Return-path: X-Andrew-Authenticated-as: 0;andrew.cmu.edu;Network-Mail Received: from po2.andrew.cmu.edu via trymail for +dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl@andrew.cmu.edu (->+dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl) (->ota+space.digests) ID ; Tue, 2 Aug 88 22:06:46 -0400 (EDT) Received: from po3.andrew.cmu.edu via qmail ID ; Tue, 2 Aug 88 22:06:12 -0400 (EDT) Received: by po3.andrew.cmu.edu (5.54/3.15) id for +dist+/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr1/ota/space/space.dl; Tue, 2 Aug 88 22:04:30 EDT Received: by angband.s1.gov id AA00300; Tue, 2 Aug 88 19:04:01 PDT id AA00300; Tue, 2 Aug 88 19:04:01 PDT Date: Tue, 2 Aug 88 19:04:01 PDT From: Ted Anderson Message-Id: <8808030204.AA00300@angband.s1.gov> To: Space@angband.s1.gov Reply-To: Space@angband.s1.gov 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!weemba@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (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 <1988Jul21.164847.15389@utzoo.uucp>, henry@utzoo (Henry Spencer) writes: >In article <12262@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (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!karn@faline.bellcore.com (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: dietz@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu (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 dietz@gvax.cs.cornell.edu ------------------------------ Date: 23 Jul 88 20:44:27 GMT From: mnetor!utzoo!henry@uunet.uu.net (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Solar Sails In article <1413@daisy.UUCP> wooding@daisy.UUCP (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!wats@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Bruce Watson) Subject: Re: KH-11 Orbital Elements In article <6233@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>, snowdog@athena.mit.edu (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!henry@uunet.uu.net (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: Resent-Date: Mon, 25 Jul 88 12:27:00 -0400 (EDT) Resent-From: Ted Anderson Resent-To: space@angband.s1.gov Return-Path: Date: 22 Jul 88 18:05:00 CDT From: "Pat Reiff" Subject: Solar flares and *nauts To: "ota" Cc: eos@angband.s1.gov Reply-To: "Pat Reiff" 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: reiff%spacvax.rice.edu@rice.edu SPAN: RICE::REIFF ------ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 25 Jul 88 15:05 EDT From: (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: acu@h.cc.purdue.edu (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 acu@h.cc.purdue.edu ------------------------------ Date: 25 Jul 88 18:23:28 GMT From: pasteur!cad.Berkeley.EDU!moto@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (EDIF Committee) Subject: Re: Born classified In article <1259@thumper.bellcore.com>, karn@thumper.bellcore.com (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!Brian_C_McBee@uunet.uu.net 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 brianop@salem1.UUCP!!! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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: RPollard.ElSegundo@xerox.com Date: 25 Jul 88 16:49:45 PDT (Monday) Subject: Re: Pegasus From: RPollard.ElSegundo@xerox.com Cc: RPollard.ElSegundo@xerox.com 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 *******************