Why Access To NASA Technical Reports Is Important

Posted 22 Mar 2013.

Earlier this evening I read about NASA removing all public access to its NASA Technical Reports Server in the wake of the arrest of a former contractor suspected of being a spy. I was outraged at the sheer amount of technical content that was suddenly wiped from the Internet. I respect and understand how important it is to restrict access to sensitive information, however I think that shutting down public access to NTRS completely during this investigation is extreme and hurtful to science and learning.

After a few minutes I put my rage aside and continued on with my evening.

Fast forward to a few minutes ago. I’m sitting in bed about a third of the way through the chapter on airfoils in Introduction to Flight by Anderson (not far from typical Friday night fare in our house). I absolutely love Anderson’s historical and design asides so of course I’m excited by the Design Box on transonic airfoil design. This particular note mentions the airfoil design of the Bell X-1, the first plane to fly faster than the speed of sound. I remember the X-1 fondly as the orange one hanging in the lobby of the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

The X-1 used two different airfoils for its wings, NACA 65-110 (10% thickness) for routine flight testing and NACA 65-108 (8% thickness) for flights planned above Mach 1. As a student pilot, aviation geek, and aspiring aerospace engineering nerd, I know generally what a 65-110 looks like thanks to Wikipedia and UIUC.

I wanted to know a little more though, so I grabbed my ipad typed “65-110 airfoil” in to Google search. I clicked on the first result. Guess what I was greeted with?

The NASA technical reports server will be unavailable for public access while the agency conducts a review of the site’s content to ensure that it does not contain technical information that is subject to U.S. export control laws and regulations and that the appropriate reviews were performed. The site will return to service when the review is complete. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Ugh. This just went from “man that sucks” to “man I can’t read something about an airfoil that predates the formation of NASA itself.”

The message isn’t particularly comforting either. How long will NTRS be offline? How long will it take to review that every document has both been reviewed and doesn’t meet the export or regulatory yardstick for exclusion? In light of recent events what percentage of content used to pass this test but now fails?

Aside from broken links across the Internet when NTRS does come back online we may never know.

Update: The NTRS is back online but some older documents including many from the NACA archives were still under review as of a few months ago.