Saturn V ICBM
Recent news articles have armed guards taking down posters of the Saturn V rocket from various engineers offices throughout the United States. Apparently this all has to do with ITAR (The International Traffic in Arms Regulation) (I’m choosing to refrain from asking why law makers insist on using bad grammar when naming laws, well, almost).
As I understand it, the issue is that the Saturn V rocket would apparently make a really neat ICBM, and there is concerns that a terrorist organisation might find these plans, copy them, and build their own.
Lets just think about that for a minute.
If a bunch of terrorists, boy scouts, or anyone, managed to recreate the Saturn V rocket, which I remind you is the biggest rocket ever produced, at a cost of around 500 millon US dollars each (and that’s 1960′s dollars), they’d immediately be given jobs at NASA (and probably many other space-flight related companies). This is no simple beast to make.
Now, fortunately some more rational people have thought this through a little, here’s the best line I found:
The Saturn V rocket would make a wonderful ICBM, assuming of course your plan was to launch a payload of nukes, 50 engineers, and a grayhound bus carrying them all. Its a bit of an overkill.
What we have to remember is that this rocket was design to send man to the moon. The moon! This is a rocket designed to send stuff to the moon, not to the other side of the planet.
Would someone please explain to me how 1960′s rocket technology, which has been in the public view for 40 years, is now suddenly top secret?
