posted 07-28-2007 10:31 AM               

However, just before we left KSC, a guy from the NASA Export Control Office (which is run by some contractor, maybe Analex?) came by our office on an "inspection" and told us we had to take down all the Saturn V drawings we had around ... now, these were just old NAA public relation drawings, plus a few commercially-purchased posters showing the Saturn V internals in very rough detail. He said they were all covered by ITAR and therefore had to be locked up! We kept telling him some were purchased at the Visitor Center Gift Shop, but he did not care. He ended up coming around with an armed security cop until we took them down and shredded them.

posted 07-28-2007 10:46 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by SpaceAholic:
It always has been under Category IV of the U.S. Munitions List...

---

NASA Procedural Requirements (NPR) 2190.1, Chapter 5, International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) Procedures, Section 5.3 License Exemptions, provides the following:

22 CFR §125.4(b)(13): Publicly Available Information About Defense Articles. Exports of publicly available information about defense articles. This Exemption is applicable to information approved by NASA for public release in any form, usually through the procedures of NPR 2200, "Guidelines for Documentation, Approval, and Dissemination of NASA Scientific and Technical Information." It does not require that the information be published in order to qualify for the Exemption.

posted 07-29-2007 04:51 AM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by dtemple:
Original NAA drawings had to be destroyed. I feel safer now because the terrorists will not be able to build a Saturn V and launch it at us!

---

posted 07-29-2007 08:50 AM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by gliderpilotuk:
I have held off destroying my 1/72 Airfix Saturn V until we get clarity on this.

---

posted 07-30-2007 08:49 AM               

• the person who originally made this claim (look at his website) is a little hot-headed (in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he put up a website with a picture of himself holding up his middle finger to the terrorists) and prone to angry rants. His claim may be accurate, but it's worth considering the source.

• ITAR is just blurry enough that overly bureaucratic types can easily fly off the handle. They can interpret everything as ITAR-controlled. A few months ago I obtained some reports from JPL on the never-built follow-on to the Surveyor lunar lander. Significant portions, including illustrations of the vehicle inside the launch shroud, were denied due to ITAR. I cannot figure out how drawings of a hypothetical spacecraft that was never built can be ITAR-controlled when the actual vehicle, as well as significant documentation on it, has long resided in museums.

• if the people actually responsible for ITAR are confused about it, this is nothing compared to the rocket-inclined public. I just read some comments that blame this on the Clinton administration, which is a bit of a distortion of what happened. In short, the rules used to be less strict. But in 1998 some Republicans in Congress decided that China had benefited from US rocket technology and they passed some stricter regulations regarding ITAR (you can Google "Cox Report" for details, although I note that the Wikipedia entry leaves out a lot of criticism of the report, including the fact that it was incredibly sloppy about its facts). Ever since the 1998 report, ITAR has been interpreted much more narrowly, but the current administration has tended to be even tougher on the issue. So although this stuff tightened up during the last administration, it has essentially been a Republican issue all along.

• from what I've heard, reading the regulations closely doesn't help clarify things all that much, because they don't simply control documents and technology, but knowledge of how to do things, so Saturn rocket technology can easily fall under the ITAR restrictions.

• ITAR is a problem for little guys, but merely an irritant for bigger players like large aerospace corporations. Companies need to hire skilled lawyers to figure this stuff out, and big companies can easily afford expensive lawyers, whereas small companies cannot.

• there have been many unintended consequences of ITAR, including apparently contributing to the independence of some other countries' rocket capabilities. The Indians, in particular, have stated that they would have been happy to buy some American technology, but ITAR forced them to develop it on their own, which they did -- and it is now not controlled by ITAR. So ITAR may have slowed down technology proliferation, but it might have also ultimately undercut the goals of the controls as well.

posted 07-30-2007 10:14 AM               

Just got off the phone with the GD export control compliance guy... there *IS* *NOT* a problem with the stuff on my webpage. As to the tale of Saturn V posters getting shredded... that's not GD's doing, nor their current policy.

The Sat V poster shredding may have been an isolated incident.