Charlie Bolden's Gutted Version of NTRS is Back Online
Keith’s note: Have a look at the Aerospace Research Information Center in South Korea. Do a few searches and you will see all sorts of NTRS material is hosted there. This makes things much easier for the folks in North Korea to access, one would assume. It has been there while NTRS was offline.
Meanwhile NTRS is apparently back online – for now. According to NASA sources, based on an analysis of the NTRS collection before it was taken offline and now brought back online, it is apparent that over a quarter of a million full-text NASA reports are no longer in NTRS. This missing set of data represents a full 85% of the NASA full-text reports. In addition, only 7% of the historical (but still technically relevant) NACA collection remains online (only about 1,000 of the roughly 14,000 that comprise the NACA collection).
Of course, NASA’s response to all of this is to gut the staff of CASI, the contractor responsible for maintaining NTRS. Can NASA review and reload the missing quarter million reports? Will NASA be able to add new reports into the NTRS (and NA&SD) collections?
Having used NTRS for our Lunar Orbiter work at LOIRP I just did a quick check to see if some of the 45 year old documents I have downloaded from NTRS are still online. Guess what: these documents are no longer online. You can buy hard copies on eBay (as I have done) I wonder what sort of security risk these documents pose such that Charlie Bolden has taken them offline?
– Atlas and Gazetteer of the Near Side of the Moon, NASA SP-241
– Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon, NASA SP-206
– The Moon as Viewed by Lunar Orbiter, SP-200
– Guide to Lunar Orbiter Photographs, SP-242
NASA Technical Reports Server Mysteriously Taken Offline, earlier post
There are Chinese university websites that have all of the NTRS documents as well. This horse has left the barn long ago. Hell even the Canadians have a copy!
And you know how we are with _that_ sort of information! 🙂 🙂
A comment posted on NASA Watch last week spells out the situation with the CASI (NASA Center for Aerospace Information) fairly well. (See below) Without their efforts to get some NASA reports (re-)reviewed, the NTRS could not have come back online with at least some good content.
The broader issue with NASA laying off the CASI technical staff is why NASA would choose to gut the production capability of its core operation at a time when they need it most? With regard to ‘sequestration cuts’, NASA did have choices— So what is going on here?
Work on the street is that there are some rather ugly politics being played-out,— and that sequestration is being used as an excuse for dismantling the CASI operation (currently located in Hanover, Maryland) and then reestablishing the entire operation in Langley, Virginia. (All that expertise and knowledge going down the drain.)
Talk at the Langley Research Center is that a “smokescreen” argument has been prepared just in case Senator Barbara Mikulski comes knocking at the door.
At any rate, the whole affair stinks to high heaven. Perhaps it’s time that the HQ Inspector General’s Office steps in. I wouldn’t suggest that there is anything illegal going on, but it certainly may be a case of some fairly unethical decisions being made based on ‘local LaRC politics’, and fueled largely by some good old fashion abuse of power.
[[Below are some earlier comments from NASA Watch — May 2 ]]
“…Word is that the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) is coming back after having a huge set of tens of thousands of reports reviewed. The staff at the contractor-run Center for Aerospace Information (CASI) are to be commended for this accomplishment. — But here is the punch line– Just days after completing this task, NASA directed the contractor to lay them all off. For those who don’t know, CASI is the operational heart of the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Program (STI). These folks have longer careers with NASA than most civil servants.___Without the experience and knowledge base of CASI, there is no STI program. So the big question is what is NASA going to do now–there are still hundreds of thousands of reports to be reviewed! As my father used to say– stupidity reigns!…”
To me the CASI Technical staff are my heros. We would simply not have been able to do the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), without that painstakingly researched and archived information. I know you don’t get thanked often but please let me heft a glass in your direction!
Send the bill to Frank Wolf, who falsely caused all of this to happen.
One might wonder why the aerospace companies (large, small, and NewSpace) are not complaining loudly about the loss of history and data in this system and others. It would be interesting to know how much they really used it. I suspect the primary users were academia and hobbiests. I have seldomly seen industry access the past unless the contract directly required such. It is much more profitable to redo than to use the old. I suspect that there are answers to many of our current development, engineering, and operations challenges buried in the records. An example of this is the rebirth of the F1 engine components. If we only knew how to do more like that.
I can guarantee you, based on my searches for information, that this information does have its uses for those smart enough to dig in there. You are right though about the ignoring of this information by the big boys.
I me some young engineers that used NTRS thoroughly in relation to their work (day job, not hobby) and not happy when it was shutdown. Chinese downloaded all the documents from NTRS before it was shutdown. I suspect many individual engineers in big aerospace used NTRS as well but we only hear of big things (AWST level) from these companies. I say far more than academia and hobbiests used NTRS.
Gotta say I use it pretty regularly in my work. Have found a few good reports that saved me a bunch of money and time, too!
Whether there were a few restricted reports in teh mix, the vast majority of the reports are pretty old and, as someone said above, anyone that wanted a full set really has had an incredilbly long time to get their hands on them. If any “power” wanted them, they had them long, long ago.
The horses are not only long out of the barn door, but the barn burned down long ago.