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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
You've got it all wrong.
It's so they can hide the mini-bar from the kids...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
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 question that comes up is - How open do you think NASA should be? Can sharing of information (incl. blueprints) be so sensitive (to security? to prevent new companies from showing up?)? There are so much corporate interests in making money and humanity is not open-minded enough - there will always be a nut-head somewhere who will use the information to do something really bad. I wonder if the data from CERN will be censored as well.
Do I require the c-sig package to have a signature?
I love a bit of hyperbole. We'll make a tabloid out of slashdot yet! Some security minion becomes "armed security cop", becomes "armed guards".
What a pity no mention was made of what he was wearing, otherwise we would be on to his jackboots by now.
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
Hmm, do they really think they're gonna be successful in blotting out references to Saturn V info on the web?
Hey, censor-guys, lemme give you an example, see if you follow:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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
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.
Notmysig
... I can expect a dawn raid from armed police/soldiers to take back my Airfix model?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The two nations that have put people on the moon
You are of course referring to the United States and America?
Too bad they forgot to take down the Saturn V Flight Manual from their own site, huh?
g ov/19750063889_1975063889.pdf
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.
"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.
Yep, a marketing stunt that coincides with the Saturn 5 restored to former glory.
Besides, the blueprints seem to be stored away, quote:""The Federal Archives in East Point, Georgia, also has 2,900 cubic feet of Saturn documents," he said. "Rocketdyne has in its archives dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F 1 and J 2 engine production to assist in any future restart.""
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
.....this isn't the rocket you're looking for.
If the guard had half a brain, he'd know that ITAR has to do with export, not possession. Under ITAR, the version of IE that supports 128-bit encryption held the same classification; this didn't mean that you had to wipe your hard drive and go back to the 64-bit version, just that you couldn't give/sell/loan your computer to someone in another country. ITAR has no jurisdiction or concern with regard to ownership within the United States.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
He's talking about a little know moon landing by Elbonia, using the unconventional catapult launch method instead of the more commonly used rocket. The Elbonian government covered up the landing themselves, as it was deemed embarrassing that the moon was a nicer place to live then Elbonia.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
You know how far those poster "blueprints" will get you in building one of the most complex systems ever created by humans-- over 1 million systems comprise the saturn V.
I remember a comment from a literary critic - forget who- on much thriller writing from the early 20th century. One of the common themes was dastardly (insert enemy here) trying to steal the plans of the latest battleship. As he pointed out, you would need (in those days) an entire railway train to steal the plans for a battleship. You might be able to find out about the planned armament, and even the displacement and SHP, but these would certainly not help very much in building a copy.
Pining for the fjords
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.
Actually, there were moon landings by the Soviet union, however these were unmanned. So he is technically incorrect but correct to point out that others did land craft there.
In return for knocking down the Berlin Wall so we could build McDonaldses all over East Germany, the US gave them 8 hours of film time at Studio Moonbase.
I can't find a link at the moment but I'm sure one is out there somewhere.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
He's antisocialising, dongbreath.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
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!
Have we forgotten the accomplishment of The Duchy of Grand Fenwick and professor Kokintz so soon?
n
o rd/dp/B00004ZBVN
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_on_the_Moo
http://www.amazon.com/Mouse-Moon-Margaret-Rutherf
Sad, sad, indeed.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
>It's what they came up with that was buildable in the time allotted. Sure, NASA was working on single stage
>to orbit designs, but they knew SSTO wouldn't be doable until the 90's, and the challange was to get there
>before 1970. It was a pure case of 'throw enough money at the problem and you'll get results'.
I recently toured the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville. Here is how the progression of our space program appears from that visit:
V2: Badass
Mercury: More Badass
Gemini: More Badass
Apollo: More Badass
Space Shuttle: Cost Effective
We aren't good enough at space travel yet to be focusing on Cost Effective. We need more "Badass" in our space program.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
He aimed for the moon but hit London. (old,old joke)
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
Furthermore we are talking about technology that is 40 years old now. Pretending that we can put that genie back in the bottle is exactly the sort of fantastic thinking that leads to terrible security. Even if you can not make it impossible for your enemies to obtain a secret, you can still make it harder -- every step of the way. True, but we're not talking about secrets, we're talking about information that has been freely available for decades. Even referring to it as a "secret" is dishonest, wishful thinking.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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...
The original guy with the website issue has posted an update:
b rowse_thread/thread/a607576dfe803de0/265b512758989 6cf?hl=en#265b5127589896cf
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.space.history/
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
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.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
The future of space travel belongs to the private sector.
That's what they said four years ago about the private sector in Iraq. And privatization turned out to be inferior there to socialism in every way, even as implemented by a buffoon like Saddam Hussein: Socialism 1, Privatization 0. That really opened my eyes to the intellectual bankruptcy of this decades-old canard, that the public sector needs dismantlement and the private sector deserves to be worshiped. They both share corruption as an Achilles heel.
Who the hell wants to watch Nike and Disney doing cross-marketing from a low Earth orbit anyway? Which they will have bought for pennies at a corrupt auction so they can launch billboards and crap into space? LEO has already been considered as a venue for obnoxious advertising, to the horror of astronomers- and once it becomes feasible, you can expect to see a lot of well-funded lobbying efforts to protect its feasibility for investment. I'd rather have our current system even if it occasionally launches drunks or psycho bitches into space.
> Given the size differential between the first and later stages, the earlier post is
> somewhat justified in calling LOX and kerosene the primary fuel for Saturn V.
But most of the delta-v comes from the final two stages.
Velocity at first staging was 9,900 km/h. Final velocity was 39,000 km/h.
Source: http://www.braeunig.us/space/specs/saturn.htm
Circumcision is child abuse.
"That's impossible. Our German scientists are better than _their_ German scientists!"
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
"Lunokhod 2 operated for about 4 months, covered 37 km (23 miles) of terrain, including hilly upland areas and rilles, and sent back 86 panoramic images and over 80,000 TV pictures."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_2
I can understand the government's concern here. There is advanced Space Shuttle simulation software available for download on the internet. It even comes with a highly detailed Space Shuttle flight manual.
The most disturbing part is, nefarious organizations are willing to sell this top secret material to the the highest bidder. Just imagine if this were to fall into the hands of the terrorists.
I'm not sure what an Atari 2600 is. Probably some kind of NASA super computer...
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
Glad you noticed. I was thinking about the same thing about Iraq today before reading your post. The Free Market was supposed to magically solve all of Iraq's problems overnight, and yet I read in the news that a huge number of Iraqis are at the moment in critical need for outside aid, as the whole society is essentially collapsing. I kind of believe that if there had been a little less ideological dogmatism involved, giving the Iraqis a generous oil-funded social democracy would have allowed for a dignified US exit from a pacified country; if you're politically so opposed to the idea, don't you think the Iraqi democracy would have sorted out the possible "inefficiencies" in due time, at their own pace?
:P
It's quite remarkable how indoctrinated Americans are against the public sector. I think it's a self-reinforcing cultural feature though; when you believe from the outset it won't and can't work, and that it must not be allowed to work, it won't. It takes quite a bit of civic pride and involvement, which takes a long time to cultivate. I'm from Europe and a lot of the American ideas about how things work (or don't work) here seem to be to be just ideologically motivated scaremongering that has very little to do with reality... fundamentally, a public-sector organization is just like any other organization, and thus is vulnerable to the same kind of problems. They are taken care of by transparency and good management, just like anywhere else.
Of course a public sector has other goals besides profit-maximization (which is in turn the private sector's role), but that's the whole point really, so it is not an inherent weakness. And to all of those who drool at the prospect of the imminent economic collapse of pinko Europe because it's all unaffordable (and would be even more so in the world's supposedly richest country, the USA)... well.. we're doing better than ever economically, the USD is toilet paper compared to the Euro, my stock market investments in Europe are doing remarkably well... and I have no intent to diversify to the US, as I'm just watching the slow-motion train wreck develop around your questionable debt-fueled bubble economy, which is going to SO sink your regular Joe and Jane Consumer who are then going to die agonizing deaths when they catch something nasty and can't afford to get treated for it. A brutal fate unimaginable here.
I really prefer a bit of Socialism in my society, thank you very much..
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.