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

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

[QuantumG]

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.

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

[Mutatis Mutandis]

It's a damn shame that a nice launch vehicle also happens to make a nice ICBM...

Saturn V would be a ridiculously poor choice to use as basis of an ICBM. It stood 110 m tall, weighed over 3,000 tons fueled, and used liquid hydrogen and oxygen as fuels.

A good ICBM needs to be compact, so that is easily hidden, and above all it must be storable in a ready-to-fire form. That meant using storable liquid fuels instead of condenses gases for first generation missiles, and solid fuels in the later designs. To give an idea, Minuteman III is a mere 18 m long, weighs 32 tons at launch mass, and uses solid fuels. Even the big Soviet R-36 aka SS-18 Satan did not exceed 210 tons, and while it used liquid fuels, it used liquid fuels that could be stored at room temperature.

Rationally, Saturn V never had a military application, and certainly today its technology is no longer of any military value.

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

[tgd]

I'm not sure the Saturn V would make a nice ICBM. Unless you're launching a payload of nukes, 40 nuclear engineers and a Grayhound Bus carrying them all, it may be a bit overkill.

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.

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

[Pad-Lok]

"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!

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

[jamstar7]

How do you re-secretize something that is in Public Domain???

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...

Of course

[iamdrscience]

No word yet if the assignment of a Karl Rove protege high up in NASA has any connection.

Ah-ha! How could I be so foolish thinking that this could just be the case of one security guard being an idiot? Surely this is all part of Karl Rove's plan! He needs to get rid of the Saturn V rocket plans in order to keep our enemies from attacking the top secret laser-equipped moon bases he's built to control the earth with. It's all so simple!

Re:Of course

[bxwatso]

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.

kdawson, stop

[Winckle]

Seriously, this is not your political blog, I'm no right winger, but even I'm getting sick of it.

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.

Re:private sector

[phozz bare]

The two nations that have put people on the moon

You are of course referring to the United States and America?

Saturn V Flight Manual still on NASA site

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad they forgot to take down the Saturn V Flight Manual from their own site, huh?

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.g ov/19750063889_1975063889.pdf

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:Protecting their IP?

[Opportunist]

Gah, when you let government work on decryption... The message was that we plan to moon the terrorists.

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

[jon_anderson_ca]

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?????

Re:private sector

[Oktober Sunset]

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.

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

[crawling_chaos]

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. And making it harder for America's enemies (such as Iran and North Korea) to build their own ICBMs is a good goal.

And so it goes. Once a great nation was told "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." Now a small one is sold the message of "be afraid, be very afraid, and let the good God-fearing leaders take care of you sheep."

What happened to my country, and will you cowards please give it back?

Re:private sector

[Hijacked Public]

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.

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

[tbannist]

'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.

Re:private sector

[mikeabbott420]

He aimed for the moon but hit London. (old,old joke)