Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V08/V8_311.TXT

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Date: Tue, 2 Aug 88 19:04:01 PDT
From: Ted Anderson <[e-mail]>
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Subject: SPACE Digest V8 #311

SPACE Digest                                      Volume 8 : Issue 311

Today's Topics:
               Born classified
             Re: Born classified
               Re: Space Suits
               Re: Solar Sails
              Re: KH-11 Orbital Elements
               FTL time travel
               Solar flares and *nauts
             Re: Libertarian space policy
           Re: space news from June 6 AW&ST
             Re: Born classified
                Lofstrom Loop
                 Re: Pegasus
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 23 Jul 88 22:40:11 GMT
From: pasteur!agate!garnet![e-mail]  (Obnoxious Math Grad Student)
Subject: Born classified

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, just someone who thinks he knows what he's
talking about.  Maybe I don't.  Apply my advice at your own risk.

In article <[e-mail]>, henry@utzoo (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Obnoxious Math Grad Student) writes:
>>Cryptological information is born classified.  And probably some stuff
>>involving optics.

>Please cite references for this.

The phrase "born classified" does not have a unique meaning, and so we've
been talking past each other as a result.  Much of that is my fault, since
I was very cryptic.

One must-read basic reference is:

US Congress, House of Representatives, THE GOVERNMENT'S CLASSIFICATION OF
PRIVATE IDEAS, 1981.  Library of Congress call number: J61.E9.96th.v.13.

This is truly interesting reading.  Almost a thousand pages of testimony.
If you have even the slightest interest in the subject--go to your library
and read this monster.  You'll be glad you did.

The most clear-cut example of born-classified cryptology is in patent sec-
recy orders.  *ANY* defense agency can request a secrecy order.  The patent
office must grant these.  They require annual review, except in times of
"national emergency".  (The Korean emergency lasted until Jimmy Carter.
I don't care to estimate how long the Nicaraguan emergency will last.)

>         NSA would undoubtedly *like* "born classified" status for
>crypto stuff, but they haven't managed to arrange it.

You are now talking about--I assume this based on your previous article--
the notion of born-classified provided by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.
This provides for criminal sanctions to someone releasing "Restricted"
nuclear ideas.  Cryptology does not have this.

There was talk in the late seventies about getting an AEA-like act, but
Inman did not push it.  Instead, he lobbied in academia for the voluntary
review system, and he got it.

Inman, in his testimony, said that the NSA cannot classify or restrain
post-publication.  Note the pregnant non-comment about pre-publication.
If I remember correctly, he wandered around this point cautiously.

To date, NSA has gotten researchers to change or delete a few clauses, plus
convinced one researcher to not publish a particular paper.  They've also
permitted patents after slightly changing some details.

>The much-heralded cases in recent years of heavy-handed DoD suppression
>of papers at the last minute, etc., have either involved DoD funding which
>had explicit strings attached, or were cases of bureaucratic intimidation
>without legal basis.

Let's see.  Your summary of these needs amplification.

There was the Meyer letter to IEEE about the applicability of ITAR to crypt-
ology.  NSA claimed he acted on his own.  They made no comment as to whether
his claims were correct or not.  The law as written is definitely less than
clear on this point, and at the time, no cases had been decided.  Since then
they have been, and so far they have been in NSA's favor.  Surely you're
familiar with the difficulties over crypt and non-USA Unix!

Then there was the stink over the secrecy order for a cryptodevice patent
request by Davida and Wells, and another by Nicolai.  NSA did withdraw the
secrecy order on the grounds that it was not needed after a proper review.
Not on the grounds that they had no legal basis.  They do.

And then there was the humorous attempt to invoke prior restraint on the
Israeli mathematician Shamir in a talk of his last year.  Note that this
was done by the Army, not NSA!  The grapevine has it that NSA pulled the
necessary strings to undo this idiocy.  At least, Shamir thanked NSA in
his talk.  The Army did have the legal basis for what they did--they were
just incredibly incompetent about it.

So, what does this have to do with the original example?  Someone has pro-
grams to generate KH-11 predictions.  He is offering to make these gener-
ally available.  Since there is no AEA-like clause covering this, what he
is doing is not yet *criminal*.  But if NSA gets a restraining order, our
programmer can proceed only by being in contempt of court.  Most likely,
though, NSA will ignore it.  (Unless, I suppose, he tries to patent it.)

ucbvax!garnet!weemba    Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720

------------------------------

Date: 24 Jul 88 00:45:36 GMT
From: thumper![e-mail]  (Phil R. Karn)
Subject: Re: Born classified

It would seem that there's a very simple way to evade a patent secrecy
order. Since you establish your claim at the moment you file, you simply
*publish immediately after filing*. By the time the idiots down at the
Pentagon even become aware of your application, it'll be too late.

Phil

------------------------------

Date: 24 Jul 88 01:33:50 GMT
From: [e-mail]  (Paul F. Dietz)
Subject: Re: Space Suits

On the subject of the Space Activity Suit:

Look in The Case for Mars II, pages 469-488 (1984).  W. Mitchell Clapp
(MIT) describes some work on space suit gloves using the SAS idea.
These gloves would go on an otherwise conventional space suit, and
were designed to be compatible with NASA hardware.

The gloves are made from Spandex or natural rubber.  They exert 3.5 psi
on the hand and fingers.  Special techniques devoped elsewhere for burn
bandages were used to design gloves that exert even pressure.  The glove
material has holes 0.5 mm across that exposes the skin to vacuum.

The gloves were tested in a partial vacuum chamber (3.5 psi below
atmospheric pressure).  They permitted much more dexterity and tactile
feedback than conventional gloves.  Little or no edema was evident.

Clapp also suggests using a 4.1 psi skinsuit inside a conventional space
suit.  This would subject the body to 8 psi, so much less prebreathing
would be required at the beginning of EVA.

    Paul F. Dietz
    [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 23 Jul 88 20:44:27 GMT
From: mnetor!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Solar Sails

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Mike Wooding) writes:
> An earlier poster suggested tacking (sailing up wind - er is that
> up light?) might be possible. How's that work. Doesn't a sail boat
> depend on keel and aerodynamic effects on sail? Would "solar" wind
> be "channeled" to produce high and low pressure areas?

No, you can't get anything useful out of that.  Solar sails can tack,
sort of, using gravity as the "keel".  It's not nearly as easy as tacking
a sailboat.  My understanding is that the primary technique is to kill
some of your orbital velocity (by setting the sail at an angle) and then
take in sail (by setting the sail edge-on to the Sun) and wait to fall
inwards.  A slooooow process, especially in the outer solar system.
--
Anyone who buys Wisconsin cheese is|  Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
a traitor to mankind.  --Pournelle |uunet!mnetor!utzoo! henry @zoo.toronto.edu

------------------------------

Date: 22 Jul 88 21:52:01 GMT
From: nbires!isis!scicom![e-mail]  (Bruce Watson)
Subject: Re: KH-11 Orbital Elements

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Richard the Nerd) writes:
>
> A few of you asked for the Keplerian elements for the KH-11 spy
> satellite we have tracked down.  All right, here is our best set.  I

> the prediction.  Expect _big_ errors!  But it's really bright.
>


I used the elements in my own Basic prog for the C-64 and got
a time of 03:42 for a S to N pass of the sat for the Denver area.

I saw a first magnitude object at about the predicted elevation in the east
heading north at 03:53.  Keep up the good work.

------------------------------

Date: 23 Jul 88 21:01:52 GMT
From: mnetor!utzoo![e-mail]  (Henry Spencer)
Subject: FTL time travel

>Is it possible that if you travel faster than the speed of light in space,
>and come back to earth, you would be able to see yourself in the past?
>I think it is possible because when you approach the speed of light, time slows
>down, and if you travel the speed of light, time stops.

Well, maybe.  Special relativity does say that faster-than-light travel
would resemble time travel in some ways -- suitably chosen observers could
see effect happening before cause.  Whether this could result in returning
before you left is a harder question; my relativity is too rusty for me
to answer it.

The possibility of effect preceding cause is widely interpreted as showing
that FTL travel is impossible, since it makes utter hash out of physics.
There is a minority opinion that says we're going to have to revise physics
to live with a looser notion of cause-and-effect anyway, since general
relativity seems to provide ways of (theoretically) building real, live
time machines.  (The majority is hoping that when general relativity is
replaced by a quantum theory of gravity, these distressing possibilities
will go away.)
--
Anyone who buys Wisconsin cheese is|  Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
a traitor to mankind.  --Pournelle |uunet!mnetor!utzoo! henry @zoo.toronto.edu

------------------------------

Resent-Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
Resent-Date: Mon, 25 Jul 88 12:27:00 -0400 (EDT)
Resent-From: Ted Anderson <[e-mail]>
Resent-To: [e-mail]
Return-Path: <[e-mail]>
Date: 22 Jul 88 18:05:00 CDT
From: "Pat Reiff" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Solar flares and *nauts
To: "ota" <[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail]
Reply-To: "Pat Reiff" <[e-mail]>

With regard to the continuing discussion of energetic flare particles and man
in space:
In response to Watson (SD 281):

>I've never heard whether or not Mitchner was making this up.

No, indeed.  I was a graduate student at Rice University working on plasma data
from a particle detector placed on the moon by Apollo 14 when the great flare
of August 2, 1982 hit.  That 1B flare had a flux of >35meV protons that was so
great that it penetrated the sides of the detector with ease (the detector
having more shielding than the average spacecraft).  I can't find the final
version of the paper I wrote on it (it was published in some obscure
collection), but I found an abstract for an AGU talk that I gave on it.  In
that abstract I said that the flux was estimated to be 10**5 to 10**6
particles/(sq cm - sec - steradian) for protons with energies above about 20
MeV.  I probably refined those numbers in the final paper.  At the time, my
thesis advisor, David Reasoner (who is now at Marshall Space Flight Center)
calcuated what the REM (roentgen equivalent in man) dose would have been for
that flux of particles.  I don't recall the numbers, but it would have been
fatal for someone even in the LEM, but the command module people might have
survived.  We kept that result out of our paper (since the Apollo program
was still going on at that time), but the fluxes were there for anyone to
see.  We did tell the folks at Mission Control about it, of course, but
there really wasn't anything anyone could do.  The scenario that Michener
wrote about was right on the mark.  The only saving grace is that those flares
are pretty rare.

As for MIR cosmonauts, the inclination is 51 degrees, not >70 as Chapman
stated (SD 284).  This puts them up at a max magnetic latitude of 62 degrees.
The region of magnetically open field lines typically runs from about 70
degrees to the poles.  For a big storm, however, this boundary can easily go
equatorward of 60 degrees.  Therefore, any spacewalk in a solar proton storm
is really unnecessarily risky.  However, most of the time MIR is at a much
lower latitude, shielded by more of the earth's magnetic field.  Plus, most
solar flares do not have as strong proton fluxes as the August 2 storm had.
I've asked my friends at NOAA in Boulder who send out flare warnings to
give us some information on how the information is passed to NASA, and
whether it also goes to the USSR (I think it does; they are part of the World
Data Center, but whether the information reaches Moscow in enough time
to reschedule EVA's is something I don't know).

Hope this is helpful.

From the First Space Physics Department in the World:
     Patricia H. Reiff
     Department of Space Physics and Astronomy
     Rice University
     internet:  [e-mail]
     SPAN:      RICE::REIFF

------

------------------------------

Date:     Mon, 25 Jul 88 15:05 EDT
From: <[e-mail]> (Matt)
Subject:  Re: Libertarian space policy

======> flame to follow

 Re: Moon Treaty, Private development of space resources, and Libertarians:

 Given the state of the terrestrial environment and the level of hostility
 about relatively worthless real estate (Falklands, etc.) under nationalist
 and private sector control, the attitude that international control of
 space resources is "sick" is misguided.  If you would like to see an
 analagous situation, look at Antarctica. The goal of international control
 for the benefit of humankind was corrupted by attaching property "rights"
 to any sort of presence, in fact, specifically to 'scientific' presence.
 True international control, ala law of the sea treaty, could allow for
 commercial development of space without either militarization or
 space pollution.  But private or national interests will never choose
 action with the good of the commonweal first.  And I think that if we look
 at the problems in space development over the last 20 years in the US,
 most if not all are related to party politics, the cold war, or military
 practices/priorities (and cf. pentagon procurement scandal are quite
 intimately related to private sector practices/motives.)
 Sure, the UN sucks as it is; but Ron Paul would rather hand over the
 ~universe to business. And as no people or nation can make any kind of
 indigenous claim to space, it is incumbent on Ron Paul to show how
 property isn't theft when it comes to space development.

 I can hardly wait to see the outer space equivalent of Love Canal and
 Manville asbestos.

 Please send numerous flames to the list.

 Matt

------------------------------

Date: 25 Jul 88 17:50:47 GMT
From: [e-mail]  (Floyd McWilliams)
Subject: Re: space news from June 6 AW&ST


    Re the planned Jupiter-Pluto flight by the Voyager spare:
How long would such a flight take?  Since Pluto is now closer to the
sun than Neptune, would it take much longer than the 12-year trip by
Voyager 2?  I can just imagine a 1989 Neptune-Pluto double encounter...
    Of course, Voyager 3 wouldn't get a boost from Saturn or Uranus,
which could make a difference - I just don't have the math background to
figure it out.

--
Floyd McWilliams    [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 25 Jul 88 18:23:28 GMT
From: pasteur!cad.Berkeley.EDU![e-mail]  (EDIF Committee)
Subject: Re: Born classified

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Phil R. Karn) writes:
> By the time the idiots down at the
> Pentagon...

They may be dumb (I tend to agree!), but lets not forget that all this
secrecy DOES have some valid reasons for existing, even if the implementation
and application is stupid or counter-productive much of the time.

The biggest problem is so many stupid rules that the real need gets ignored
or "worked around" along with the stupid ones!

Mike Waters

------------------------------

Date: 25 Jul 88 04:50:58 GMT
From: portal!cup.portal.com![e-mail]
Subject: Lofstrom Loop


I've read several science fiction stories recently in which the Lofstrom Loop
is mentioned, but they don't go into any great detail. Does anyone have any
references where I can read more about it?

Please use the following path and NOT [e-mail]!!!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
What the eye beholds           CI$: 72406.1363
And the heart covets           PLINK: Brianop
Let the hand boldly sieze!     UUCP: ...tektronix!tessi!agora!salem1!brianop
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Running AmigaUUCP on salem1.  Now if I could just postnews...

------------------------------

Sender: [e-mail]
Date: 25 Jul 88 16:49:45 PDT (Monday)
Subject: Re: Pegasus
From: [e-mail]
Cc: [e-mail]

Recently I have seen messages about Pegasus on this dl.  When I tried to find
information about the Orbital Sciences or Hercules Aerospace Inc. I couldn't
find anything.

Can anyone provide me with additional information so that I might contact either
of these two organizations ?

Any info would be appreciated.
Thanks
Rich Pollard

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V8 #311
*******************