Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

NASA’s Technical Report Server

9 Comments

Has Frank Wolf shut it down?

As the emailer who sent me the link notes, “I understand the need for an ITAR review, however, what we have so far is a blanket ban, with no prescription in place for when and how this issue will be resolved. In the meantime NASA’s vast archive of technical information, so vital to the commercial and private sector has vanished in a single day.”

So where in the days of sequester is NASA going to find the funds to review the data and get it back on line? Just more ITAR madness that has cost the US space industry billions over the past decade and a half.

[Thursday morning update]

More over at NASA Watch.

[Bumped]

9 thoughts on “NASA’s Technical Report Server”

  1. Even more insane since this is closing the barn door after the horse has left (assuming there was a horse to begin with, and not simply cows and sheep).

    Does anyone, even Wolf, think that China hasn’t already copied anything of value on that server?

  2. So as of right now, since somewhere between 99.99% and 100% of the data on NTRS was all properly disclosed, it would seem that in order to satisfy Wolf, NASA is now in violation of its authorizing legislation

    Sec. 20131. Public access to information

    (a) Public Inspection.–Information obtained or developed by the Administrator in the performance of the Administrator’s functions under this chapter shall be made available for public inspection, except information—

    (1) authorized or required by Federal statute to be withheld;

    (2) classified to protect the national security; or

    (3) described in subsection (b).

    (which is proprietary information)

  3. Hmm NASA has a bunch of Chinese spies working for it? I thought people said China was neither a threat nor competing with us?

    China already has all of the open source intel it wants and also a lot of classified and proprietary information as well gained from hacking our government and businesses.

    What this story shows, is the need for NASA to get its act together. If they are going to wear the chip on their shoulders about being the best and brightest, it is high time they acted like it.

  4. I would say that unlike contractors, who have good guidelines in place to be sure that real technical data under ITAR is not disclosed, the civil servants I ran across didn’t care to follow the guidelines and hassled contractors that marked data as being ITAR sensitive.

    Whether the current ITAR rules are sensible are a matter to take up with Congress. Contractors and the civil servants are supposed to follow the law.

  5. I guess the lobbyists at Lockmart finally caught on to the fact that startups are using these papers on a regular basis to make informed design decisions. Can’t have the mammals getting uppity!

    1. Assuming there is a political component to this, is it significant that Jiang worked for the National Institute of Aerospace? Alan Wilhite, who’s been pushing propellant depots (see his recent FISO presentation), is on the faculty there. Wolf seems to be a big supporter of anything coming from old-line aerospace contractors, and I’ll bet he doesn’t like people pointing out that the SLS emperor has no clothes.

  7. Even more insane since this is closing the barn door after the horse has left (assuming there was a horse to begin with, and not simply cows and sheep).

    My thought was that the cowboys’ remaining horses are locked in the barn, which prevents them working.

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