[FPSPACE] The private sector

[E.P. Grondine]

Hello - 

A friend once asked me how I got involved as a writer on the space program, and I was a little less than truthful in answering him. Now that I've had my stroke, and given some of the nonsense that has been written about me, I just want to set the record straight...  

C.P. and Jim will remember how I simply showed up in 1985 at Huntsville at a conference on the 
Soviet space program, and watching that video of the Energia-Polyus launch. What they didn't know was exactly why I showed up there, or why I was so interested in the Soviet space program...

In the early 1980's, the brother of an acquaintance of mine inherited a computer programming shop in Albany that was selling a text retrieval package, BRS Search, and he hired me to code for him, Assembler H in a CICS environment. 

When I got up to Albany I found it disorienting and could not get a grasp on the 
system. There was good reason for this. I later learned that what had happened was that the company had originally used IBM STAIRS to sell medical information. But IBM STAIRS had been coded for magnetic core memory, and when they had hit capacity problems they had recoded
sections of IBM's STAIRS for the new larger semi-conductor memories. They had then gone 
on and recoded the core of STAIRS, while they had STAIRS code in front of them, and were selling the entire package to customers claiming that it was what they used to deliver medical information. 

About this time the company was sold, and all the original coders left. But their re-coding of STAIRS had major flaws. In a nut shell, what I learned after 6 months in Albany was that the company had sold $2 million in defective pirated software. When I learned of this I wrote a memo, and was set to work preparing the software for the 4 senior systems engineers who actually got it to work.

As you can imagine, this gained me no friends, and I was frozen out of the company and had my a** slandered into the ground. I later learned that as IBM sold nearly all of the mainframes, and had been sued by Wang for their own theft of magnetic core memory technology, they would not object to anyone "rewriting" their software. (That's one of the big reasons why computer intellectual property law was so undeveloped in the US.)

Now while I was wandering Washington looking for work I learned that BRS SEARCH had been selected by NASA for TMIS for the space station, and I knew that it would not do what NASA wanted it to do - it was initially a static system for text only. At the same time I learned from friends of the Energia launcher, and I was certain that the Soviet Union would use the Energia for two things: first, building an orbital weapons platform to counter Reagan's Star Wars program (which turned out to be Polyus), and second, sending men to the Moon for long periods of time (which is what Glushko had in mind). This while NASA's space station was heading for difficulties...

I have heard that TMIS did not work, or at least the first effort at it, at a cost of some $200 million. Now in the US there is the piece of legislation called the False Claims Act, and if 
a private citizen can recover money under it he gets 15% of that money, or in this case $30 million. 

But it turns out that the False Claims Act has peculiar wording: it only covers "acounting errors".

As a "journalist" I was selling reportage to Seth Arenstein at Soviet Aerospace at Phillips, and when he took over Defense Daily he offered me a job, but by then I was ulcerating, aside from the fact that I also knew nothing of Soviet weapons systems, and I was hardly literate or fluent in Russian.

BRS was later acquired by the British press baron Robert Maxwell, and there was an effort on about this time to move the technical documentation for all US weapons systems to CDROMs. But the company was resold following Maxwell's death, and all the people who I dealt with were no longer involved with it. Other pressing matters now came up...

I never did learn how TMIS finally turned out.
If any of you happen to know, drop me a note.

So that's how I ended up a space journalist covering the Soviet manned program, and I hope
this clears things up a little for you. I hope you are enjoying reading Volumes 1-4 of my History of Cosmonautics. Right now, if you would like to know what the Oklahoma City Bombing and the "Man didn't walk on the Moon" nonsense have in common, write to me for a 3 hour fun read... oh yeah, a whole whole lot of fun...

sic fata volvere

E.P.
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