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NASA Contractors Censoring Saturn V Info
cybrpnk2 writes "Get ready to surrender your data sheets, study reports and blueprints of the Saturn V to stay in compliance with ITAR. Armed guards are reportedly taking down and shredding old Saturn V posters from KSC office walls that show rough internal layouts of the vehicle, and a Web site that is a source for various digitized blueprints has been put on notice it may well be next. No word yet if the assignment of a Karl Rove protege high up in NASA has any connection."
After all, space has been opened for the enterprising public, maybe NASA wants to keep their edge in rocket development.
Tells you something about R&D if that 'edge' is 40+ years old...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
WTF is happening? First it was the availability of mobile coverage that was secretized, and now Saturn V?
For fu&k's sake, its Saturn V !!! Not the plans to latest Anti-Gravity Cavorite
And secondly, it has been available in school/college libraries for a long time now?
So will the SS take down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Vtoo ?
I guess if Rove & Co were living in ancient ages, they would have made sure that any reference to catapults were removed from Library of Alexandria?
How do you re-secretize something that is in Public Domain???
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
It's a damn shame that a nice launch vehicle also happens to make a nice ICBM, but the progress of getting off this rock is a teenie bit more important that keeping foreign countries from spending less than a few million dollars and a few years of research and development to make their own design. Meanwhile, the much harder problem of making a man rated rocket is being done over and over and over again. Talk about duplication of efforts.
How we know is more important than what we know.
No word yet if the assignment of a Karl Rove protege high up in NASA has any connection.
So why bother mentioning it unless you're trying to establish some sort of political agenda of your own?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Aren't they a bit late to stop this information getting out? If it's been in the public domain for years then anyone interested in using it would already have a copy.
Just buy a new one from ebay: http://cgi.ebay.com/Apollo-Saturn-V-Plans-1967-Ama zing-Item_W0QQitemZ230155998873QQihZ013QQcategoryZ 13903QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Seriously though, this must be some kind of silly bureaucratic mixup, someone overreacting to the new directive from above etc.
As if someone trying to build a freaking ICBM would not have already picked up every bit of public information (and more) regarding US, Soviet etc rocket technology.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I would think older, simpler rocket designs would be more applicable to the needs of an emerging space power or rogue terrorist group. Why not censor and confiscate information about the older Titans that carried Gemini? Or the Redstone, Atlas, or even Little Joe rockets that propelled the Mercury program? Sure, they don't have the glamour or cachet of the Saturn V (which was, and still is, a beautiful machine), but I'm sure there are a lot of old technical manuals and such about those floating around. (I live in Central Florida, and have been to many estate sales of former NASA employees where there are tons of such material available. And, yes, I have profited quite nicely from them on eBay, thank you.)
But this is a futile effort -- 40 years of being in the public domain is a bit much to reverse and cover up now. Why do so many people still think that you can rein this stuff in after it's already been so widely disseminated? Especially in the Internet era -- it's like when someone wants something taken down from YouTube or some other site when millions have already viewed and downloaded the file, and copies and copies of copies and copies of copies of copies are multiplying like bunnies through the "tubes." Nowadays, once something is "out there" it's OUT, and you can no more undo the damage than you can "unexplode" a bomb.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Seriously, this is not your political blog, I'm no right winger, but even I'm getting sick of it.
The Saturn V is one of the greatest accomplishments of American Engineering. To shroud it like this is nothing short of disrespectful to those who built it, not to mention a pretty startling reflection of the current status of science in America.
That all said, anybody who would consider using a Saturn 5 rocket as any sort of weapon is absolutely insane. The Saturn rockets were huge, and designed to deliver massive payloads (all of Skylab was launched via a single Saturn booster). The capacity of a Saturn rocket is just shy of 118 times as massive as the largest nuclear device ever constructed.
Needless to say, it'd be pretty damn difficult for anybody to hide a rocket that big, along with that much nuclear material.
Smaller rockets are scarier, because bombs don't need to be particularly heavy in order to cause serious damage, and because they can be easily concealed and launched at sea.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
So why bother mentioning it unless you're trying to establish some sort of political agenda of your own?
If they're actually doing the deed, and it appears they are, what difference does the motivation of the whistle blower make? Why would you defend this heavy handed stupidity under any circumstances?
Anyone with the wherewithal to develop a launch vehicle can simply purchase one from the Russians...already assembled and working, complete with the ground support crew to service it. If the Russians can't handle the order they could go to the Chinese, India, or Pakistan. They're not going to try duplicating a multi-stage liquid fuel lift vehicle based on 30 year old technology.
How does that old phrase go? Strain out a gnat and swallow a camel? Something like that.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
There is no benefit from hiding information about technology. Take the atom bomb as an example. Once you know its possible to build one you are halfway there. The leap wasnt that somebody succeded in building an atom bomb but rather that someone had a rough idea that it might work. Any country hellbent on making a missale can do so over a small period of years. They know its possible and building the knowledge up isnt that hard. Often the basic information (fuels, materials etc) are very well documented, all you need is to work out the kinks IRL. Sadly things like this hurts the US most since their engineers wont learn from previous mistakes and endavours. They have to relearn things over and over from person to person.
HTTP/1.1 400
I know the majority of people dislike Karl Rove, but let me assure you, the Government was doing stupid things long before he came along, and that will never change.
"How do you re-secretize something that is in Public Domain???"
The crazy conspiracy theorist in me thinks that it might be a little worse than that. Maybe, they don't care about the Saturn V at all. Maybe its nothing more than a test, a social experiment of sorts. A test, of how effectively they can rewrite history and how much the public will care. And let us hope they are not successful, as if this is true and they are successful, we have much bigger concerns than the preservation of the history of space exploration on our hands.
Or maybe the crazy conspiracy theorist in me is just a little too crazy and I'm talking out of my ass. But we must watch this.
Yeah, why use any of the Russian designs available when you could spend 1,000 times as much building a Saturn V? At least then you'd have bragging right of being able to nuke the moon when your country goes bankrupt.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
You know what, I WISH they use old Saturn designs for that purpose. Seriously. The crappier their long range missiles the better. T_T
If that's "the real reason," then we are *screwed*! No government that thinks it's protecting its citizens by tearing down Saturn V posters is actually protecting its citizens at all.
Then again, because there is *no good reason at all* to tear down Saturn V posters, I'm willing to believe whatever they say it is. It'll be retarded every which way.
I like basketball!!1!
ITAR has no jurisdiction or concern with regard to ownership within the United States.
No, it governs the nationality of the people who are allowed access to the information. If something is ITAR controlled only US citizens and green card holders can have access to it.
ITAR applies to almost anything that could plausibly be used to construct a spacecraft or launcher.
ITAR can make international collaborations very awkward, and even makes it hard to work with US universities with the large number of non-US people working at any major university. Some US universities don't even allow ITAR controlled data on their campuses (presumably to avoid the chance of being prosecuted).
I don't know whether ITAR is slowing down the development of weapons by foreign governments and terrorist groups. But, in my experience, it certainly is slowing down the development of US science and technology.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I think most people here are completely missing the point.
Someone in a position of authority, in the United States, insisted that a publicly available poster be taken down and destroyed, then came by with security forces to ensure compliance. Compliance, for whatever reason, was achieved.
I'm in Canada. I'd fucking laugh at someone who told me to take down and destroy an inoffensive poster. I'd laugh even harder if they came by with a security guard too. In fact, I'm sure the security guard would be laughing too. And then I'd tell my fucking co-workers the tale and we'd all be slapping our knees and shaking our heads. And the poster would still be hanging there, having become a major office conversation piece.
I wonder what Stanley Milgram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) would say about this...
Personally, I'd love it if some of those darn terrorists decided to spend their time and effort on building ICBMs according to line-drawing plans from POSTERS of the Saturn V.
1) it would take them forever
2) when it inevitably exploded on launch, good odds that it would take all of their certainly-rare warheads, it would also likely take out all of their semi-capable scientific minds as well (if the explosion didn't get them, the post-explosion witch hunt for the scapegoat would)
Building a Saturn V *is* rocket science, you're not getting anything from a poster that's terribly critical anyway.
-Styopa
This may be Slashdot Heresy, but isn't the Saturn V design actually kind of buggy? As I recall, the "pogo" issue (high-frequency, high-amplitude variations in thrust) occurred during several launches, was not solved during the program, and was later learned to be extremely serious. There were a few engine shut-downs during launches, which made orbit anyways, because the shut-downs were relatively late in the firing, and there were lots of engines.
Aha, found a link.
This caused a lot of problems for Apollo 6 and Apollo 13, the latter of which of course later had much more serious problems.
It's not obvious that you would want to reproduce this, necessarily.
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