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.