Columnist Lee Dye Remembers a NASA Rebel

July 30 -- — Ollie is dead, ending the long, tumultuous career of a space pioneer of extraordinary skill and courage, although you may never have heard his name.

Oliver Harwood first came into my life in the mid-1980s, when I was a science writer for the Los Angeles Times, and he was a senior engineer for the aerospace giant, Rockwell International. He died recently of a heart attack, the only way anyone could have ended Ollie's desperate battle to change the way this country does business in space exploration.

He was not the kind of guy you could tell to shut up.

In the end, his efforts cost him his job, and left him idolized by some, and despised by others, because he dared rock a boat that for many had proved very profitable. For more than a decade Ollie argued to anyone who would listen, including the U.S. Congress, that the space station envisioned by NASA would prove too costly, take too long to build, exhaust the shuttle fleet, and not end up being what we really needed.

He lost that battle, and the cost of what was once envisioned as an $8 billion station is now above $30 billion and rising, the shuttle fleet is grounded because of a tragic accident, the International Space Station is far from completed, and even many of the scientists it was supposed to serve are disenchanted.

Battled With the ‘Client’

The irony in all of this is that Ollie loved space exploration, and was a key player in the design and construction of the nation's first space station, Skylab. He wanted to see the United States build a station that would serve our needs for generations, gradually evolving and growing in a systematic way as we learned more about what we really need in an orbiting laboratory.

"After you get up there is when you want to design it," he told me in 1987.

My guess is Ollie knew, even then, that he was going to lose. As a veteran aerospace engineer who had worked for several leading companies, he knew better than most that many of the best ideas went begging because no one wanted to offend "the client," which the rest of us know as NASA.