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."

Comments

I don't know about this

[NotmyNick]

All I see is a guy who makes his living selling memorabilia and documents screaming about the possibility of some of those docs becoming artificially scarce (in just a few short hours!) and the only corroboration he seems to have is what looks to be the excerpt of what could have been an email from an unknown person in some NASA office somewhere at Kennedy. Something smells.

Idea: Nuttier than a fruitcake.

[Ancient_Hacker]

Totally nutty idea.

• Nobody's going to build a Saturn V for "terrorist" applications.
• You can't build a Saturn V from a poster. Or a blueprint. Or even 100 blueprints. Every detail, from the metallurgy of the rivets, to the welding techniques for the heat exchangers, to the construction of the tools, dies, jigs, test fixtures, processing chemicals, dips, platings, surface treatments, case-hardenings, ball peening, test plans, processing timelines, and much more, each encompasses a whole thick book of technology, most of which has been lost. Or is available on microfiche from any good Univerity or Govt documents repository library. Plus the Saturn V had about 130,000 subcontractors that supplied everything from gold-plated lockwashers to platinum-skinned servomotors. The technology for those was not captured in the basic Saturn V documents. For instance the specs for a small servomotor might have read "35 ft-lbs torque, 0.1% resolution, 77 to 800 degrees C. and how they did it was a trade secret of some now defunct subcontractor. And the making of the motor's teflon-coated wires was a trade secret of the wire manufacturer. And so on. Multiply that by 130,000 times.
• So you not only would not want to, you could not even begin to build a Saturn V from the "blueprints".

Re:WTF??? How do you take down?

[tgatliff]

Why is this seen as a political issue? I mean, ignorance applies everywhere.... And "Neo Cons"?? Where the hell did this come from?? Instead of everyone just speculating and trying to fufill what you want to believe, why doesnt someone just file a FOIA on some of the Saturn V docs. In fact, I will do that today and see what turns up... At least then you have an official response...

And no, I am not going to believe this "terrorists could use Saturn V to deliver nuclear warheads" crap. That argument is just plain ignorant.....

Re:This is why we're still in the Space Stone Age

[MichaelSmith]

By today's standards, Apollo was a dinky little deathtrap,

The more I read the ALSJ the more respect I have for the hardware. The Apollo CM would have survived both shuttle disasters. The Apollo 13 incident resulted in a more mature spacecraft with more redundancy. A similar incident on a shuttle would probably have killed the crew immediately. Building the system out of small modules meant that the architecture could accommodate expanded modules. Apollo serviced the lunar program, skylab and apollo-soyuz.

I just wish NASA had looked into an economical launcher to support it after the supply of Saturn Vs ran out.

the men who rode it were no-foolin' heroes.

No argument from me on that front.