Mona Charen talks about Bill Clinton’s other legacy, growing more clear by the day.

I’m on the phone with a bank. I have two credit card accounts with them. I’ve got one of them registered for on line banking and bill paying. The other one needs to be paid. Today.

There’s no way that I can see on the web site to register the other one, at least with the same user name.

I call the help number. I have to call three times, each time repeating my sixteen digit credit card number, each time having them verify all of my vital information, each time telling me that they can’t help but that they’ll transfer me to someone who can. The first two times, this results in a long hold period, and then a dial tone as the line is dropped.

The third time is the charm.

I talk to the young woman on the other end, and explain that I’d like to pay both of my cards on line. She says she’ll have to go talk to someone else.

She comes back in a few minutes, and informs me that we can register my other card, but first we have to cancel the first one.

???

“I don’t want to cancel the one that I’ve already successfully registered. I want to have them both registered.”

She says, “That’s the only way to do it.” She says this as though it’s perfectly reasonable. As though no one in their right mind would want to be able to make an on-line payment of their bills on more than one card, or would mind continually cancelling and reregistering the credit cards twice a month in order to do so.

I finally persuade her that this is not exactly a customer-friendly policy, and she goes off to talk to them again.

This is yet to be resolved, but I’m simply amazed at how stultifyingly dumb the designers of some on-line commerce sites can be.

Just in time for Halloween, an Indiana man is building a pumpkin gun that will launch a ten-pound speciman a mile, with a muzzle velocity of 900 miles an hour.

He’d better beware of recruiters from Iraq.

My prediction: the oversized gourd will be instantaneously squashed and cooked. Perhaps they can use a pie shell as a target.

Only in America.

Not necessarily.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has spoken of “regime change” in Iraq for at least 18 months, said Sunday the United States might not seek to remove Saddam Hussein if he abandoned his weapons of mass destruction.

Other semantically equivalent statements:

“The United States might not seek to remove Saddam Hussein if Susan Sarandon, Woody Harrelson, Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn issue a joint press release that isn’t utter nonsense.”

“The United States might not seek to remove Saddam Hussein if the Democrats will support elimination of the corporate income tax.”

“The United States might not seek to remove Saddam Hussein if the sun rises in the west.”

“The United States might not seek to remove Saddam Hussein if snowball fights break out in Hades.”

According to this story, Al Qaeda is funded by about a dozen individuals, mostly Saudis.

Not to worry, though–they’re our allies.

The administration does not plan to confront Saudi Arabia with the new information. But officials said the United States plans to first form a coalition that will ensure that Europe will be off-limits to Saudi financing.

On Friday, the Washington Post said Al Qaida has relied on human couriers to fly cash from Saudi Arabia to agents around the world. The newspaper said U.S. intelligence followed the couriers and helped identify the money trail.

“In the next few weeks, you will hear cries of pain, mostly from Saudi Arabia,” the senior official was quoted by the Post as saying. “If the Saudis don’t take action against these people, we will at least make sure they cannot travel outside their home country and cannot do business as usual around the world.”

Gee, wasn’t it some American president who a little over a year ago said something like:

“We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these terrible acts and those who harbor them…”

I guess he forgot the little escape clause “…unless they’re our ‘allies’ and have a lot of oil.”

Ahern didn’t leave anything to chance this time, and by spending ten times as much as the opposition, and a big get-out-the-vote campaign, Ireland passed the Nice Treaty this time.

It’s not a great day for Irish independence, but at least the first no vote sent a message.

You know, the one that says that the shooter was sending a message by killing nine and shooting eleven (9-11, get it?). I never bought into it, but now the number is up to nine and twelve.

Of course, given that this one is much further south, it could also mean that the copycatting has begun…

A second vote on the Nice Treaty is being held tomorrow.

Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, said only yesterday that another no result from Ireland would be a “cataclysm”.

Here’s hoping for a cataclysm.

I got another interesting email in response to this week’s Fox column, this time from Scott Benson, who writes:

I enjoy reading your musings, and always find things to agree and disagree with. But this time, I must be missing your point.

It seems to be: In a high flight rate mission model, reusable launch vehicles make much more sense.

Well, that is interesting, and I tend to agree; but it is totally irrelevant for the next 20 (?) years minimum. The mission model for the foreseeable future is 10’s of launches per year, not thousands, as much as we wish it would be the latter. And for better or worse, the NASA mission model is primarily about 5 human space flights per year, carrying 3 – 7 people to the ISS, with an assortment of 10 or so other earth and interplanetary missions. It is perfectly rationale, under that reality, to use expendable launch vehicles and reusable crew modules.

Well, here’s where the disagreement lies. There is no such thing as a mission model. This is just a fiction that government bureaucrats come up with to generate requirements for potential new government launch systems. Mission models were always, to me, the absurdity of activities like the Space Transportation Architecture studies (some of which I participated in, and even managed). There is, in fact, no particular need for us to do anything at all in civil space, at least not in civil manned space.

“Mission models” are driven by launch capability–not the other way around. We have a “mission model” to deliver a certain number of crew to space station per year. Why? Not because there’s anything in particular for those people to do in space, but because we built a space station of a certain size, and that’s how many it holds. Why was it that size? Primarily because we decided from day one that one of its stone-tablet, not to be even questioned, program requirements was to put it up in pieces with the Shuttle.

For the amount of money that we spent on station to date, we could have built a station ten, or even a hundred times the size, had it been important to do so. But the primary purpose of station was to give JSC and Marshall something to do after the Shuttle development was complete, and to justify the development of the Shuttle. So as an artifact of that decision, we end up with a “mission model” that requires delivering a couple dozen people to space for the next twenty years.

Had Reagan said, instead of asking for a scientific space station, that he wanted a habitat for a hundred people in orbit, and he didn’t care how NASA did it, he could have had it for the same money (after diverting a few billion to a heavy-lift Shuttle derivative that could launch huge modules, a la Skylab, out of ET barrel sections). If he’d done so, we’d now have a “mission model” of many hundreds of annual crew transfers, rather than a dozen or so.

There’s a phrase for basing present decisions on past flawed ones. It’s called “throwing good money after bad.”

NASA’s options are:
1) Use STS forever and cross their fingers
2) Build a reusable launch system (that certainly doesn’t seem to be in favor)
3) Buy the commercially available low cost reusable launch services
4) Go with expendables to mitigate STS life risks, and to wait until the commercial reusable launch services arrive.

Are you in the “build it and they will come” camp, with the assumption that building a commercial RLV will instantly lower the price of access to space and result in rapid growth in flight rate? I suppose it could happen, and that your article is trying to convince the entrepreneurs to invest their billions. Maybe that is the point. I’ll check your feedback to see if I guessed it right.

I’d go with a combination of options 1 and 4: use STS until the commercial reusable systems come along, but also put into place government policies that encourage (rather than discourage) the latter.

I am in the “build it and they will come” camp, and I do want entrepreneurs to invest (though I don’t believe that it will require billions, at least not to get operating revenue and profits). But I’m also in the camp that wants to see a fundamental rethinking of the purposes and means of government space policy. I’d like to make it more transparent, and be explicit about why we even have a manned space program.

The dirty little secret, of course, is that we do it for jobs in Houston and Huntsville and Florida and California, and international prestige, (and more recently as a means of providing foreign aid to Russia without dipping into the State Department’s budget), not because we’re trying to accomplish anything in particular in space.

If it’s to open up space as a frontier, and truly become a space-faring society, the current path is not going to get us there, and developing a new generation of expendable launchers is on that current path. For the limited amount of activity proposed by NASA’s “mission model,” there’s no point in ever developing anything new. It cannot pay for itself.
We’re still flying B-52s, and we can probably get decades of life out of the Orbiters as well, given the low flight rate.

If, on the other hand, we make a conscious decision to develop a lot more capability, then there are policy routes to get there. I would propose an airmail-like subsidy, having the government purchase thousands of round-trip tickets at much lower costs than current, using what it needs for its own purposes, and then auctioning the rest back on the market.

And NASA should have absolutely no say in the vehicle design. They need to get out of operations entirely, and get back into a NACA mode (the way they would have operated had we not panicked after Sputnik).

But why bash NASA for looking at reasonable alternatives, especially given the options?

Because I don’t think they really have a problem. They just want another development program. It’s just the next way to sell X-38.

I also object to your characterization of “converted munitions”. The current generation of Atlas and Delta rockets have almost (or absolutely) nothing in common with their missile ancestors. The designs of these vehicles have been driven by one thing over the last 20+ years, making a profit in a commercial market place (a concept I believe you are in favor of). I doubt either LockMart’s or Boeing’s mission statements read “We are extending the application of first generation ballistic missiles into their 6th decade!!!”

That’s a semi-fair criticism. They aren’t literally converted munitions. But they are based on the same philosophy that goes all the way back to their ICBM progenitors, and it’s not one that will ever give us the reliability and low costs that are absolutely necessary to do truly ambitious things in space, and to open it up to society. As for making a profit delivering comsats, that’s nice, but it has very little to do with opening up space to the masses, which is my goal, and one that I believe is achievable given a change in mindset among the policy and investor communities, and the public.

That was the point of my column (and most of my columns).

I also hope the incredible happens, and someone finds the way to open space to all of us. Thanks for your efforts in getting the word out.

And thank you for putting in another quarter. Hope you enjoyed the rant.

Print this out and keep it by your telephone.

[Thanks to Dave Trowbridge]