one of the camps (I didn’t see the whole thing, so I don’t know which it was–I think that it was Dachau).

Continue reading Useful Idiots →

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Confusing Recall Story

Does anyone have more information on this decision? (Like, for instance, the actual text of the decision?)

U.S. District Judge Barry Moskowitz said voters will be allowed to cast a ballot for a potential successor to Davis even if they do not vote on whether he should be recalled.

This is written ambiguously, at least to me. Did he say that you can cast a ballot if you didn’t vote at all on the recall issue, or that you can cast a ballot if you vote against the recall? The former interpretation doesn’t really make sense–how many people are going to go to the polls who don’t have an opinion on the recall (other than, perhaps, those who are going to vote on the Racial Privacy Initiative), but that would be how I’d read the reporting here. If it’s the latter, they should have clearly said “even if they vote against the recall.”