Today, Newt Gingrich announced that if elected president, he would personally ensure that there would be a permanent US base on the moon, rather ambitiously, during his second term.  Given the US military’s tendency to proliferate permanent bases around the world, why not in the heavenly bodies?  Anyway, he also proclaimed that he believed there would be a “continuous propulsion system” that would allow travel to Mars in more practical time frames.  Sounds like he plans to be busy in the back yard of the White House with his slide rule and some bottle rockets, as well.

This stupid plan has been trotted out by every President since Clinton, including Dubya and even Obama.  Every time one of these obviously lame attempts to invoke memories of the famous “We choose to go to the moon..” speech by John F. Kennedy that launched the Space Race is tarted up for the press I am amazed that Americans buy any of this bullshit.

Americans need to come to grips with the fact they are staring down the barrel of a prolonged, likely irreversible economic decline.  Let me put this in perspective:  When you’re fucked, your credit cards are maxed, and your house is about to be foreclosed on, you don’t go out and buy a Bugatti Veyron. Well, I guess you do, actually.. so you can wreck it and collect the insurance money.  That’s America.

For the rest of us on the planet watching so many Neros, fiddling while Rome burns, is incredible.  I realize now that Americans will never elect a politician who is a realist.  They will cast their votes for sycophants who allow them to continue the fantasy of prosperity while their world crumbles around them, all the while fanning the flames of crisis.  They have cultivated educational, governmental, electoral, and media systems that literally weed out any form of realist or fixer, because fixing what’s broken requires a change of behaviour on a mass scale.  And reality is something that the vast majority of Americans would rather leave up to a later, less fortunate, generation to endure.

In the video above you see examples of fuzzy search, a touch-screen UI, a tablet form factor, social search, a recommendation engine, and of course speech-to-text as the main user input paradigm.  It isn’t so interesting that someone as brilliant as Alan Kay had this vision in the first place, but what is amazing is the degree to which Apple has been focused on delivering this vision — a vision telegraphed by a company nearly 25 years ago that was itself less than half that age at the time.

Just as NASA engineers and designers have accredited a great deal of their vision to the work of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick (via his visual adaptation of 2001) so Apple has slavishly pursued this vision of pervasive and hugely interactive computing with acquisitions like Siri and innovations like the iPad.  Sure, there are many reasons for Apple’s market success in this post-PC era — but I would heap disproportionate credit toward building a corporate culture that cultivates, communicates, and ultimately has pursued that vision over the course of the past 30 years.

The tough nut to crack has always been the speech recognition part.  We are perhaps 25 years into a 50 year cycle in helping computers to understand most nuances of human communication.  Humans have ways to convey context, via body language etc., that computers cannot yet pick up.  Speech is not effectively used without all of these cues and there are many ships on the rocks of this technology frontier.  As such I and most of the consumer marketplace have never taken it very seriously, and I don’t expect this to change with Apple’s emphasis on speech reco this morning.

The question is:  When we’ve checked off all of the boxes from this video what’s next?  What’s the vision for 30 years hence?

by Jeffrey F. Bell Honolulu – Jul 10, 2003

Once again, NASA has proposed to develop a replacement for the troubled Space Shuttle. This year’s project goes by the ungrammatical moniker “Orbital Space Plane”. An interim version of OSP called the CRV (Crew Rescue Vehicle) to be developed by 2010 will take over the International Space Station lifeboat task now done by Soyuz.

An improved OSP called the CTV (Crew Transfer Vehicle) will assume the ISS crew exchange task now done by Shuttle in 2012. To minimize development costs, the OSP will be launched on one of the new EELV family of expendable boosters, Delta 4 or Atlas V.

Sound familiar? It should. The OSP is only the latest of many “Shuttle replacement” programs that have all failed dismally. A close look at OSP shows that this program is also doomed to failure due to fundamental technical defects. It’s no surprise that such usually reliable NASA boosters as “Space Coast” Congressman Dave Weldon and aerospace lobbyist Lori Garver have publicly attacked OSP.

Most critics have focused on the suspiciously low development costs, or the embarrassing gap between 2006 and 2010 in which no ISS lifeboat is planned. In fact, the basic concept of the program is so stupid that every knowledgeable person involved in it must be perfectly aware that it will never fly.

The basic problem is that the OSP, as currently defined, must carry such heavy mass penalties in the form of wings, wheels, and various escape systems that its performance will not be much better than the Dyna-Soar design of 40 years ago.

Because it cannot carry any of the supplies needed to sustain its passengers once they arrive at the ISS, it will not reduce the number or expense of Shuttle missions needed to support the International Space Station, and will not provide “assured access to space” as NASA claims.

Instead OSP will force NASA to simultaneously fly two very expensive man-rated vehicles at a time when it is financially unable to support even one, and will double the risk of long stand-downs in ISS operations due to lack of either replacement crewmen or the supplies needed to keep them alive.

The Shrinking Spaceplane Mystery: The original OSP concept envisioned a 7-seat vehicle which could rescue or exchange the entire ISS crew in one sortie. (NASA’s proposed Budget Amendment of 14 November ’02 said “as many as 10”.) The Level I requirement document reduced this to “at least 4” persons.

This major decline in the OSP’s basic performance measure was widely criticized. Although I have not seen an official justification for the 4-seat requirement, it appears to be based on an agreement among ISS users that NASA will be responsible for escape and exchange only of the non-Russian ISS crew members, with the RSA continuing to support 2 or 3 Russian crewpersons with 2-3 Soyuz TMA flights per year.

However, a later NASA document “interpreting” the Level I requirements ( online reference ) has gone mostly unnoticed. In this ‘interpretation” the requirement for “at least 4” seats in OSP has been changed to a “system requirement” that can be reached using multiple spacecraft instead of only one! Presumably, proposals for 2-seat or even 1-seat spacecraft would be now considered acceptable under this bizarre “interpretation” of the “at least 4” requirement.

I know of no other aerospace program in which the basic performance goal has been lowered by a factor of FOUR in the first few months! This isn’t just a question of being “a step backward from Shuttle” (or even from Soyuz), but fundamentally wrecks the economics of the program. Even in the CRV mode, a 2-seat OSP is an extremely dubious proposition.

The normal configuration of the station would then be one in which two OSPs and a Soyuz would occupy three docking ports, oriented in such a way that all three lifeboats could be manned and pull away from the Station in any desired order, while leaving other ports free for CTV or supply vehicle docking.

In the CTV mode, the 2-seat OSP would be heavily burdened by the irreducible overhead of basic nav, comm, and docking equipment that cannot be scaled down. So by cutting the seating in half, NASA has much more than doubled the annual cost of rotating ISS crews.

NASA has not given any reasons for this extraordinary lowering of the bar that the three competing contractor teams have to reach. The most likely explanation is that preliminary studies have revealed a 7-seat or 4-seat spaceplane turns out too heavy to be launched on Delta 4 or Atlas V, when all necessary requirements are met.

To see what kind of problems they may have found, let’s compare it with the previous, now-cancelled design for a 6-seat Station CRV, the X-38. The X-38 was very narrowly tailored for the CRV requirement. It lacked most of the systems needed for independent flight, since it was to be carried into orbit inside a Shuttle and docked to the ISS with the aid of the Canadarm2. The ECS supported 6 persons for only 9 hours, the RCS used compressed nitrogen, avionics were highly simplified, there was no rendezvous and docking gear, landing used a simple solid retrorocket, parachute and skids.

There was no question of reusability since it was an emergency lifeboat, and since it would only be used once or twice in the lifetime of ISS high reliability was unneeded.

Now let us imagine a CTV version of the X-38. Clearly, a lot of stuff needs to be added: radar, computers, control rockets, fuel, instrument panel, a window to look out of, a docking mechanism that can tolerate significant misalignments and shocks, more O2 and N2 tanks, more CO2 scrubbers, real thermal control, extra batteries.

Many of these systems need to be duplicated to provide sufficient reliability for routine flights, and everything needs to be reusable with minimal maintenance between flights. There just isn’t volume for this stuff in X-38 (or any winged vehicle of its approximate size and weight) without throwing out some of the seats.

[follow link to read more…]

Google vs. Evil

The world’s biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don’t be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business.

By Josh McHugh

Life used to be so much easier for Sergey Brin. In the autumn of 1998, he and Larry Page unleashed Google with a clear mission: Help computer users find exactly what they want on the Internet. Newbies flocked to the site, grateful for a simple search engine that was both powerful and intuitive. More sophisticated techies came to appreciate Google’s computational elegance and its willingness to shun the “portal” model that crammed ecommerce down their throats. Within months, Google became one of the most popular sites on the Web – and not long after that, “Google” became a verb. Today, Internet users spend about 15 million hours a month on the site. Google.com logs more than 28 million visitors each month, nearly as many as Yahoo! and MSN. Nearly four out of five Internet searches happen on Google or on sites that license its technology.

Google owes its swelling popularity to deft algorithms that quickly divine what’s useful on the Web. But there’s more to it than that. At Google, purity matters. Over the years, Brin and Page have resisted pressure to run banners, opting instead for haiku-like text ads and unintrusive sponsored links. They’ve taken a stand against pop-ups and pop-unders and refused ads from sites they consider to be overly negative. All the while, they’ve stubbornly kept the Google homepage concise and pristine. On just a faint whisper of a marketing campaign, the company pulled in an estimated $70 million last year (a third from licensing fees and the rest from ads).

The Google strategy appeals to every engineer’s sense of The Way It Should Be. Build the best entry in the science fair. Do not tart it up. Do not make it more clever than it needs to be.

But a funny thing is happening on the way to Internet adulthood – Google’s awkward teen years. The company’s growth spurt has spawned a host of daunting questions that no data-retrieval system can easily answer. Should Google play ball with repressive foreign governments? Refuse to link users to “hate” sites? Punish marketers who artificially inflate site rankings? Fight the Church of Scientology’s attempts to silence critics? And what to do about the cache, Google’s archive of previously indexed pages? In April, the German national railroad threatened legal action to remove an obsolete site containing sabotage instructions.

Most major companies refer to a detailed code of corporate conduct when considering such policy decisions. General Electric devotes 15 pages on its Web site to an integrity policy. Nortel’s site has 34 pages of guidelines. Google’s code of conduct can be boiled down to a mere three words: Don’t be evil.

Very Star Wars. But what does it mean?

“Evil,” says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “is what Sergey says is evil.”

Of the Google triumvirate, Schmidt makes sure the company stays on course financially and strategically; Page keeps busy in the R&D lab, cranking out new features; and the 29-year-old Brin, in his role as Google’s conscience and head policymaker, spends his days gripping the moral tiller – and in so doing, imposes his worldview on everyone else.

That puts Brin at the flashpoint of most of the major Internet-related controversies. He knows his decisions have far-reaching consequences. He feels the pressure that attends Google’s growing power. “I do get fairly stressed,” Brin says. “I’d like to feel a little less scrutinized.”

Google has succeeded by adhering to one, pure principle: Do good by users. Now, for the first time in its history, Google is facing rifts between what’s good for users and what’s good for Google. And Sergey Brin is finding that purity just doesn’t scale.

II.

Don’t be evil. Brin has had to refer back to those three words quite a bit over the past year. Governments, religious bodies, businesses, and individuals are all bearing down on the company, forcing Brin to make decisions that have an effect on the entire Internet. “Things that would normally be side issues for another company carry the weight of responsibility for us,” Brin says.

In March, lawyers representing the Church of Scientology requested that Google stop linking to a Norwegian anti-Scientology site called Operation Clambake. The church claimed the site, xenu.net, displayed copyrighted Scientology content and that by providing links to the information, Google was in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Much to the dismay of many First Amendment fans, Google caved, removing the offending pages from its index.

In May, Anita Roddick, the outspoken British founder of the Body Shop, blasted Google in her blog for yanking a text ad for her site. Google’s explanation: Roddick had called actor John Malkovich a “vomitous worm” in her blog, violating a Google policy against accepting ads for sites that are “anti-” anything. After Roddick protested, Google offered to reinstate the ad in exchange for a promise from Roddick that she would remove the Malkovich reference from the first page of her site. When she refused, Brin had a decision to make: Should he give in and accept Roddick’s money, or stand by his principles? He chose his principles.

Three months later, Daniel Brandt, who runs google-watch.org, attacked PageRank, the algorithm at the heart of Google’s vaunted system, accusing the company of being unfair and undemocratic. Brandt urged the FTC to investigate Google and regulate it as a public utility – as a company that, in effect, controls access to the Internet’s natural resources. The mainstream press tended to dismiss Brandt as a webmaster spurned by a low Google ranking, but in the online forums and weblogs, many agreed with his assertion. As far as search engines go, Google has become the only game in town.

Then in the first week of September, Brin found himself pulled into matters of foreign policy. He received several emails from users telling him that the Chinese government, worried about political dissent in the weeks before the 16th Chinese Party Congress, had shut down access to the site. “Our Chinese traffic was down by a factor of five,” Brin says. “We were blocked.”

Brin was no expert on international diplomacy. So he ordered a half-dozen books about Chinese history, business, and politics on Amazon.com and splurged on overnight shipping. He consulted with Schmidt, Page, and David Drummond, Google’s general counsel and head of business development, then put in a call to tech industry doyenne Esther Dyson for advice and contacts. Google has no offices in China, so Brin enlisted go-betweens to get the message to Chinese authorities that Google would be very interested in working out a compromise to restore access. “We didn’t want to do anything rash,” Brin says. “The situation over there is more complex than I had imagined.”

Four days later, Chinese authorities restored access to the site. How did that happen? For starters, the Chinese government was deluged with outcries from the nation’s 46 million Internet users when access to Google was cut off. “Internet users in China are an apolitical crowd,” says Xiao Qiang, executive director of New York-based Human Rights In China. “They tend to be people who are doing well, and they don’t usually voice strong views. But this stepped into their digital freedom.”

The quick workaround: Chinese authorities tweaked the national firewall, making the new Google China different from the site that was turned off. Today, Chinese who use Google to search on terms like “falun gong” or “human rights in china” receive a standard-looking results page. But when they click on any of the results, either their browsers are redirected to a blank or government-approved page, or their computers are blocked from accessing Google for an hour or two. “They have a new mechanism that can block the results of certain searches,” Brin says. Did Google help China find or obtain the filtering technology? “We didn’t make changes to our servers” is all he’ll say.

In late October, a report by two Harvard researchers revealed that Google had begun filtering its own servers to block users in Germany, France, and Switzerland from accessing sites carrying material likely to be judged racist or inflammatory in each country. Neither Brin nor anyone else at Google will talk about about the preemptive self-censoring moves in Europe.

In the wake of these international incidents, members of Google’s loyal, tech-savvy constituency began to question the company’s motives. “I am a little on the fence about Google’s latest actions,” wrote Brian Osborne, a staff writer for Geek.com, a news site. “On one hand, I understand Google’s stance that it must remain in compliance with German and French laws. Nevertheless, Google is putting itself on a very slippery slope.”

III.

“What is this?” asks a visitor squinting at the form he must sign before proceeding to the cafeteria at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters. “An NDA? To have lunch?”

The receptionist shrugs. “This is Google,” she says. “They’re crazy that way.”

The Googleplex, contrary to almost every written account of the place, is hardly a haven of easygoing geek whimsy. The cafeteria is adorned with a tie-dyed banner, but the Google employees aren’t humming any Dead songs. Most of them appear deadly serious. Brin’s second-floor office overlooks a courtyard festooned with empty hammocks. A book about Enron rests on his coffee table.

Brin’s designation as Google’s policy maven is relatively new. He, the big thinker, and Page, the mad scientist, complemented each other and shared nearly every role in Google’s early years. “Larry was always the driver,” says Scott Hassan, who did much of the programming for the original Google. “A big part of his role was going around and yelling ‘Why can’t it do this? Why isn’t this working?'” Brin would sit next to Hassan and watch him write code, pointing out errors and taking an occasional turn at the keyboard.

The frenetic Page looked at all the popular engines at the time and decided they were going about search the wrong way. By relying on HTML code – meta tags as well as page text – they would bring back all sorts of irrelevant information and open themselves up to massive manipulation by webmasters looking to increase their own rankings. Brin took Page’s observation and ran with it. He figured the best way around the problem was to harness the vast repository of human judgments already preserved on the Internet in the form of hyperlinks. “Most people search for local maximums – like figuring out how to get the best car, the best immediate situation,” Hassan says. “Sergey is always searching for global maximums.”

By 2001, Google’s breakneck growth convinced Page and Brin it was time to establish a more rigid structure. Page handed over the CEO title to Schmidt and became copresident with Brin. The move freed up Page to focus on developing his knack for product development (as a child, he crafted a printer out of spare parts and Lego blocks). Brin’s passion for the big picture made him the natural choice to spend time on Google’s growing role in the world.

Which means Brin’s views on politics and policy matter quite a bit. Not that he’s willing to talk. He tells me he listens to NPR on his morning drive to work. I think Democrat and ask about his voter affiliation. He says he votes across party lines. Independent? He smiles and tells me there’s no easy shortcut toward figuring out how he comes to his decisions about good and evil. And even if there was, he wouldn’t let me in on it. If I succeed in figuring out exactly what he considers good and evil, people who don’t care about Google users might start gaming him the way they try to game his search engine.

Born in Moscow and raised in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Brin grew up listening in on conversations at the dinner parties thrown by his father, a math professor, and his mother, a NASA scientist. Talking about his decisions and the values he holds most dear, Brin chooses his language carefully, but one word he repeatedly comes back to is “useful.” And while Google’s policy decisions over the past year look a bit haphazard at first glance, they begin to make more sense in a worldview where usefulness is the paramount virtue.

Aside from the indisputable goodness of causing hard-line Communist Party officials to say the word “Google” to one another for a few days, it’s difficult to say on which side of the good-evil line the company’s China resolution falls. Brin seems at peace with how it all turned out. “Political searches are not that big a fraction of the searches coming out of China,” he says. “You want to look at the total value picture that a search engine like Google brings and think of all that it’s used for.”

But Xiao Qiang, the activist, thinks the company should have taken a firmer stand. “Ultimately, China’s state censorship mechanism will have to submit to this growing demand for freedom from Chinese netizens,” Xiao says. “It’s important to protect integrity, particularly for an Internet firm.”

On the same day that China blocked access to Google, it also flipped the switch on AltaVista. AltaVista issued a defiant statement to the media and went on to list several ways to access the site. Months later, AltaVista is still blocked. Brin figures that by meeting China halfway, Google remained available – and useful – to visitors and also preserved its advertising revenue there. “You have to look at the total value picture,” he says.

What about the Scientology mess? Didn’t Google give in too easily? Jennifer Urban, a fellow at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and a member of Chilling Effects, an organization formed to document attempts to stifle speech on the Internet, says that from a legal standpoint, Google’s hands were tied. “To qualify for safe harbor protection from liability, they really have to err on the side of taking down the link,” Urban says.

In fact, Google didn’t fold entirely. After consulting with Brin, Kulpreet Rana, Google’s head of IP, found a way that Google could comply with the law without letting the Scientologists erase their critics from the Internet. The solution: When Google gets a request to remove a link under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA Section 512, it substitutes a link to a form on the Chilling Effects’ site. The form contains the Web address of the page in question, and anyone still interested in the site can direct their browser to the address.

Does abiding by the letter of a bad and flimsy law absolve Google from charges that it squashed free expression? Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is certain that a vigorous legal challenge would put an end to the steady flow of Section 512 filings Google receives but admits she doesn’t expect Google to devote its resources to such a broad fight. And while some cheered Google’s workaround as evidence of a rebellious bit of payback – a small point scored against the enemies of unfettered speech – the move is another instance of Brin choosing the path of usefulness over a righteous crusade.

IV.

If Brin’s code of good and evil permits the company to negotiate with sovereign governments and allows for some legal meddling from unpopular religions, there is no wiggle room – no gray area whatsoever – when it comes to those who attempt to subvert the power of Google to their own commercial ends. One thing Brin is sure of: On the side of evil lies trickery.

I ask Brin to imagine, for a moment, running his company’s evil twin, a sort of anti-Google. “We would be doing things like having advertising that wasn’t marked as being paid for. Stuff that violates the trust of the users,” he says, describing a site that sounds not unlike the pay-for-placement search site Overture. “Say someone came looking for breast cancer information and didn’t know that some listings were paid for with money from drug companies. We’d be endangering people’s health.”

The anti-Google might also be more amenable to the growing business of “optimization,” the altering of Web sites so that they rank higher in search engine results. For a fee, there’s help for a Dallas plumber who’s unhappy that his site is on the 17th page of results when someone types “Dallas plumber” into Google. An optimizer will tweak the site in such a way that boosts it to, say, the 3rd page of results.

To pull this off with Google, an optimizer needs to understand how the company’s search mechanism works. Google uses 100 or so closely guarded algorithms to determine its search results. The best known of the lot is called PageRank, which allocates relevancy to a page according to the number and importance of pages linked to it, the number and importance of pages linked to each of those pages, and so on. One ploy is to create “link farms,” in which an optimizer gets clients to link to one another, racking up relevancy points. In general, optimizers make a living by guessing what Google regards as important. The way Brin sees it, the optimizers are co-opting Google’s bond of trust with its users. He regards optimizers the way a mother grizzly might regard a hunter jabbing at her cub with a stick.

Every month, when Google updates its index and its mix of algorithms, it rakes a disruptive claw across the optimizers’ systems. In the industry, the monthly shuffle is known as the Google Dance, and Brin doesn’t mind letting on that if Google ends up dancing all over the optimizers, so much the better. “When we change and improve our technology, things get shuffled around,” Brin says, “and sometimes it has a disproportionate effect on optimization sites.”

Consider the case of Bob Massa, a former solid oak dining room furniture salesman who lives in Oklahoma City and runs SearchKing, an optimization company he started in 1997. Last summer, Massa received a rare gift from Google in the form of the Google Toolbar, a software program that lets users perform searches without going to Google.com. More important for Massa, the Toolbar shows the approximate PageRank, on a scale of one to ten, of whatever page a user is visiting. It was the first time since Brin and Page were in grad school that they’d shared so much technical information. After years of watching Google’s every move like an Etruscan high priest trying to augur divine intent from cloud formations, Massa had a piece of the goods. On August 9, Massa started selling optimization based on PageRank.

After the Google Dance of September 20, most of Massa’s customers suddenly found themselves in a heap at the very bottom of Google’s 3 billion site index. It seems that the improvements Google had made included a severe downgrade of sites with links to SearchKing. Massa’s customers, needless to say, were very, very unhappy. “Everyone thinks I’m the biggest idiot in the world for making Google mad,” Massa said in October.

He filed suit a few weeks later, charging that Google downgraded his customers’ scores in a deliberate attempt to put him out of business. The suit asks for an injunction forcing Google to restore the scores to pre-Dance levels, and seeks $75,000 in damages. “It’s a classic good versus evil thing,” says Massa, turning Brin’s framework back on Google itself. “I knew they wouldn’t like it. I didn’t think they’d go so far as to wipe out all these little people.”

The day Massa’s suit was filed, the reaction from the Slashdot crowd and most other forums was predictably vociferous, with posters stumbling over themselves to craft metaphors painting Massa as a criminal suing his victim. But gradually, a surprising number of people, while careful not to look as though they were defending Massa, began tagging the search engine as a Google-opoly. It’s hard to sympathize with a David as parasitic as Massa, but Slashdotters tend to be uneasy with Goliaths of any stripe, especially when their methods are kept secret.

And the real problem with Massa is that he’s simply the termite Brin is able to see. There are thousands more behind the wall, invisibly boring away at the very structure of Google’s house. “It’s easy to become overly obsessed with those kinds of things,” Brin admits.

It would make things a lot easier for Brin if the world’s webmasters would just act as though his site didn’t matter, but that’s not human nature. There’s no way around it – as long as Google remains the search engine of choice, the arms race between Google coders and the hordes of optimizers will go on.

V.

As proficient as Google is at revealing information, Brin is adept at keeping key morsels under wraps. In a way, that makes a lot of sense. Although the obvious image of Google is one of accumulation, the essence of data retrieval is just the opposite. Google is about division and subtraction, narrowing down billions of choices before revealing the most promising. Brin’s world isn’t as simple as visible equals good, hidden equals evil. Google’s effectiveness as a search tool depends largely on how well it’s able to shroud the site’s inner workings from the commercial interests that clutter so much of the Internet today.

But here’s the thing: If Brin thinks his job has become more difficult over the past year, it may soon become near impossible. In September, at the height of the China controversy, Google legal eagle Drummond spotted an article about the prospect of a Google IPO, which, the story said, might be the spark to ignite the dormant public offerings market. Drummond forwarded the story with some sardonic comments. In his office, Brin tries to find the email for me but can’t. He notes the irony in that, and goes on to paraphrase the note: “Oh, OK, now we’re going to reform the Chinese government – and on top of that, we’re going to fix Wall Street.”

Schmidt claims the company is in no rush to go public, but his appointment and the hiring of CFO George Rayes last August were unmistakable steps in that direction. When the IPO comes, it will bring riches – and more problems.

As a private company, Google has one master: users. As a public company, there are shareholders to worry about. And more than happy users, shareholders want ever-greater profits. Thus far, Brin and Page have succeeded in standing up to pressures that might compromise Google and the user experience. Google’s influential stand against pop-up ads extends beyond its own domain – the company rejects advertisers whose links take Google users to pages that feature pop-ups. (AOL followed suit in October, announcing its own pop-up moratorium.) But when Google becomes a public company, shareholders might force the site to take a more amenable position, if the price is right. After all, for several years, Yahoo! refused to accept anything but fast-loading banner ads, claiming that it was looking out for users. That policy lasted until right about the time that the company’s stock price began to cave.

Such pressure could cause Brin to rethink other policies, like his decision to refuse all alcohol and tobacco advertising. The fact that Google accepts advertising for adult content sites is an intriguing commentary on Brin’s morality: Cigarettes and booze are evil; porn is not. It’s a policy that would become progressively harder to defend were Google to go public. Then there’s the Google cache to consider. Today’s users love having access to a warehouse of information that was once published on the Internet but has since disappeared. Some information goes away for a reason, though. The cache could get Google in trouble, and Brin & Co. could soon find themselves facing all sorts of libel, defamation, or copyright lawsuits.

Increased competition may also cause Brin to do other things he’s loath to do. So far, Google has gotten by without much in the way of competition from the other Internet superpowers. But in May, Yusuf Mehdi, the head of MSN, said he views Google as “more of a competitor than a partner” in the effort to become the default homepage on millions of browsers. What if, as Google.com solidifies its position as the focal point of the Internet, Yahoo! and AOL begin to rethink the millions in licensing fees they pay to what has become a top competitor? Brin may be forced to make the kind of concessions that he’s thus far reserved for international governments.

The utilitarian manner in which Google has achieved its success has made it a sentimental favorite among the code-parsing set. Tech-community sites like Slashdot are almost uniformly pro-Google. Those with the temerity to bring lawsuits against Google ultimately feel the burn of online flames, watching their servers wither under the quasi-zealous wrath of thousands of engineers defending one of their own. But as Google is forced to make more concessions to realpolitik, its bonds with that idealistic constituency will inevitably continue to fray.

And without any sort of technological lock-in, it would be very easy for Google’s visitors to simply start using other search engines. Fast Search & Transfer, based in Norway, boasts a 2.1 billion-page index at www.alltheweb.com, and its search engine works as quickly as Google’s. What’s more, it does a complete crawl of the Internet every 7 to 11 days compared with Google’s 28 days. What if an influential group of politically active netizens makes a rousing case for boycotting Google on the grounds that it is anti-free speech and in cahoots with repressive governments? How long can a hugely powerful company that plays its decisions so close to the vest and refuses to justify itself publicly count on the devotion of the average information-hungry Web user?

It’s inevitable that a company of Google’s size and influence will have to compromise on purity. There’s a chance that, in five years, Google will end up looking like a slightly cleaner version of what Yahoo! has become. There’s also a chance that the site will be able to make a convincing case to investors that long-term user satisfaction trumps short-term profit. The leadership of the Internet is Sergey Brin’s to lose. For now, at least, in Google we trust.

Josh McHugh (josh [at] buzzkiller [dot] net) wrote about Wi-Fi campus life in Wired 10.10.

———–

November 25, 2002 Top SciTech Gifts 2002

Still haven’t found presents for the science fans on your list? Before you brave the cold and the holiday crowds again, take a look at our favorite geek gifts to give and get this year.

That time has come once again when Scientific American editors wrap up their holiday shopping. Okay, actually we’re far from done. We admit it. But in our annual mad dash for this season’s best science and technology presents, we have turned up quite a few terrific gifts–from pet tornadoes and weather stations to million-year-old fossils and ancient pyramid kits.

Grouped into five categories below–wearables, novelties, toys, gizmos and other stuff–this collection has something for the geek in all of us. How would Dad like a watch with a built-in universal remote control? How about a chemistry set of delicious bath soaps for Mom? Have a nutty relative who, so far as you can tell, lives in a cave? Give him a bona fide bat detector. Or a lump of coal–from the Titanic. Happy browsing! –the Editors

Wearables

Tied to Science When you have to tie one on, it might as well be scientifically stylish. Josh Bach offers several options among its offerings of colorful silk ties for $39 apiece, including cartoons of atoms, moon phases and rocket ships. http://www.joshbach.com

Double Helix Bracelet Wear your feelings about science on your sleeve–and at the same time commemorate the upcoming (March 2003) 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick. The bracelets are fashioned from spring steel and then silver plated. They come in three sizes and prices ($6, $10 or $15). There are also “hematite” and multi-color finishes available. http://www.carolynforsman.com/product.cfm?item_id

Smart (Alec) T-shirts Want to advertise your smarts before you even open your mouth? Some of these T-shirts should do the trick. The Bell Curve shirt shows the simple graph used so often for grading—and nicely points out the wearer’s superior spot at the far end of the scale. Another T, in a lovely shade of turquoise, conveniently shows more digits of Pi than you will ever need. http://store.thecoop.com/cgi-bin/coopstore.storefront /3dde42fa048dda74273fc0a814660702/Catalog/1343

Space Station Crew Cap Is someone on your gift list out of this world in one way or another? Give them this black baseball cap, identifying them as a crew member on the space station. The back of the hat features the IMAX logo. http://store.thetech.org/spacstatcrew.html

Midas Remote Controlled Watch Think of it—a universal remote control attached to your wrist at all times. No TV will ever again escape your will, at least not if it’s within 20 feet. This watch’s database covers every make/model of TV and cable receiver imaginable. What does such power cost, you ask? Only $39.99. http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/5a7b/ Novelties

Aged Well Fossils, skulls, and large insects are among the offerings at Maxilla and Mandible online. When we looked, for instance, the 350 million-year-old fossil trilobite was a steal at $56. Also available was a modern wildebeast skull with graceful black horns ($360), and an impressive specimen of a giant scorpion ($100). Prices and offerings vary. http://www.maxillaandmandible.com/

Titanic Coal Need to fill stockings for bad children, large and small? Well, for a mere $21.95 you can give them a piece of coal from the engine room of the most famous shipwreck, the sinking of the Titanic. Each lump comes with a certificate of authenticity. http://shop.store.yahoo.com/scimall-usa/titaniccoal.html

Test-tube Spice Rack For the chemist-cum-cook, this set of glass test tubes in a matching silver rack makes it easy to brew up just about anything in the kitchen. Cork stoppers keep spices fresh. http://www.gourmetbistro.com/glastestubsp.html

Bath Science Fill your tub with a variety of potions and lotions from chemistryset.net this season and keep the beakers and vials for later use. The delicious soaps, bath bombs, mineral salts, aromatherapy beads and candles from this site are all you need to dissolve holiday stress. http://www.chemistryset.net/

MC2 Frame Hand-made, hand-painted and cast in bonded porcelain, this beautiful frame is a nice way to display your photos of Einstein—or anyone else you hold near and dear. http://store.yahoo.com/msichicago/16-538.html

Surveyors’ Bearings Antique scientific instruments can be very pricey. But there are some high quality, accurate reproductions available that will put less of a dent in the pocketbook. The classic surveying compass, for example, was patented by Colorado mining engineer D.W Brunton in 1894. It quickly became the standard instrument for explorers mapping new lands and territories and charting coastlines. This faithful replica has a solid polished brass casing that opens to reveal folding peep sights; on the inside of the lid is a mirror with a centre line. The case is heavily constructed from a machined casting, with brass screws and hinges. It comes in a leather case with stitched seams and brass strap fastening. www.simplysuperbgifts.com

Signed by Chuck Yeager In 1947, Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, flew into history when he became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. The Bell X-1 Rocket Research plane he piloted. You can’t give someone the original X-1–its at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum but you can give them a 1:32 scale model autographed by Yeager. The model is handcrafted of mahogany and presented on a wooden display stand. www.smithsonianstore.com

Astronaut Autographs The moonwalker astronauts are now in their 60s and 70s–and most will likely be gone before humans return to the moon. But space buffs can still get the gift of a living remembrance of those heroic journeys in the form of NASA photographs autographed by the astronauts. For example, a signed and authenticated 16-by-20 copy of the famous photo of Neil Armstrong reflected in the faceplate of Buzz Aldrin’s helmet can be purchased for $299; framed for $459. www.novaspace.com Toys

Rocket Car Forget the run-of-the-mill remote-controlled models from Radio Shack. This two-foot long speed machine runs on pure vinegar and baking soda. You might want to send Fido outside before you fire ‘er up. http://store.thecoop.com/cgi-bin/coopstore.storefront/ 3dde42fa048dda74273fc0a814660702/Product/View/5029

Pet Tornado Speaking of pets, why not keep your very own storm around for a, well, sunny day? No need for walks, bones, scratching posts, flea collars or pigs ears. Just spin the cage and watch a baby tornado form. At $4.50, it makes a great stocking stuffer. http://store.yahoo.com/msichicago/pettornado.html

Cat-A-Pults Watch mechanics in action as Newton the foam cat flies from one catapult to the next. This set contains five catapults, each with 25 adjustment settings to control the cat’s trajectory up to distances of eight feet, and 10 actual Newtons, for a total of 90 feline lives. http://store.yahoo.com/ explo/catapults.html

Pyramid Building Blocks Reconstruct Tut’s tomb with this 67-piece block set. These hardwood blocks come in 18 different shapes, making it far easier for you to engineer a pyramid than it was for the ancient Egyptians. http://www.smithsonianstore.com/ product_detail.asp?styleg301&catid001814&dptidP2

Talking Globe Learn geography plus national anthems and songs. This globe asks more than 10,000 questions and grades your answers. You can create custom quizzes at different skill levels and track scores for up to four players. http://www.smithsonianstore.com/ product_detail.asp?style`26&catid#9&dptid#5

Ant-omology Like chemistry sets, the holidays wouldn’t be the same without some budding entomologist getting an ant farm. This escape-proof set up allows kids to watch these industrious arthropods through the walls of a round-walled clear container with a snap on magnifier for closer viewing. “Sugar Cement” puts nutrients into the sand while making it cave-in resistant and spurs the ants to greater activity. A mail-in coupon brings the ants to their new abode within 2 to 4 weeks. It also gives parents a chance to reconsider. www.scientificsonline.com

Designer Molecules Molecular models may be the Tinker Toys of the 21st century. Here’s a kit that contains an extensive assortment of 480 atoms molded in polypropylene. Three hundred flexible vinyl connectors represent the bond “linkages.” Double and triple bonds are easily constructed. Anything from an acid to an enzyme is easily fabricated. And even if its not the next blockbuster designer drug, the models are nice to look at. gallery.bcentral.com

Unraveling DNA It’s been 50 years since Watson and Crick figured out that the DNA packed in all living cells was coiled in the form of a double helix. But few people have actually seen this stuff of life. Here’s a kit that can give amateur experimenters a look by extracting the DNA from onion cells. By following simple instructions users can see the DNA precipitate from solution and lift it out of the test tube. In the process, they learn about cell lysis, denaturation, precipitation, super coiling, high molecular mass, and the double stranded helix. www.books4kids.com Gadgets

Portable Solar Array If the batteries in your CD player or cell phone run dry on a clear, sunny day, just plug the little gadget into iSun, a portable solar charger offered by ICP Global Technologies. The size of a small book, one iSun generates about two Watts of electricity, enough to power a Walkman, cell phone or PD. Each unit costs $79.99 a piece, and they can be linked together like a daisy chain to power hungrier devices. www.icpglobal.com

Backyard Weather Station Dreaming of a white Christmas? Go one step farther and make your own forecast. These professional weather stations feature anemometers to measure wind speed and direction, rain collectors to track daily and accumulated rainfall amounts, temperature and humidity sensors and much more. They transmit their readings to remote LCD console/receivers that can be placed up to 400 feet away. http://www.weathershop.com/davis_wireless.htm

Bat Detectors No, this isn’t a giant bat-shaped spotlight you project into the night sky. This palm-held gizmo is the bat-hunter’s equivalent to a fish finder. For beginners, Bat Conservation International, Inc., which brings you the Swedish-made devices, suggests the E-5 Microbat model, with high/low frequency capabilities for detecting most bats through a speaker or headphones. For around $89, it comes with belt clip, battery and instructions. http://www.batcon.org/catalog/catp3.html

Time Flows By Here’s new twist on the time-honored hourglass egg timer. The Bubble Timer is a polished two-inch acrylic cube that reckons the minutes by the lazy ascent of a bubble through a tube. Depending on the face the cube is set on, the tube has three inclinations–and hence counts out three different times: ten seconds, one minute or five minutes. Invert the cube to repeat the measurement. bubbletimer.com/

Don’t Party Without It No need to fear the consequences of overzealous holiday celebrating is you are carrying this Digital Alcohol Detector. This compact personal breathalyzer uses advanced semiconductor gas sensor technology to approximate the percent of blood alcohol concentration (BAC) from your breath. Blow into the mouth vent and within 10 seconds a precise reading, in increments of 0.01 percent, ranging from 0.00 to 0.19 percent BAC.appears on the LCD display. www.scientificsonline.com

Atomic Time With the ExactSet clock there is no reason to call the phone company for the correct time. This compact travel clock sets itself automatically to the radio signal from the US Atomic Clock in Colorado. In addition, the clock incorporates two alarms, time/day/date display, indoor temperature, and low battery indicator. It even has an eight minute snooze for an indisputable wakeup call. www.weathertools.com

Solar Observer Here’s a safe way to look at the surface of the sun. The Sunspotter is a wooden, folded-Keplerian telescope that uses a system of mirrors and a powerful 62millimeter objective lens to project a brilliant three-inch solar image onto a white viewing screen. Sunspots can be easily tracked as they appear and move across the solar disk. Tracing the images provides an hour-by-hour or day-by-day record of the solar cycle. www.scientificsonline.com

Bright Beam Almost everyone has a flashlight–or too many–but the X5 LED Long Distance Flashlight adds a new dimension. Its powerful beam reaches 120 feet but, unlike conventional flashlights, it illuminates that darkness in full spectrum color by combining the light from five LED bulbs. The distinctive blue beam can be seen more than two miles away at dusk or dark. Its aircraft-grade aluminum case is virtually unbreakable, completely waterproof (up to 150 feet), and shock proof. shopping.discovery.com

Digital Microscope Another old standby children’s gift–the optical microscope–is going digital. The C2D Microscope connects to a PC and can magnify objects up to 220 times their actual size. The software can record both stills and video. Like its mechanical forebears, the kit also contains dissecting tools and prepared slides. store.yahoo.com Other

Adopt a Whale For only $54 dollars, you can help support research on killer whales and claim one for your very own or for a friend. The killer whale adoption program from the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Center sends you an ID photo and biography of your whale, an adoption certificate, a CD featuring the sounds of British Columbia’s killer whales and newsletter about the research program. You choose your whale from a pull-down menu: Balaklava, Clio, Echo, Izumi, Nimpkish, Whisky and pals are waiting. http://www.clamshell.org/

Sponsor a Big Cat For only $25, you can sponsor a jaguar, snow leopard or Siberian Tiger and get a bunch of great goodies as well. The Wildlife Conservation Society will send you a limited edition T-shirt, one year of their magazine, a brief history of your cat and information about what WCS is doing in its habitat to help protect wildlife. For $35 or more, you’ll also receive a quarterly newsletter. http://wcs.org/bigcats/#whichcat

Blue Planet This hauntingly beautiful journey beneath the sea made documentary history. From giant whales to tiny coral polyps and the strange organisms that live in the abyssal deep, it contains scenes never before captured on camera. Narrated by Sir David Attenborough, it stands as a definitive exploration of the ocean’s most breathtaking habitats, from its deepest recesses to its frozen deserts. The entire series is available in a boxed gift set of four DVDs. DVD extras include behind-the-scenes featurettes, interviews, photo galleries, fact files and a Blue Planet music video. shopping.discovery.com

———–

The US space agency (Nasa) has cancelled the book intended to challenge the conspiracy theorists who claim the Moon landings were a hoax.

Nasa declined to comment specifically on the reasons for dropping the publication, but it is understood the decision resulted from the bad publicity that followed the announcement of the project.

Criticism that Nasa was displaying poor judgement and a lack of confidence in commissioning the book caused it to abort the project, agency spokesman Bob Jacobs said.

Astronaut on moonwalk, Nasa Oberg will still write the book Nasa had hired aerospace writer Jim Oberg for the job on a fee of $15,000.

He says he will still do the work, although it will now be an unofficial publication with alternative funding.

The book will deliver a point-by-point rebuttal of the theory that the Apollo landings were faked in a movie studio, to convince the world that the US had beaten the Soviets to the Moon.

It will explain why in still and video footage of the landings, no stars can be seen in the Moon sky, why a flag appears to ripple on the atmosphere-free satellite and why shadows fall in strange directions – all “facts”, conspiracy theorists say, point to a hoax.

Some commentators had said that in making the Oberg book an official Nasa publication, the agency was actually giving a certain credibility to the hoax theory.

On Thursday, November 7, 2002, at 02:02 PM, Ian Andrew Bell wrote:

> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2410431.stm
>
> Thursday, 7 November, 2002, 19:16 GMT
> Nasa challenges Moon hoax claims
> Training for the Moonlandings, Nasa
> Lights, camera, action: Training for the Moon landings
> By Dr David Whitehouse
> BBC News Online science editor
>
> For years there have been rumours that the Apollo lunar landings were
> faked, staged on a movie set to convince the world that the US had
> beaten the Soviets to the Moon.
>
> And, despite evidence to the contrary, the belief that the “one small
> step for man” was a sham continues to spread.
>
> Now, having tried to stay above the rumours, the US space agency
> (Nasa) has finally got fed up with the conspiracy theorists and asked
> James Oberg, a leading aerospace writer, to produce a book that it
> hopes will settle the issue.
>
> Buzz Aldrin – former US astronaut and second man on Moon
> Buzz Aldrin: Angry at claims that landing was faked
>
> But will it work, or will it just add a certain credibility to the
> hoax theory?
>
> Flags that ripple on the airless Moon, discrepancies in the part
> numbers of lunar lander components, shadows that point in the wrong
> direction, the lack of stars seen in the sky – these are all “facts”
> that have fuelled the conspiracy theory.
>
> It is claimed that the six Apollo landings took place in a hangar on a
> secret military base.
>
> Over the years, every one of the lines of evidence has been
> discredited but the rumours refuse to go away.
>
> In September, Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, punched
> a man in the face after he had confronted the former astronaut at a
> Beverly Hills hotel.
>
> Bart Sibrel – who has made a film questioning the Apollo Moon missions
> – had demanded that Mr Aldrin, 72, swear on the Bible that he had in
> fact walked on the Moon.
>
> Prosecutors declined to file assault charges against Mr Aldrin.
>
> Truth out there
>
> Tackling the conspiracy theory head-on in an official book was the
> idea of Nasa’s former chief historian Roger Launius.
>
> Flag, Nasa
> Lunar flag: Not fluttering
>
> He says that hardcore conspiracy theorists are not the book’s main
> audience, as they will never be convinced of the truth.
>
> Instead, it will be aimed at the general public and especially
> teachers, giving them the science to answer questions in class.
>
> Doubters will no doubt dismiss the new book as just another attempt by
> the establishment to cover up the truth.
>
> Nasa says the rippling flag is easily explained by the fact that the
> astronauts twisted it as they planted it in the soil.
>
> The stars are not visible in the lunar sky because of the bright
> landscape and the light from the Earth drowning them out.
>
> In a few years a definite answer could be possible.
>
> A private company, Transorbital, will place a private high-resolution
> satellite into orbit around the Moon. It should have the power to see
> the Apollo hardware left on the surface.
>
>
> ———–
> FoIB mailing list — Bits, Analysis, Digital Group Therapy
> https://ianbell.com:8888/foib.html

———–

Thursday, 7 November, 2002, 19:16 GMT Nasa challenges Moon hoax claims Training for the Moonlandings, Nasa Lights, camera, action: Training for the Moon landings By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor

For years there have been rumours that the Apollo lunar landings were faked, staged on a movie set to convince the world that the US had beaten the Soviets to the Moon.

And, despite evidence to the contrary, the belief that the “one small step for man” was a sham continues to spread.

Now, having tried to stay above the rumours, the US space agency (Nasa) has finally got fed up with the conspiracy theorists and asked James Oberg, a leading aerospace writer, to produce a book that it hopes will settle the issue.

Buzz Aldrin – former US astronaut and second man on Moon Buzz Aldrin: Angry at claims that landing was faked

But will it work, or will it just add a certain credibility to the hoax theory?

Flags that ripple on the airless Moon, discrepancies in the part numbers of lunar lander components, shadows that point in the wrong direction, the lack of stars seen in the sky – these are all “facts” that have fuelled the conspiracy theory.

It is claimed that the six Apollo landings took place in a hangar on a secret military base.

Over the years, every one of the lines of evidence has been discredited but the rumours refuse to go away.

In September, Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, punched a man in the face after he had confronted the former astronaut at a Beverly Hills hotel.

Bart Sibrel – who has made a film questioning the Apollo Moon missions – had demanded that Mr Aldrin, 72, swear on the Bible that he had in fact walked on the Moon.

Prosecutors declined to file assault charges against Mr Aldrin.

Truth out there

Tackling the conspiracy theory head-on in an official book was the idea of Nasa’s former chief historian Roger Launius.

Flag, Nasa Lunar flag: Not fluttering

He says that hardcore conspiracy theorists are not the book’s main audience, as they will never be convinced of the truth.

Instead, it will be aimed at the general public and especially teachers, giving them the science to answer questions in class.

Doubters will no doubt dismiss the new book as just another attempt by the establishment to cover up the truth.

Nasa says the rippling flag is easily explained by the fact that the astronauts twisted it as they planted it in the soil.

The stars are not visible in the lunar sky because of the bright landscape and the light from the Earth drowning them out.

In a few years a definite answer could be possible.

A private company, Transorbital, will place a private high-resolution satellite into orbit around the Moon. It should have the power to see the Apollo hardware left on the surface.

———–

RICHARDSON, Texas — Two years ago, J. Michael Dugan spread the word to his fellow optical engineers in North Texas that he was starting a company that could make them all rich. The telecommunications business was hot, and optical engineers were the hottest commodities of them all, commanding big signing bonuses and six-figure salaries.

Mr. Dugan, a burly Texan with more than 20 years under his belt at the giant French equipment maker Alcatel SA, was persuasive. So many flocked to his annual summer party in July 2000 to learn more about Latus Lightworks that he ran out of food. The start-up took off quickly, hiring 120 employees as the engineers raced to devise ways to squeeze more data and voice traffic through a hair-thin strand of fiber-optic glass.

Then the bubble burst.

A few weeks ago, when all those engineers gathered again in Mr. Dugan’s backyard, it was to commiserate and swap job leads. Ken Maxham, a cheery 59-year-old who comes from a long line of engineers, was worried about his unemployment benefits running out as his savings dwindle. He had cut back expenses as much as possible, but basic health insurance costs $750 a month and his wife was putting off going to the dentist for a toothache.

David Wolf, who at 37 is one of the youngest optical engineers around, was counting the days until his second start-up was due to run out of money. The fresh-faced father of three young children was pruning expenses such as his daughter’s gymnastics lessons and worrying about the future. Mr. Dugan, whose work as a temporary consultant was about to end, was contemplating returning to school at age 50.

And the party was buzzing about a cruel twist of fate: Two of the former colleagues had just gone head-to-head for one of the few remaining telecom jobs out there. The one in the more precarious financial position didn’t get it.

“When I see someone I haven’t seen in a while, my first question is, ‘Do you have a job?’ ” said Bruce Raeside, a 46-year-old Michigan native who also worked as a Latus engineer. “It’s almost like Detroit in the ’70s.”

In many ways, it’s worse. Like the massive declines in the nation’s steel, oil and automobile industries in decades past, the disintegration of the telecom business is leaving deep wounds in the U.S. work force. But labor historians say telecom stands out for the unprecedented speed of the boom-and-bust cycle. After telecom was deregulated in 1996, it quickly expanded by some 331,000 jobs before peaking in late 2000. Since the downturn started, though, companies have announced layoffs that have wiped out all those new jobs and more — a total of well over 500,000 workers, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal. By contrast, it took two decades for the ranks of the United Auto Workers to fall to 732,000 from 1.5 million, as the auto industry was forced to become much more efficient in the face of foreign competition.

The number of telecom jobs grew faster and has fallen much harder than the overall job market, according to James Glen, an economist with Economy.com, a West Chester, Pa., research firm. He says the 12% drop in telecom jobs is still gaining steam, especially as the rout claims bigger and bigger companies such as Global Crossing Ltd. and WorldCom Inc. And the economic and human cost of the telecom bust far exceeds that of the highly publicized Internet crash, which by and large involved smaller companies.

Telecom has turned into one of history’s biggest bubbles because so much money poured into the industry during the stock-market boom, creating some $470 billion in debt and a vast glut of capacity. Once a sleepy industry known for its modest growth, telecom took off like a rocket in the late ’90s as companies rushed to lace the world with ultra-fast fiber-optic networks to carry an expected onslaught of Internet traffic. But after a frenzy of spending and hiring, it suddenly became clear in mid-2001 that the Internet wasn’t growing nearly as fast as the 1,000-fold annual increases originally predicted. The huge run-up has now been replaced by a merciless ride down. Rumors of foreclosures and marital problems have replaced word of the latest IPO. Some laid-off telecom workers are even turning up in local homeless shelters.

So much money was spent buying telecom gear during the frenzy that there is now seven years’ worth of excess inventory, says Lonnie Martin, chief executive of White Rock Networks, a Richardson start-up that is trying to hang on. He values the excess supply at some $160 billion. “That is an awful lot of exuberance to get rid of,” he says.

There are few places where the hangover is more severe than here in the sun-blasted plains north of Dallas. Back during the boom years, developers couldn’t throw up office buildings fast enough to keep pace with the demand. Telecom jobs doubled to 90,000 between 1995 and the peak of the bubble as big names such as Cisco Systems Inc. stormed into town and companies such as Nortel Networks Corp. quadrupled their work forces. Money was flowing so freely that countless start-ups emerged from nowhere. Now, vacancy rates in the area known as the Telecom Corridor have shot up to 34%. The vast expanses of empty parking lots make the area look like a corporate ghost town.

And the layoffs keep coming. While the Latus workers left stable jobs to join the start-up, they know plenty of colleagues who stayed behind and lost their jobs anyway. Big suppliers such as Nortel and Alcatel had already shed half their work forces before WorldCom’s collapse. Xalted Networks Inc. just laid off most of its Texas engineers and issued a press release saying it’s moving its software development to Bangalore, India, where it plans to hire 70 engineers in a bid to conserve cash.

Change of Fortune

The change of fortune is especially jarring to telecom’s engineers, many of whom chose their profession because it promised a stable paycheck and seemingly limitless growth. Mr. Dugan, who has degrees in physics and electrical engineering, shifted into telecom after down-sizings in NASA’s space program and the Texas oil industry, where he built support electronics for the oil diggers. Mr. Raeside came on after surviving layoffs at semiconductor companies through the 1980s.

During the boom, no one was more in demand than the eclectic band of optical engineers who had worked for years in relative obscurity transmitting millions of calls a second through tiny hairs of glass by using lasers of light invisible to the human eye. Their value soared in a climate where any innovation could quickly become the next hot IPO. Suddenly, companies were paying salaries well over $100,000 to lure top talent.

As some of the early start-ups were purchased by bigger companies in deals that made their founders rich, the walls of the big companies started to feel a bit confining. Mr. Dugan left Alcatel in January 2000, contemplating a few offers. He was hanging around his house one February morning when he was contacted out of the blue by Michael Zadikian, who had sold his company, Monterey Networks, to Cisco Systems Inc. for $500 million in 1999.

Mr. Zadikian had a new plan to launch four start-ups at once to develop a single system that phone companies could use for all of their needs. He wanted Mr. Dugan to focus on the so-called long haul, the cross-country and undersea networks that companies were racing to build. Mr. Dugan signed on.

Latus was following in a rich tradition. The former MCI Communications Inc. started here in the late ’70s, using the microwave technology deployed by Collins Radio to challenge AT&T Corp.’s monopoly. But microwave towers couldn’t be placed more than 35 miles apart because of the curvature of the earth, leading MCI to push for advances in fiber-optic technology. In the early ’80s, MCI embraced a new technology that used light waves to transmit calls on one strand of fiber, a signal that was so strong MCI only needed to install equipment to boost it every 1,000 miles or so. Companies rushed into Richardson to help give MCI a competitive edge, a customer and supplier relationship that has flourished for years, but which is now in jeopardy with the collapse of MCI’s parent, WorldCom.

The goal of Latus was ambitious: to develop a system that could send data and voice traffic at higher speeds and longer distances than ever before. Optical networking was all abuzz about a technology called dense wave division multiplexing that could divide a single strand of fiber into dozens of channels by beaming different colors of light through it. The Latus system had 256 different channels, and was designed to go more than 1,200 miles before the signal needed to be boosted again so it could continue on.

The company didn’t have a name until March, when Mr. Dugan, flying home from a convention, bought a Latin-English dictionary at an airport and found the word, “latus,” meaning wide, open and expansive. Latus got $28 million in its first round of funding in July of 2000 from a group of investors eager to follow Mr. Zadikian’s success.

David Wolf knew he was at a turning point as he decided whether to follow his former boss to Latus. A friend of his late father told him to do it because it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. His wife, Susan, advised making the leap as well. The couple had just purchased some property north of their home in Allen, Texas, to build a bigger house to accommodate their expanding family.

“Do it, as long as you get paid the same,” Susan told her husband. Even if it didn’t work out, the couple reasoned that Mr. Wolf could take advantage of one of several other job offers. In a matter of days, Mr. Wolf found himself plunking down $5,000 on his credit card to buy a laptop so he could start work at Latus on Monday. He remembers thinking with amusement that there were no expense forms to fill out to get the money back, but he trusted Mr. Dugan.

They found some office space to rent and began hiring workers. “At every board meeting, they said, ‘Spend the money. Spend the money,’ ” recalls Mr. Wolf. “The engineers were the hardest to find.” Latus had to pay at least $100,000 and as much as $120,000, plus bonuses, for the very senior engineers, who often were playing more than three job offers off each other. The start-up handed out 20% of its total shares to employees, and those who joined first were given the largest number of options. Another start-up raffled off a new BMW to employees who referred their colleagues to the company.

Money seemed to be everywhere — and in many senses, it was. Capital spending by telecom companies at the height of the boom soared to 106% of revenue, according to Mr. Glen at Economy.com. Historically, that figure had been just 38%.

At Latus, Ken Maxham jumped in as employee No. 11, Bruce Raeside as employee No. 16 and Amy Dugan as employee No. 47. Mrs. Dugan joined despite some nervousness about perceptions of nepotism. A respected engineer herself, she reasoned that joining her husband’s company meant the two could work day and night on Latus.

The scramble began to get the technology ready for viewing at Supercomm, a huge trade show in June of 2001. The engineers sometimes put in 20-hour days working out kinks in the product, which looked like a bunch of refrigerators full of wires. “Our entire existence was hinged on meeting our claims,” says Mr. Dugan. “I said there is no way we can go back and tell the board there appeared to be fundamental physics limitations.”

What they didn’t realize was that economic limitations would prove the bigger threat. Latus was launched precisely at the peak of the bubble, when money was flowing so freely in telecom that companies seemed willing to buy anything.

It was at Supercomm in Atlanta that the big buyers began showing signs of flagging demand. Mr. Dugan had to rush out to California in the middle of the show to give a funding pitch to one of the original investors. But the second round of financing for Latus became almost impossible as the spigot of capital shut off. An initial public offering became a distant dream.

Mr. Dugan was hoping the uncertainty was just a slight fluctuation in the market. That summer, the Dugans threw an even bigger party than before, and catered it for the first time, bringing in trays of Mexican food under a huge rented tent. Around that time, Susan Wolf started joking with Mr. Dugan about whether her husband would still be able to bring home a paycheck. An accountant, she works only during tax time to bring in a few thousand dollars. Mr. Dugan knew it was a joke, but he began feeling the responsibility on his shoulders.

The first layoffs hit the Richardson area in the middle of 2001. Susan Wolf began hearing stories in her neighborhood. “It is like the black plague. You hear it happening to someone your neighbor knows. Then her brother is laid off, and then it happens to you,” she told her husband over dinner recently with a guest. “It goes from the edges in — closer and closer — and finally gets here.”

The company was notified that it lost its funding the morning of Sept. 11. Mr. Dugan was waiting for a conference call among the Latus board when the second plane hit the World Trade Center, but the call went on as investors notified them that funding would be cut off. The founders were given only 10 days to find a new backer — an almost impossible feat because any potential bidders would have had to travel by bus to visit the company, since all flights were grounded for days by terrorism fears. “We got bombed twice,” says Mr. Dugan, who doesn’t blame the investors for their decision given the climate.

On Sept. 12, he called an all-hands meeting and told his fellow Latus employees to update their resumes and finish their projects. “It’s not over, but it doesn’t look good at all,” he told them.

On Sept. 23, Mr. Dugan invited them all to the local Omni Hotel, the place where all the deals were made during better times. He told them that Latus would be shut down, and its doors padlocked as the bank cleared out its equipment. Everyone would lose their jobs immediately. Mr. Dugan made arrangements to sign them up for unemployment benefits on the spot, and then the Dugans paid for drinks for all. “A lot of these people were my friends. They didn’t hold it against me,” says Mr. Dugan. “But I felt badly for them.”

When Latus shut down, the Wolf family cut down on spending as they could. They stopped hiring babysitters and going out to dinner, and cut back on groceries.

David Wolf stayed at home looking for a job, surprising his children the first time that he picked them up from school. To fill his time, to the slight irritation of his wife, he plunged into another start-up with Mr. Dugan and a few others to develop another optical product. They even paid out of their own pockets for Mr. Dugan to present the product at a show in California earlier this year. But with the downturn so pronounced, they received little interest. The fiber-optic amplifier is now sitting in a case in Mr. Dugan’s living room.

As he flung himself into a new start-up, Mr. Dugan and others held meetings at the local Starbucks, which had become the unofficial meeting place for the unemployed. He says it is a strange experience to run into people during the middle of the day. “It is like, ‘Oh, this happened to you, too,’ ” he says.

Mr. Maxham started looking for a job immediately. Even though he is 59, he was perhaps worst off financially because he had invested 30 years of retirement savings in tech stocks after leaving Alcatel. “I was a believer, but that was a bad decision,” says Mr. Maxham, who lost “hundreds of thousands” of dollars. Initially, he was mystified by the scarcity of jobs because he had turned down seven job offers before joining Latus. As he searched every day for jobs, unemployment benefits of about $300 a week kicked in.

To ease the tension, Mr. Maxham plays electric bass guitar in a band of engineers called Signal2Noise. But it wasn’t much of an escape: At one point, half of the band was out of work. He felt increasingly guilty about his precarious financial situation and apologized at one point to his wife, Penny. “I am not angry,” she told him. “I sort of know that we are going to be OK.” Still, it was rough recently when she had to accept money from her parents to travel back to Idaho to visit them.

For months now, the bottom has been getting deeper. Robert Shapiro, head of the local telecom branch of the national engineering association, thinks the cycle must be at the bottom. “How could it get any worse?” asks Mr. Shapiro, who is working a temporary job after months of unemployment. Attendance at the group’s monthly meetings at the local Holiday Inn has doubled since engineers now have extra time. Mr. Shapiro estimates that half of the association’s members have been laid off. Meetings now start with job-hunting tips.

Part of the problem is that there is no place for the highly specialized engineers to turn as the tech industry continues to slump. Krish Prabhu, the former chief operating officer of Alcatel who lives in the Dallas area, hears the desperation as companies ask for money and former colleagues call for job tips. A partner with Morgenthaler Ventures, a venture-capital firm, Mr. Prabhu says it will be tough for any start-up to survive. “There is a nervousness about whether this downturn is part of a cycle or a fundamental change that telecom has become a commodity like the computer industry,” says Mr. Prabhu.

The ripples are spreading. The city of Richardson is being hit by a drop of more than 20% of its sales tax and a coming hit to its property taxes from all the empty office buildings. Foreclosures in Collin County, where many telecom workers live, are up 79% over last year, especially for homes worth $250,000 or more. The process is brutally efficient in Texas: Once a house is posted for foreclosure, the owner has only 21 days to come up with the money before it is auctioned.

Howard Dahlka, executive director of the Samaritan Inn, a homeless shelter in nearby McKinney, is seeing the shell-shocked faces of telecom workers who have lost their homes. “It is a whole new breed, what we are seeing here,” he says.

People in Trouble

Just in the past week, Samaritan has received 15 calls from people who are expecting to lose their homes, and he worries whether his 58-bed shelter will have to turn people away. Bill Kewin, an engineer who was laid off from WorldCom six weeks ago, says many WorldCom workers are in very bad financial shape because their 401(k) plans are worth virtually nothing. Many have put their homes on the market and don’t know where they are going next. “There are a lot of people who are in trouble,” he says.

As November turned into December, Mr. Dugan had found no work. His wife, Amy, thankfully did land a job for $100,000 a year at a telecom manufacturer, giving them a degree of financial stability they are grateful for. But it isn’t easy for Mr. Dugan, who has 13 patents to his name. He eventually got a little work consulting for a start-up, but expects to lose that job in about a month. Something permanent feels pretty far off. He’s even thinking of going back to school to study medicine. “I don’t have a sense of accomplishment,” he says. “I still have more to do.”

Across town at the Wolf household, tension rose as Christmas approached and David still didn’t have a job. The couple fretted about Christmas, and how to contribute to the gift-giving rituals with their extended family. They didn’t want to ask for help but were happy to accept cash gifts to help ease the pinch. Susan Wolf was most worried about the $10,000 bill for private school for one of their children with some special needs. Her parents stepped in to help foot the bill late last year.

Finally, in January, David got a job at Yotta Networks, another local start-up that is focusing on long-haul networks. He makes about $100,000 a year, but Yotta has gone through two sets of layoffs and is set to run out of its funding in a matter of weeks. Company officials are negotiating with a promising new customer, but the start-up is burning through $1 million a month.

The Wolfs estimate they have only enough savings to last three months. “I’m getting nervous,” says Mr. Wolf. “I’ve got a lot of people who are telling me just to get out of telecom. I don’t want to end up on the street again.” Susan Wolf says that if she needs to, she will resort to anything to pay this year’s school tuition. “I’ll move into an apartment if I have to.”

In April, Mr. Maxham thought his prayers had been answered. A company called Celion Networks Inc. needed an engineer. He quickly called to arrange an interview. Then a friend tipped him off that Mr. Raeside, his old colleague from Latus, was also in the running for the job. After agonizing the day before the interview, he decided to deal with the competition head-on. “I put a good word in for him,” says Mr. Maxham.

He felt the interview went well. The job seemed like a perfect fit. They needed a systems engineer — a big-picture guy who supervises the hardware design of a new product. But while he was waiting to see if he’d get another interview, the phone rang with some disquieting news. It was Mr. Raeside, letting him know as a courtesy that he’d been asked back for a second interview. He called again when he got hired.

The two men remain friends, but Mr. Raeside seemed sheepish when he spotted him this year at Mr. Dugan’s party. “I was lucky,” he said softly. “I am really convinced that it came down to either one of us. We were both perfect for the job.”

The job only lasted four months. Mr. Raeside was laid off on Friday.

The party itself was much tamer this year. Guests were asked to bring potluck dishes, and the biggest attraction was a big tent Mr. Dugan designed himself to save money.

Mr. Maxham attends job workshops run by various churches in the area. As every week passes, he notices more and more of the unemployed coming. Lisa Miller, the executive director of Career/HiTech Connection, the biggest workshop in the area, makes it her mission to keep spirits high. “You will find a job,” Ms. Miller told the crowd packing the Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church one recent Tuesday night as she explained the importance of networking. But as the telecom crisis deepens, Mr. Maxham becomes less convinced there are even jobs to be had. He sat with a grim look one recent night as job openings were called off, none of them for engineers.

As Mr. Maxham’s savings account dwindles to under $10,000, things are getting very shaky. He now buys only food that is on sale, looks for the cheapest gas and has put off replacing his wife’s 10-year-old car. He won’t go to a food bank because he says they give away too much meat, which he doesn’t like. Repairs are going undone. Recently, Mr. Maxham set out with sealant to repair some leaks on his roof. If he doesn’t find any work by September, he says that money will “get very tight.”

It already has. Penny Maxham says that she is trying to ignore a toothache because the couple has no dental coverage. She quit her job a couple of years ago to fulfill a dream of getting a Ph.D. in neuroscience, but she is considering going back to work.

Once there was a time when Mr. Maxham vowed never to leave engineering. His father was an engineer, and his three grown children are engineers. But a month ago, Mr. Maxham’s unemployment benefits ran out, and he is reconsidering. He recently applied to teach physics at a community college. A friend recently asked him to help install some computers in cars. He is open to anything because he really needs the money.

“It’s frustrating,” says Mr. Maxham, who in his 30 years as an engineer earned seven patents. An eighth just arrived in the mail last week. “I just enjoyed being an engineer so much. I was born like that and I passed it along to my children. … But maybe I will become a teacher, just like my dad did in the Depression.”

Write to Rebecca Blumenstein at rebecca.blumenstein [at] wsj [dot] com1

Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) mailto:rebecca.blumenstein [at] wsj [dot] com (2) <http://online.”>http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB10281640071014240,00.html>http://online. wsj.com/article/0,,SB10281640071014240,00.html (4) <3887 https://ianbell.com/2002/02/22/nsync-in-space/ Fri, 22 Feb 2002 18:01:58 +0000 https://ianbell.com/2002/02/22/nsync-in-space/ MirCorp could do us all a huge favour here and leave him up there.

———– http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/eo/20020222/en_music_eo/russi ans__nyet_so_fast__lance&cidy5

Russians: Nyet So Fast, Lance Thu Feb 21, 7:35 PM ET

For those still scratching their heads over Lance Bass’ plans to become the youngest space traveler ever, you’re not alone.

A spokesman for Russia’s space agency, Rosaviakosmos, said Thursday that they haven’t started any talks with Netherlands-based MirCorp about sending the ‘N Syncer into space.

And while it’s entirely possible Bass could still realize his $25 million Rocket Man dream, the pop star’s announcement “is as if I said I had bought Australia,” Rosaviakosmos spokesman Sergei Gorbunov tells Reuters. “MirCorp has no right to sell these flights. They have no link to Rosaviakosmos, we have no contract linking us.”

They may think it’s gonna be a long, long time before Bass nabs a coveted seat on a Soyuz taxi mission to the International Space Station (news – web sites). But Bass’ publicists and MirCorp remained optimistic Thursday that the 22-year-old would be able to work out a deal getting him a spot on the November flight–despite competition from other potential candidates.

“MirCorp and Destiny productions are confident that with their proposal, Lance Bass will have this slot,” MirCorp vice chairman Walt Anderson said in a statement.

As part of the agreement with MirCorp, Bass and L.A.-based Destiny Productions are hoping to document the flight–as well as five to six months of pre-flight training in Russia–for a TV special titled Celebrity Mission: Lance Bass.

“MirCorp has the most experience in commercial space activities with the Russians,” Anderson added. “MirCorp is partners with RSC Energia, which builds the manned launch vehicles. MirCorp and Destiny stand by their invitation for Lance to be a part of this historical event.”

Destiny Productions president David Krieff also seemed optimistic about Bass’s chances, saying Wednesday “it’s really only a matter of money.”

But Russia’s space agency said it’s not so simple.

“We are not a shop selling flights,” Gorbunov said. “There is a hard preparation process and it is not just about coming up and buying a flight. And I’m not even talking about the agreements it is necessary to reach with our partners.”

Russia has welcomed private citizens onto its flights, part of an attempt to bring in extra cash and solve some of its budget problems. MirCorp was involved in early preparations to send U.S. millionaire Dennis Tito to the space station last year, but the final deal ended up getting worked out by the Virginia-based Space Adventures. That company also is behind a trip this spring by South African businessman Mark Shuttleworth.

Russian Space Chief Yuri Koptev said Wednesday there is still an open spot on the November Soyuz mission, and they are looking for potential passengers. But the Rosaviakosmos spokesman told Reuters that the current frontrunner in the race is not Bass–but Polish businessman Leszek Czarnecki. (Yeah, but how many platinum records does he have?)

Gorbunov says Czarnecki’s trip also must be approved by Russia’s International Space Station partners, which includes NASA (news – web sites) and more than a dozen other countries.

Meanwhile, according to Space.com, a NASA spokesman said the U.S. agency wouldn’t oppose the Bass trip, as long as he met all the medical and physical requirements recently agreed upon by the Space Station partners.

So, in other words, cut down on those Chili’s babyback ribs, Lance–there may still be hope.

Friday May 18 7:49 PM ET

Soviet SST Wings Its Way to Internet

By Chris Stetkiewicz

SEATTLE (Reuters) – For sale: Soviet-built supersonic Tu-144 jetliner. Top speed 1,650 mph, seats 135. Low miles. Price $10 million or best offer.

The plane is nearly 20 years old, but was fully refurbished for high-speed flight testing by NASA four years ago and would make a stunning executive jet or, more realistically, a spectacular flying billboard for corporate advertisers.

“It could go to a person who likes to own the fastest car or it could be used by a cola company who wants a marketing effort with global reach,” said Randall Stephens, a Texas aviation expert working with Russian jet maker Tupolev to sell the jet.

Nicknamed “Concordsky” because it closely resembled the Concorde built simultaneously by Britain and France in the late 1960s, the Soviet jet holds 35 more passengers and flies about 5 percent faster than its cousin.

But the Tu-144 was too noisy and inefficient for even the Soviet airline Aeroflot (AFLT.RTS) and deadly crashes at the Paris air show in 1972 and again in 1977 sealed its doom. Only a handful were ever produced.

Yet NASA found the price was right to lease a Tu-144 for over 300 hours of flight testing, three times what it had flown previously, and replaced its four old out-of-production engines with powerplants borrowed from a Tu-160 supersonic bomber.

Boeing, which announced plans for a near-sonic speed jet earlier this year, participated in the flight tests and probably got some good ideas along the way, experts said.

With the upgrades and flight testing costing about $35 million, the $10 million Tu-144 asking price is a steal, said Paul Duffy, an Irish aviation consultant.

“For $10 million you could probably buy a 12-year-old Boeing (NYSE:BA – news) 737,” Duffy said. “But this (Tu-144) is very special. If you can make any use of it you are getting a real bargain.”

EBAY GETS COLD FEET

Stephens posted the jet for sale on Internet auction house Ebay Inc. (NasdaqNM:EBAY – news) and got at least one tentative bid. But after a week Ebay grew concerned over U.S. laws banning imports of big Soviet jets and withdrew the item to make legal checks.

Ebay would earn $125,000 if the jet sold for $10 million, nearly 10 times the next most expensive Ebay sales — a Kentucky resort and a famous baseball card, a spokesman said.

Undaunted, Stephens has posted the Tu-144 for sale on his own Web site, (http://www.tejavia.com), and says he and Tupolev can provide maintenance and spare parts and operate the airplane for prospective customers.

For Stephens, the commercial project also represents his faith in the people and technology of the failed Soviet empire and his desire to forge closer ties between the onetime Cold War enemies by marketing other Russian planes.

“I believe in capitalism and I believe in the possibility of us working together. I find people over there feel the same way,” Stephens said. “Russians are a tenacious, long-suffering people and the people on the street actually like us.”

The cost of operating the Tu-144 could prove prohibitive, experts say. The Concorde, undergoing a make-over after crashing for the first time near Paris last summer, is more efficient than the Tu-144. But airlines still charge thousands of dollars for a one-way transatlantic trip at twice the speed of sound.

“A blimp or a Boeing 727 would be much cheaper and present fewer regulatory worries as a flying billboard,” said Richard Aboulafia at Virginia aviation consultancy Teal Group. “The Tupolev 144 has baggage, including the most spectacular disaster at an air show in recent memory.”

Recent reports suggest French fighter jets, equipped with cameras to snap photos of the Concorde competitor, actually caused the Tu-144 crash by swooping too close, forcing the Soviet jet into a steep climb well outside its design limits.

But regardless of the cause, the jet’s lousy track record could be its own worst enemy. “It’s a piece of junk,” said Colorado aviation consultant Mike Boyd. “You don’t want be seen in it or around it.”

NOSTALGIA OR REAL VALUE?

Western manufacturers like Boeing have sifted through the rubble of the Communist Soviet economy to find inexpensive technology and engineering talent and put them to work researching or operating commercial projects.

Boeing officials privately marvel at the advanced Russian jet designs that rivaled Western ones on smaller budgets. But public perception of Iron Curtain engineering could hardly be worse with memories of the nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl and the sinking of Russia’s Kursk nuclear submarine last year still fresh in many people’s minds.

And just this month Russian space officials reportedly got $20 million from Dennis Tito to make him the world’s first space tourist, subsidizing their share of the International Space Station, but angering their NASA counterparts.

Ever optimistic, Stephens insists the Tu-144 will fly once more, a tribute to the human obsession with superfast flight.

“Even 30 years later, people still stop and stare open-mouthed when the Concorde takes off,” Stephens said. “This is going to be a great advertising medium.”