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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."
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.
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.
How on earth is the parent poster defending censorship? Nothing was said about his opinion of this censorship, he was questioning the summary's implication that this connected with Jane Cherry (Karl Rove's "protoge").
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
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.
It's probably because of the new CEV program (which is totally not just an Apollo redux... the CEV program will feature more seats). If terrorists know exactly where the join was between the first and second stages of the booster rocket, they could... uh...
How about this: we can't say exactly what they could do because it's classified! But trust me, they could totally do stuff.
Really.
Would the US government lie to you? Are you calling us liars? Why do you hate freedom?????
What happened to my country, and will you cowards please give it back?
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
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.
They were confiscating and destroying posters purchased at the gift shop. These aren't technical specs, they're public relations fluff posters with a rough cut-away display of the interior of the rocket.
So you think it's reasonable in a free and just society for armed men to go into a private company's offices, rip publically available posters of 40+ year old technology off the walls and destroy them in the name of national security?
Think about this for a second. The Saturn didn't have computers on board, it's older than the computer age. When it was designed, you probably couldn't fit a computer into it's entire cargo area. It doesn't make sense on any level to try to even pretend that the technology should be classified, it's clearly a sign of massive incompetence on the part of the Bush cronies who were recently put in charge at NASA. These people have no relevent education or experience, hell one of the morons was the second in command at FEMA during Katrina and now's he's got a different plush job at NASA where he's screwing up just he did a FEMA.
It will probably take decades to clean up the mess that Bush is making of the U.S.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
'Where do you see "cowardice" here?'
I see cowardice whenever someone tries to justify intolerable abuse of power on the basis that maybe it will make it harder for some unknown enemy to strike at us.
Brave men demand more than vague threats and hand waving before they surrender their basic rights, cowards don't.
Fanatically anti-fanatical