NASA Contractors Censoring Saturn V Info 583
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."
Protecting their IP? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tells you something about R&D if that 'edge' is 40+ years old...
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Re:Protecting their IP? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Protecting their IP? (Score:5, Informative)
Tells you something about R&D if that 'edge' is 40+ years old...
Just got an e-mail from Scott Lowther saying that he's established that there's no ITAR issue and it's just some idiot being unnecessarily officious.
Panic over, everyone!
Re:private sector (Score:5, Funny)
The two nations that have put people on the moon
You are of course referring to the United States and America?
Re:private sector (Score:5, Funny)
Re:private sector (Score:5, Informative)
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Just check the Wikipedia article on moon landings. [wikipedia.org] The early ones were "hard landings", but later they landed several unmanned probes successfully, and even brought samples back.
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"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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:private sector (Score:5, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_on_the_Moo
http://www.amazon.com/Mouse-Moon-Margaret-Rutherf
Sad, sad, indeed.
Re:private sector (Score:5, Funny)
I can't find a link at the moment but I'm sure one is out there somewhere.
Re:private sector (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:private sector (Score:5, Funny)
Re:private sector (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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WTF??? How do you take down? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] ?
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-secreti
Re:WTF??? How do you take down? (Score:5, Funny)
They sure were fast on that one!
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Re:WTF??? How do you take down? (Score:5, Funny)
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...
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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 outl
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Re:WTF??? How do you take down? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:WTF??? How do you take down? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:WTF??? How do you take down? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I first heard the term in isbn 1400042216 [amazon.com]. Probably comes from Chomsky or something. It's really a fitting term though, when you consider what republics used to stand for compared to what they stand for now...
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Yeah, but how about this: "terrorists could use Saturn V to deliver nuclear warheads to the mooon!". Ok, well, maybe its not that either.
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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 nu
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http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/10/08/korea [cnn.com]. nuclear.test/index.html
And I'm not surprised you missed the point...
You grossly misunderestimate (hehe) our enemies. The Theocracy in charge of Iran is first a religious organization, and second a government. Perhaps you have been lucky enough to never meet anyone religious enough to actually want the apocolypse to happen. I have, and don't put the same trust in their ability to think rationally anymore. Moreover,
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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
Re:WTF??? How do you take down? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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No, actually I said that I doubt it would do any good at all. I doubt you could put much useful on a piece of paper that size. Hopefully, along with the posters, they classified the pieces of information that would be useful. Don't be fooled into thinking that just because its
or maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
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 sp
Re:WTF??? How do you take down? (Score:4, Funny)
Naw, he'd just burn the place down.
Re:WTF??? How do you take down? (Score:5, Insightful)
What happened to my country, and will you cowards please give it back?
Re:WTF??? How do you take down? (Score:4, Informative)
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...)
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Nor could we destroy one of their cities in just a few minutes... well, not unless we were able to fly some heavy bombers over and level it with conventional weapons. In any case, we had many enemies, and most of them were just as big and powerful as we were. Iran may not be weak, but they've got nothing on the full military might of the U.S. Ditto that for Korea, Syria,
Re:WTF??? How do you take down? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
We WANT them to build ICBMs (Score:3, Interesting)
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Maybe, maybe not. If she does anything worth bashing, then no doubt we will see the stories. All politicians aren't created equal: some are shittier than others, and Bush is one of the bad ones. I think you mistake "bias in favor of common sense" for "liberal bias"; anyone who consistently does stupid shit wit
This is why we're still in the Space Stone Age (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is why we're still in the Space Stone Age (Score:5, Interesting)
That doesn't stop me worshipping it
Re:This is why we're still in the Space Stone Age (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is why we're still in the Space Stone Age (Score:5, Interesting)
The more I read the ALSJ [nasa.gov] 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.
No argument from me on that front.
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Can you give me something at least a little challenging? A canal that runs uphill, a viaduct that can span a couple of cities in an earthquake zone with a 100+ year warranty, a Michelangelo-style work on the inside of a glacier - you know, something hard. Something that might be a bit more challenging than merely keepi
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It's only a matter of a great deal of luck and extremely hard work by both the astronauts and the folks on the ground that the Apollo 13 accident didn't kill the crew.
We need more of this attitude, not less! (Score:4, Interesting)
>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.
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The founding fathers attempted to work within the existing legal frameworks before declaring independence. "No taxation without representation" was simply a request to vote on issues that affected them. Without a nonviolent mechanism to resolve differences the founding fathers were forced into violence. Today, on the other hand, there are numerous world wide, regional, local, you name it, organizations that can be worked within to resolve pro
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But the Saturn V was an expensive dead end. Ground support costs alone make it impossible to turn it into a commercial prospect. All US manufactured launch vehicles are presumably controlled by ITAR in any event. I am sure Richard Branson is going to have a fine time exporting the tier 2 system to the other countries he wants to launch from.
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Re:This is why we're still in the Space Stone Age (Score:5, Informative)
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.
You sure know a lot about this stuff... (Score:3, Funny)
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> 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 [braeunig.us]
Re:This is why we're still in the Space Stone Age (Score:5, Funny)
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So why mention it? (Score:3, Insightful)
So why bother mentioning it unless you're trying to establish some sort of political agenda of your own?
What difference does it make? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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and turn into ordinary hypocrites?
Not sure a Bush supporter has any business calling anyone else a hypocrite. That goes way beyond the pot calling the kettle black.
You support corrupt, incompetent people and make excuses for their behavior.
Re:So why mention it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Given today's vitriolic political climate, unfunny attempts at humor look more like editorializing. Such editorializing on
Ballistis Missiles (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ballistic Missiles (Score:2, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
Nah... (Score:5, Funny)
It's so they can hide the mini-bar [slashdot.org] from the kids...
Of course (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
No worries (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Why just the Saturn V? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why just the Saturn V? (Score:5, Insightful)
It does work after a fashion. Instead of working tireless only that grand bang that will make loads of smoke and noise, kids sit bored staring into the blue screen until they go completely brainnumb. The process produces easily controlled model taxpaying consumer-producers which is what the government wants. Bingo, goal achieved.
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I expect in the Internet Age, it would be not unlike pouring the feathers out of a pillow during a hurricane.
kdawson, stop (Score:5, Insightful)
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But it takes kdawson a few seconds to deliberately choose THAT summary out of the hundreds that will get discarded today, including no doubt a dozen that refer to this exact article. The "Rove" comment is completely gratuitous, and you know it. It's an interesting topic, and raises questions about how wisely security people in a government agency
Armed guards (Score:3, Funny)
What a pity no mention was made of what he was wearing, otherwise we would be on to his jackboots by now.
Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Seems like closing the barndoor after the chickens have already flown the coop though.
Re:Ridiculous (Score:4, Funny)
Proof again that those that can't remember history are doomed to repeat it. Have you forgotten that Skylab was used to attack Austrailia? [wikipedia.org]
Oh, geeee... (Score:5, Funny)
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
Hiding information never works. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about this (Score:5, Interesting)
does this mean ... (Score:3, Funny)
Saturn V Flight Manual still on NASA site (Score:5, Informative)
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.
Idea: Nuttier than a fruitcake. (Score:5, Interesting)
True, and not well understood (Score:3, Interesting)
You Didn't See Anything..... (Score:5, Funny)
Stupid guards (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Stupid guards (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
protect against copycats? (Score:3, Informative)
Update: Website not an issue (Score:3, Informative)
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.space.history/
Blueprints? You mean line drawings.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Pogo issue? (Score:4, Insightful)
Aha, found a link [wikipedia.org].
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.
Re:Why do I get the feeling... (Score:5, Informative)
Besides, the blueprints [space.com] 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.
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