-
List of selected NTRS documents from 1980 or before
by
Proponent
on 11 Jun, 2018 20:16
-
Attached is a very long list of NASA technical reports, which I found on line. They're described as restricted-access in one way or another, though some of them actually are available on NTRS (perhaps they've been added since the list was prepared).
Anyway, the point is that there are some things here that look really interesting. For example, did you know that there was a study of a Jupiter-Agena (DocID 20150013799)? In that miles-long
what-if thread about the Saturns flying well into the 1970's or beyond, it would have been very interesting to see the reports on the H-1 engine uprating study (e.g., DocID 19640050617).
Would anyone know how to convert this to a more manipulable form? I'm thinking spreadsheet, plain text, or standard document-editor-friendly format.
EDIT: Typo
-
#1
by
brickmack
on 11 Jun, 2018 21:12
-
Wow, thats a very long list. ~300k entries...
I've attached a preliminary attempt. I just copied and pasted from the pdf into notepad (it took almost 3 minutes for it to fully do so). I did some initial cleanup by hand (cut out the introduction memos and some of the page numbering, and fixed some broken lines), but it looks like its going to take way to long to fully do that by hand. I'll try and make a script to finish the formatting work and then convert it to an excel file.
Archive.org (both the website archival, which has a lot of old NTRS documents, and user-submitted files) and google (use quotation marks for exact terms, great for finding documents if you know the exact title or an id and they've been posted elsewhere) may be helpful for tracking down those not currently on NTRS
-
#2
by
edkyle99
on 11 Jun, 2018 21:46
-
Jupiter-Agena was originally proposed by von Braun's U.S. Army team to serve as an ICBM surrogate (and Jupiter itself as an IRBM target) for Nike-Zeus ABM missiles. After that idea was dropped in favor of using Atlas missiles for targets, Jupiter-Agena appears to have became untenable for any other proposed use.
https://www.army.mil/article/201318/smdc_history_nike_zeus_abma_and_dr_von_braun - Ed Kyle
-
#3
by
brickmack
on 11 Jun, 2018 22:18
-
Alright, done. This is supposed to be a CSV file, but NSF doesn't let you upload CSVs for some reason, so its a txt file. Just change the extension and Excel or LibreOffice Calc should be able to open it (its huge though, might take a while). If it doesn't work, you can still open it in notepad anyway, since CSVs are just comma-delimited plaintext
-
#4
by
Proponent
on 12 Jun, 2018 02:10
-
Thanks very much, Brickmack!
I have corrected a couple of glitches, where two-line titles seem to have confused things, and have saved the results as a spreadsheet. Now it's easier to search (and, to my surprise, smaller).
-
#5
by
Hobbes-22
on 12 Jun, 2018 12:47
-
For those who weren't around the last time the NTRS was closed down: don't use this list to set up an automated download of large amounts of NTRS material.
-
#6
by
indy91
on 12 Jun, 2018 13:16
-
For those who weren't around the last time the NTRS was closed down: don't use this list to set up an automated download of large amounts of NTRS material.
Most aren't available on the current public access NTRS anyway. Lot's of them were accessible up to 2013, but still haven't returned.
-
#7
by
Proponent
on 12 Jun, 2018 13:49
-
I've fixed a few more glitches (quotation marks in titles sometimes caused problems). Please let me know if you find any more processing errors (as distinct from data errors, e.g., the second report on the list, prepared by Motorola on the topic of semiconductors in the Pershing missile, obviously was not published in 1907!).
Some of these things could not possibly be sensitive, e.g., the first one, "Motion of Suspended Particles in Static Fluids as Required by Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat." As it dates from 1905, I wonder whether this might be the famous paper by Einstein that explained Brownian motion.
-
#8
by
Archibald
on 12 Jun, 2018 16:50
-
For those who weren't around the last time the NTRS was closed down: don't use this list to set up an automated download of large amounts of NTRS material.
Most aren't available on the current public access NTRS anyway. Lot's of them were accessible up to 2013, but still haven't returned.
Stupid paranoid Frank Wolf, and stupid failed chinese spy that only loved porn. And extremely stupid story overall. And when I use the word "stupid" I'm really bitting my tongue not to use *rude* words...
-
#9
by
WallE
on 12 Jun, 2018 20:38
-
That postflight report of Atlas Centaur 5 would be very very nice to have. There's at least ten other Atlas-Centaur flight reports online, but of course they don't have the one you actually want to read.
-
#10
by
thammond
on 13 Jun, 2018 14:58
-
For those who weren't around the last time the NTRS was closed down: don't use this list to set up an automated download of large amounts of NTRS material.
Most aren't available on the current public access NTRS anyway. Lot's of them were accessible up to 2013, but still haven't returned.
Stupid paranoid Frank Wolf, and stupid failed chinese spy that only loved porn. And extremely stupid story overall. And when I use the word "stupid" I'm really bitting my tongue not to use *rude* words...
Agreed...So is anyone aware of any web sites lists put together to look/search for any of the documents no longer available on NTRS? Or is Google the best option (which I have found not to be very successful)?
-
#11
by
brickmack
on 13 Jun, 2018 17:40
-
Agreed...So is anyone aware of any web sites lists put together to look/search for any of the documents no longer available on NTRS? Or is Google the best option (which I have found not to be very successful)?
Archive.org has a lot of them
-
#12
by
Jim
on 13 Jun, 2018 19:18
-
I just download them. ;-)
Too bad I can't share them
-
#13
by
RIB
on 16 Jun, 2018 10:15
-
If I'm looking for a specific document, what's the best search term to put into archive.org?
-
#14
by
edkyle99
on 16 Jun, 2018 14:20
-
I just download them. ;-)
Too bad I can't share them
Maddening is the almost-certain fact that those who they are trying to keep these from have already had them for many years. (I'm not talking about Jim, of course.)
- Ed Kyle
-
#15
by
leovinus
on 16 Jun, 2018 14:45
-
If I'm looking for a specific document, what's the best search term to put into archive.org?
On archive.org, I had some success with URLs like
ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/<docid>.pdf
e.g.
ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19670015716.pdf
On Google, a query like
filetype:pdf "19670015716"
works better it seems.
YMMV
-
#16
by
WallE
on 16 Jun, 2018 14:48
-
For some reason, they can't be bothered to declassify stuff like the CANYON satellites even though Geoffrey Prime leaked all the info about them to the Russians in, like, 1975 and they're completely obsolete from a technical standpoint.
Also the Air Force for some reason were quite adamant that Atlas 5A (which was on display somewhere) had to be scrapped because bad guys might possibly use a test article missile from the '50s to develop ICBM tech.
But still, I find it a bit hard to swallow that they would have taken documents down from NTRS because China might use them, considering they've had a ballistic missile/space program for 50 years now. It could just as easily be because of people with robot downloaders crashing the NTRS servers. Unless I'm actually underestimating government stupidity (and in the case of Atlas 5A, maybe it's worse than I thought).
It's also slightly strange that I've never seen a mission report of John Glenn's flight even though the reports for most of the other Mercury missions are online. Considering the historical importance of that flight, you think somebody could be bothered to upload them.
-
#17
by
Jim
on 16 Jun, 2018 15:26
-
For some reason, they can't be bothered to declassify stuff like the CANYON satellites even though Geoffrey Prime leaked all the info about them to the Russians in, like, 1975 and they're completely obsolete from a technical standpoint.
It isn't the spacecraft, it is the data that is the issue.
-
#18
by
WallE
on 16 Jun, 2018 17:12
-
As I understand, the DOD doesn't like to admit that they were tapping into other countries' phones/radio transmitters for political reasons, in spite of the fact that the Soviets found out about it early on and changed their military comm systems from satellite dishes to landlines because it can be construed as an aggressive act against a foreign nation in a way that taking reconnaissance photos is not. In the DOD's convoluted logic, it's ok if the enemy knows you're spying on him and how you do it, but you can't actually admit you're spying on him.
Although in the case of programs like CANYON, the actual operational details about the satellites and what they were doing has been public knowledge for many years, but they can't be bothered to release photos/documents/mission reports for them either for the political reasons mentioned above or because they're simply lazy and it takes time and money to declassify something (the effort involved in scanning and uploading thousands and thousands of images and documents is enormous).
-
#19
by
Blackstar
on 17 Jun, 2018 12:27
-
Ugh. The statements above contain so much misleading information about why stuff is not declassified that I could write about it for an hour.
Instead, here is the simple answer: it's the bureaucracy, and two dozen people need to say "yes" for something to get declassified and all it takes is one person saying "no" to prevent it. Apparently there is a person or person in the NSA opposed to declassifying high-altitude SIGINT satellite programs, even very outdated ones, and so it does not happen.
With the photo-reconnaissance systems, NSA doesn't get a say in the matter, so fewer people who can say "no."
