Dan Weintraub has the latest twist in the recall saga. The words “if appropriate” are rearing their ugly head again. The author of the 1974 amendment that added them (presumably a Democrat, though Weintraub doesn’t say), claims that he added them for the purpose of ensuring succession of the Lt. Governor in the event of a recall, rather than allowing an election. He’s going to court, and if he wins, it will be a choice between Grayout and Bustemante, with the second half of the ballot nonexistent.

Weintraub is skeptical. So am I.

Go sign this petition to get Daniel Pipes on the board of the United States Institute of Peace. Let’s get some balance on it, despite the terrorist apologists at CAIR and in the Senate.

Go sign this petition to get Daniel Pipes on the board of the United States Institute of Peace. Let’s get some balance on it, despite the terrorist apologists at CAIR and in the Senate.

Go sign this petition to get Daniel Pipes on the board of the United States Institute of Peace. Let’s get some balance on it, despite the terrorist apologists at CAIR and in the Senate.

Focus groups for the (horrible, by all accounts so far) movie “Gigli,” starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, are demanding a different ending.

Although the various test audiences differed on the preferred methods of death, they seemed unanimous on one point.

“We were very surprised at how many viewers thought that, no matter what, Affleck and Lopez should not be entwined in a romantic embrace at the time of their deaths,” Zitterman said. “Everyone was perfectly clear on that.”

Dean Esmay has a great interview with the cartoonists Cox & Forkum.

I’d be a cartoonist myself, if it wasn’t for the funny hats. And the fact that I can’t draw. (Go read the interview to get the joke.)

Kistler Aerospace has filed Chapter 11. They’re half a billion dollars in debt.

I’ve never thought much of them. It’s another example of people who know what to do not having the money, and people with money not knowing what to do. The original Kistler concept (which Walt Kistler himself came up with) was a little loony–a flying bedpost for a first stage, and recoverable rockets that landed in nets. But things really went downhill, in my opinion, when they brought in a bunch of Apollo retreads, in an effort to get credibility to raise the money they thought they needed.

They spent many hundreds of millions of dollars–enough to fund a half dozen other, more sensible startups, and I’m not sure at this point what they have to show for it. They’ve demonstrated, sadly, that private ventures can blow large amounts of money seeking low-cost access, just as NASA does.

I think they had a failed business model (like Beal, they didn’t understand the market or the forces that would be arrayed against them), that resulted in a failed development approach as well. XCOR has learned the lesson–you don’t get low costs by spending lots of money.

Fortunately, I think we’re past the days that we need to hire ex-NASA managers to raise funding.

Here’s a bit of rare good news on both the Homeland Security and Drug War front. Insanity doesn’t always reign. The feds are actually going to divert some funds from local narcotics task forces to looking for terrorists.

?Certainly the president?s focus in the aftermath of Sept. 11 is to make sure our nation is preventing attacks and protecting our citizens from terrorists,? Stanzel said. ?So the resources have been redirected to counter terrorism efforts.?

U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulshof, R-Missouri, believes it?s important to keep funding at its current level. He is among two dozen congressmen who sent a letter to members of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee urging that the Byrne funding remain intact.

?The grants make up a huge percentage? of agency budgets, he said. ?Some of these departments are quite dependent on the monies.

Dependency’s a tough thing, Kenny. Maybe it’s time the drug warriors got that federal monkey off their back…

?The only way we can make the case is to talk about the successes. To me it?s important to tout those successes to the appropriators. … Otherwise, a lot of these agencies are having to contemplate turning out the lights.?

Don’t contemplate it–do it. Just say no.

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…

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.