How things change...

[jay]

An email today... checked in with a friend JF at KSC today, with whom I had lost contact for a couple of years. We used to work on vehicle health management together... the PITEX project, for the X-34... his group did the avionics hardware and mine did the diagnostic software. He was the co-conspirator that in the fall of 1998 smiled and waved and smuggled five of us up to the next-to-top floor of the Shuttle Launch Control building for the John Glenn shuttle launch. Now... he's KSC's Deputy Center Director for External Relations. Understandable, in a way, because JF is great at estabishing rapport with strangers. But now he's the guy escorting the President on the top floor during Return To Flight last summer, worried about errant NASA staff below him...