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NASA's 1975 Graphics Standards Manual (slate.com)
38 points by ForHackernews on Sept 4, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments



Jason Scott has some interesting things to say in the comments section for this Kickstarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thestandardsmanual/reis...


When I stumbled upon this project earlier today I was already looking for my credit card when I opened the kickstarter page. But then I was disappointed, that the project wasn't to come in the original format but in a simple print of the scanned pages, even with the binder holes showing. Jason Scott's client's project would have been way cooler. (Sorry, I'm a sucker for such stuff)



$549,480 on Kickstarter? For taking a PDF from the Internet Archive and running it through a print shop?

Someone else should just upload the thing to a print on demand service.



I smell a rat. Some kind of money-laundering scheme?


I'm almost tempted, as a kid growing up in England in the 80's and a complete science and technology nerd a large part of why I'm into computers is because I realised I was never going to be an astronaut but technology was just so fascinating.

I had that logo on everything, a family member who visited the states even brought me back some astronaut food with it on :).

NASA was worth every penny they spent just in PR for America.


Meh. I'd like to see the complete engineering documents for some of the older missions.

That means hundreds or thousands of sheets of drawings, and thousands of pages of specifications.

In case you haven't worked on a large engineering project, every part gets a detail drawing; if it's off the shelf, it usually gets a source control drawing; every assembly gets an assembly drawing.

There might also be wiring diagrams, harness drawings, airline diagrams, and system block diagrams.

It can't all be classified, can it?


Wait a second. Nasa is the US government. This manual is therefore not protected by copyright, at least not within the US. And they are charging 79$? They can do so, but 79 seems a little high given that once anyone gets their hands on it they can in turn sell their own copies again. How much for the pdf?


"A work of the United States government, as defined by the United States copyright law, is "a work prepared by an officer or employee" of the federal government "as part of that person's official duties."[1] In general, under section 105 of the Copyright Act,[2] such works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law.

This act only applies to U.S. domestic copyright as that is the extent of U.S. federal law. The U.S. government asserts that it can still hold the copyright to those works in other countries.

Publication of an otherwise protected work by the U.S. government does not put that work in the public domain. For example, government publications may include works copyrighted by a contractor or grantee; copyrighted material assigned to the U.S. Government; or copyrighted information from other sources."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...

Things might be a bit different for this since this falls under the 1976 revision of the law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th... but I'm pretty sure these guys sorted it out.

Anyhow 79$ is a bit steep considering you need to cough up about 30$ more for shipping to EU even more to Asia...

Would've paid 2-3 times that price to get a replica of the original tho the reprint doesn't look that impressive to me...




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