Wolf and Bolden's Vandalism at NTRS Continues
Keith’s note: The gutting of the NTRS continues. This report used to be on NTRS: “Distribution of pressure over model of the upper wing and aileron of a Fokker D-VII airplane, Fairbanks”, A J, NACA, 1927: “This report describes tests made for the purpose of determining the distribution of pressure over a model of the tapered portion of the upper wing and the aileron of a Fokker D-VII Airplane. Normal pressures were measured simultaneously at 74 points distributed over the wing and aileron.”
Thanks to Google, there is a cached version of its previous existence on NTRS. (larger screengrab). But when you click on the PDF link you get an error “This PDF file is no longer available from NTRS.” This document is freely available here at the University of North Texas Digital Library, here at Cranfield University in the UK, here at the University of Delft, Netherlands, etc.
What purpose could possibly be served by Charlie Bolden and Frank Wolf in keeping this 86 year old document about World War I biplanes off of NTRS? It is utterly harmless (unless your air force still flies Fokker D-VII aircraft – or is threatened by them) and it is readily available (as is all NTRS stuff) around the world. This gutting of NTRS is tantamount to vandalism – and these actions are fueled by partisan paranoia on Wolf’s part and lack of a backbone on Charlie Bolden’s part. Moreover, these actions are in direct contradiction of what the agency is chartered to do:
The National Aeronautics and Space Act Pub. L. No. 111-314 124 Stat. 3328 (Dec. 18, 2010)
“Sec. 20112. Functions of the Administration (a) Planning, Directing, and Conducting Aeronautical and Space Activities.–The Administration, in order to carry out the purpose of this chapter, shall– … (3) provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof;”
– Charlie Bolden is Erasing NASA’s History, earlier post
– Charlie Bolden’s Gutted Version of NTRS is Back Online, earlier post
Maybe the NTRS debacle is an extension of the curtailment of EPO activities and functions? NASA management seems to have hit a new low.
I would be really curious to know what the U.S. web traffic to NTRS was before it went down and compare it to international traffic to the site. I’m a U.S. citizen and I used this site a lot to develop computation fluid dynamics (CFD) programs. And, unfortunately, I don’t have a government contract which would allow me access to NA&SD. It’s almost as if STEM is all wonderful, except when it gets too close to anything new and innovative. Then it becomes scary stuff. Of course so much of this technical data isn’t even new. Somehow I just can’t shake the thought of Ayn Rand’s novel “Anthem”
I hope you have your copy of the entertaining JSC Biconic CRV. I doubt if it is available now. Thanks for the liquid rocket engine pdf. First thing I see is something I was wondering about. 396lbs. per sec of fuel for a 100,000lb. thrust engine. Is there enough fuel in F9 to back down from space? I wonder if they could come in nose first and zoom upwards to zero speed and then start the engine.
What concerns me is that the NTRS database is a large, complex setup, and in “reviewing” it, one error in procedure, or even a technical problem, has the potential of “losing” whole large sections of it. Even if all of the the actual data items are intact, any corruption or loss of the indexing files might effectively make parts of the document list “disappear,” and no longer be accessible. If a file is no longer in your.Browse or Search indexes how would you know it is missing?
I have no information to suggest anything like this has happened, and I’m making some assumptions about the database management, but given the knee-jerk reactions to this all around, I worry that NTRS may have become damaged since, in theory, they should have been able to bring the whole thing back on line in just a few minutes with very little effort.
And I have to wonder why we haven’t had an updated official announcement of what’s actually happening or planned to be happening. Is it because the public doesn’t matter to them or because they don’t know themselves? I sure wish Frank Wolf had been born in China, and stayed there.
Keith,
The problem of NTRS and other NASA reports servers, including the library servers losing documents has been going on for years. It is not entirely clear why, but for NTRS it probably stems from the misguided effort in recent years to charge money to download selected items from tangentially connected websites. Nobody buys the documents so the purchase websites run by contractors go away, it seems, and the documents with them.
For example, in January or February of 2006 when I was working on the Northrop Grumman-Boeing CEV proposal, I looked up the Skylab Experience Bulletins on NTRS and they were all there (about 22 volumes, as I recall). In 2010, a friend asked where she could find them, but by then, they were all missing from NTRS. I asked a librarian at Ames, but he could find only about half of the SEBs on one of the older library servers.
Fortunately, when I retired from NASA in 2005, I sent a great many original documents to the Federal Records Center in San Bruno, pending transfer to the National Archives after 25 years. It included a complete set of the SEBs. I arranged to have that FRS box sent to the library, where I brought a new scanner (double-sided feeder) and spent many happy hours scanning the complete set. They are now posted, safely, on the AIAA Space Architecture Technical Committee site at http://www.spacearchitect.org (Click on Publications, then Click on Bibliography). You are right to ask why 40 year old reports from the Apollo Program that have been in the public domain all this time should be pulled from public availability. Luckily, we could save this historic set and make it available on our site
The fact is that NASA management has been culling the corporate memory for well over a decade. They call it being nimble, flexible, or cost-effective, or some such jargon. It was not just the reckless throwing of books into dumpsters and closing of libraries at some centers. NASA management’s strategy was to transfer all the holdings to digital form and then save the floor area and expense of maintaining libraries. However, that strategy could work only if NASA actually digitized all the documents and then retained them securely. Neither necessity occurred. The situation is even worse with the digital scanning of photographic negatives. I understand that at Ames, they scanned only about 2% of the original negatives before pulling the plug on that effort. It was more “cost-effective” to just not do it at all, it seems.
I guess it falls to NASA personnel and retirees to preserve NASA’s rich legacy and corporate memory, because there does not seem to be any interest on the “9th Floor.”
While the NTRS is a recent and good example of the difficulties NASA has in making data available for research and education purposes (why some like Bolden feel it would be better to place organizations like the Department of Education in charge), the spacearchitect website is another poor example that is really not very helpful. Maybe if you have worked on setting it up the website’s organization makes sense, but to the uninitiated you can spend a long time there-hours- and never find anything you are looking for, like the Skylab experience bulletins. Most of the website appears to be set up according to organizational lines-a problem common to NASA’s information resources. The inability to find needed information is exactly what frustrates teachers and professors who are teaching space subjects; this is a significant problem.
The current NASA managers think that it is all about what is happening in space today; this is not the case. while it would be good to have available information resources on how the current ECLS or electrical or other systems function, it is every bit as important to understand how these systems evolved and were developed.
For the managers and designers who are in charge today and have been for many years, they will tell you they have no interest in the past because they are going to do things differently and better.
This current crop of managers have now been in charge for about 10-15 years.They have not succeeded in doing anything differently or better. They really have not succeeded in doing very much at all other than waste a lot of money and time. This is why the overall program is in the poor shape it is in. It is probably too late now to recover what they have succeeded in losing.
Much of the corporate memory and experience is long gone. Much of it has died. When you take managers, like the ones in charge today in manned space, who have never designed or developed anything, and they feel they have no need for the past, then they are destined to have to reinvent the wheel. This is a waste of billions of dollars and half a century of hard won experience.
Perhaps because the memory of those on the 9th floor rarely extends back before whatever administration is currently in power. Any excuse for this having to do with anything other than incompetence (e.g. national security) is inane as China has a complete copy of the archives as well as most everything else NASA tried to hold securely other than, maybe, flight code well defended on UNIX boxes or Modcomp boxes. Perhaps one day China might offer to sell it back to us for a fraction of what it cost us to create in the first place.
“What purpose could possibly be served by Charlie Bolden and Frank Wolf in keeping this 86 year old document about World War I biplanes off of NTRS? “
Not loading up NASA servers with needless or outdated data which, as you pointed out, is stored at numerous other locations a mere Google-fu away?
Somehow I doubt a few thousand PDFs are going to “load up” NASA servers. Do you sincerely think these historical documents are a burden to NASA’s computing capabilities and network infrastructure?
“ needless or outdated data“
To you maybe, but not to many thousands of the rest of us.
Having bits and piecs spread out over many organizations and servers/sites that NASA doesn’t link to is of no use and is no way to control the content or its access. NTRS is supposed to be the master database and the one place from which it is controlled.
The reason that historical archives are maintained is for (gasp) historians. I went shopping last night or a backup drive for my home systems. A two TERABYTE drive was less than 100$. The primary cost of maintaining a digital archive (I spent 10 years doing digital archives research for the Library of Congress before coming to NASA) is digitizing the material in the first place not in storing it.
I gather you may not be a scientist, researcher, or possibly an engineer. A paper/report, in general, will build on past knowledge and that past knowledge
is referenced. Frequently it is necessary to obtain those past reports
to fully understand the current paper if one’s background does not cover the knowledge well. Yes, some papers are hosted in many locations. But some are not.
So Keith, should we expect a separate Shock Horror post for each of the thousands of reports that are not yet back on NTRS? After claims of “erasing history” and “gutting”, and now this cry of “vandalism”, will your next post accuse Bolden of treason? Petty larceny? Failure to use turn signals?
Absolutely. You might not want to read NASA Watch for a while.
SHOCK HORROR ERASING GUTTING VANDALISM
I have used the NTRS on occasion but what has surprised me the last several weeks has been the number of calls I have gotten from external independent researchers, to whom I have contributed and had a somewhat tangental relationship with, who have called to say the NTRS situation has interrupted their work in significant fashion. For many people this is their source of information.
The sickening thing about copyright on these government works is that if someone acquired a copy then figured out how to get NASA to destroy theirs, they can then charge a fee and potentially royalties for a copy in a different format. Congress needs to close that loophole on public domain works, so that if in fact you have created a substantial copy of a work you cannot claim copyright on that just because it’s encoded differently. Sure I get one time fee, but nobody should have the right to actually control or own public domain works.
It is the typical “we are doing something important” knee jerk overreaction. This is government censorship of historical documents that have been scrutinized with a fine tooth comb in an era when there was more paranoia. Paper copies of these documents exist in libraries around the world. The genie was out of the bottle long ago. I am surprised that historians are not up in arms about this.