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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.
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
"Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for Saturn Vtoo in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings."
They sure were fast on that one!
-- Sauer
By invoking National Security, of course.
But then, if you posted someplace that NeoCons are total whackjobs that need massive amounts of medication to make them sane again, you're likely to get arrested for revealing state secrets...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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?
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
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
NEWS AT 11: sharp objects can kill!
Fearing terrorists will try to build and use deadly weapons, called collectively "sharp objects", the American president has issued a executive order classifying the knowledge of building sharp objects. The ATF has already arrested over 10,000 American children in a attempt to enforce this law. The head of the ATF taskforce tasked with enforcing this executive order, when questioned with the practicality of enforcing this, is quoted as saying "if they can successfully outlaw, ban, and remove a weed from this great country, we can, and will, prevent the deadly knowledge of making sharp objects from terrorists at all costs". Police say the children where found creating these weapons on the streets from sticks, but we cant say anymore then that due to the classification of the material. Experts at the FBI suspect these children where not acting alone, but are part of a nation wide effort of children to overthrow the government by use of sharp objects. No word on weather they will be taken to Gitmo, we can only wish the authorities with the best of luck in quickly removing this dangerous knowledge before it reaches anymore terrorists.
Back to you Kristin.
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
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.
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.....
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.
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?????
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?
Simply put, it's because the Bush administration (in itself a sensible working definition of the word "neocon") is the most secretive administration in history. The pointless re-classification of old NASA documents is an example of a pattern that has been going on throughout the executive branch for six years.
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
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
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.
Forget the terrorists. Lets focus on our tangible enemies (North Korea and Iran). True, they probably won't use the Saturn V to deliver missles. They don't have to when the Russians have provided them perfectly usable missile systems (SCUD for instance).
That being said, the Saturn V was a relatively cheap way of delivering payload to space. There is plenty to be learned from old designs, even if they aren't duplicated. If you've kept up with the news the last few years then you've seen North Korea master nuclear technology, but not the missiles to deliver it. While we seem powerless to stop these countries from acquiring nuclear weapons, we don't need to help them develop the technology to deliver those weapons.
double woosh
Superb Hosting
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?
Naw, he'd just burn the place down.
What?
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.
Because one of them wags a stick around for food and the other claims that Germany should take responsibility for their own war crimes? WTF? This makes them "tangible enemies"? How, exactly, are either of these nations affecting YOUR life in the least?
The most "tangible" enemy of the American people at this point in time is the American Government's overreaching power grabs and the American people's consumptive apathy.
Stop giving up MY freedoms to ease YOUR fear!
What happened to my country, and will you cowards please give it back?
Baby Boomers. The largest generation ever in the United States, and raised to hide under their desks any time there is a fire alarm or attack, thanks to the Cold War. Rather than thinking rationally, bravely, or pragmatically, they think "hide under the desk". Which 'hide the Saturn V blueprints' is merely an extension of. And they're now reaching an age where they're being handed the reigns of the federal government.
If you're GenMe or GenY, you may get your country back when you're approximately 65 or 70 as the Baby Boomers die off. If you're a Baby Boomer yourself, sorry dude, you're probably stuck with the cowards through to the end.
(Also, if you're GenMe, I recommend getting over any delusions of 'social security' being viable when you retire, and start coming up with some alternative retirement plans... Baby Boomers are going to bankrupt the social security system and mortgage their kids futures without a second thought if it means an extra 5 or 10 years of living in retirement homes... Can't say that I wouldn't do what they're going to do if I were in their situation. Just being the realist and pointing out the cliff that we're driving towards...)
The neocons themselves invented it. Irving Kristol, cofounder of Encounter and its editor from 1953 to 1958, Norman Podhoretz, and others described themselves as "neoconservatives" during the Cold War.
This space available.
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
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.
Actually the Saturn V did have computers on board - the Instrument Unit (IBM) and the DSK(?) computers in both the CM and LM (Honeywell?). Of course any $40 programmable calculator available today would run circles around them, so it's not technology worth protecting.
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.
Yes, it looks the same - but the capability leap is staggering. It *looks* like the Apollo SM/CM for the same reason most bridges look the same - a good engineering solution is a good engineering solution. The CEV is being designed to carry 6 crew to ISS and 4 to lunar orbit (accomodating the increase is habitable volume necessary for this is why the diameter of the vehicle increased from Apollo's 3.9m to well over 5 meters). Much more importantly, the CEV is being designed to support much greater operations (read: science) at the moon. Apollo missions durations were limited by their fuel cells and could only target lunar equatorial landing sites [although it appears the lunar poles is where th intersting science opportunities are] and had narrow launch windows (driven largely by abort return geometries). To support long duration spaceflight CEV is designed to remain dormant at ISS or in polar lunar orbit (in support of a permanent lunar outpost) for up to 6 months at a time. The staggering delta V requirements for just getting into and out of lunar polar orbit (with an anytime abort capability) really put CEV in another class of vehicle than the Apollo CM/SM. Don't assume it is "apollo reduc" just because it looks similar and you don't understand the implications of the differences in requirements.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
"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