As Jay implied, it doesn't mean you will be privy to "gubmint secrets" but that you can be trusted not to speak out of school.

I'm sure Kaysing had a security clearance of some sort. He couldn't have done his job without it. But he's not the first conspiracy theorist to try to bolster his credibility by touting a real or imagined security clearance. The problem is that it's always a two-edged sword. I'm sure you were told about the very draconian penalties for violating the terms of a security clearance, and the little white card you sign which waives your right to trial in such matters.

Given that the U.S. government appears very serious about its security clearances, how are we to interpret the actions of alleged holders of these clearances? You can go to jail just for telling your mother about secret information, and these guys are writing books and going on television? Can anyone explain to me why the FBI can't seem to catch them?

The obvious answer is that the tales these folks are spinning have nothing to do with anything they might have learned as a result of their security clearances. The whole idea of a security clearance is to prevent just such an occurrence.

But the real answer, as I said, lies in the structure of Bill Kaysing's case. He stands up and claims to be an insider. But his evidence consists of things that anybody could have found out: photo anomalies, etc. Kaysing may have had a security clearance, but compared to his argument that's just a big smelly red herring.

So, you're saying the 747 can't really fly?

LOL! No, I'm putting the Saturn V in perspective. Most large-scale engineering projects have parameters that would impress or frighten the layman. Two million parts sounds like a lot to people who have trouble with a 100-part kitchen toaster. But of course professional engineers have ways to manage that complexity.

The Boeing 747 has about six million parts, or three times as much as the Saturn V launch vehicle. It was rolled out in 1968, if memory serves, about the same time the Saturn V became a viable machine.

Bill Wood wants to make the Saturn V sound like some impossible engineering nightmare that couldn't possibly have been accomplished because it had two million (gasp!) parts. That's very misleading, and someone with as extensive an engineering background as Mr. Wood purports to have shouldn't be making that sort of argument. In engineering terms, the Saturn V has only two million parts.

Another thing to consider is that the Saturn V is a three-stage rocket, and each stage was given to a different company to design and build: The S-IC first stage went to Boeing (while it was building the vastly more complicated 747, I might add), The S-II second stage went to North American Aviation, and the S-IVB third stage went to McDonnell-Douglas. Divide and conquer.

The issue about linearity and coupling is very important. The Saturn V is a modular design. The S-IVB, for example, can work either as the Saturn V third stage or as the S-IB second stage. What does that mean? It means that the design and operation of the S-IVB is largely independent of what you stack above or below it. That greatly reduces the coupling in the system. There's very little the S-IC or the payload can do to affect the operation of the S-IVB. That means it can be designed, built, tested, and certified independently. It's not a matter of throwing all two million parts together and hoping they work.

Compare that to a 747. While it's not true that each part affects the other six million parts in the design, it is true that the 747 is not modular. You can't detach the wings and hook other wings on. You can't partition the design up into large segments and say that the operation of each segment is unaffected by other segments. Sure, you can put different engines on, but those are made by someone else anyway. That's a "design interface" problem.

The point is that Mr. Wood isn't giving us the engineer's point of view. He's simply reinforcing the incorrect layman's view of large scale engineering and how it affects reliability. The 747 is a highly reliable design, and according to Mr. Wood it would have been three times the nightmare of the Saturn V, which he says is an unreliable design.

Degrees which don't make him an expert on astronomy or photography ...

You can't get a physics degree without taking astronomy classes. You can't get a chemistry degree without knowing about photochemical reactions. While you can say he might not personally have acquired the necessary special expertise to cover this question, consider that he claims to have researched these questions for 30 years, and the statements in question were given in 1996. Surely by that time someone would have said, "Uh, Mr. Wood, that's not a supportable argument."

Let me be frank. I don't think Mr. Wood actually holds all the degrees he claims. Let's break it down.

and then after that,

He doesn't say he was actually in the Air Force, but his title "munitious specialist" sounds like a plausible military job title. Of course, that's the bit that explodes, and that has nothing to do with propulsion.

The point is, he isn't designing the things, he's just following the steps in the maintenance manual intended for use by your average airman. Of course he'd have a security clearance. You don't even get to see the service manual without a clearance.

The point is that all this happened before he got his degrees from the institution he named.

What degrees? Bachelor, Master, Doctorate? What institutions granted these degrees, and why would they accept him to their programs if he already held several degrees?

When did he get them? His resume has him working on various projects from his graduation from CalPoly in 1976 right up to 1993, three years before making his claims. Sure, I worked professionally while working toward advanced degrees, but I certainly couldn't have kept up that pace through three highly technical degrees.

Continuing on,

That might be true. Unfortunately Mr. Wood chooses to question the validity of the Saturn first stage, which uses a completely different kind of fuel and was built by a completely different company.

In any case, if Mr. Wood was familiar with the Delta launch vehicle, we wonder why he has such a problem understanding the LM ascent engine. The Delta second stage uses an Aerojet engine which is an almost exact double of the TRW LM ascent engine. It's about the same size, produces the same thrust, and burns the same fuel.

Is Mr. Wood playing dumb, or is he padding his resume?

Which programs? With which companies? The old, "I worked on classified programs" line is a staple of aerospace resumes.

To this point he hasn't been specific about what he worked on with these projects. His arguments below discuss supposed irregularities with propulsion, yet he doesn't say what he did for the Delta program, or for his "various classified projects".

The problem is that "Bill Wood" is a pretty common name, and so it's easy to verify that a certain "Bill Wood" did this, and a certain other "Bill Wood" did that, but we can't verify that they're this particular Bill Wood. There's a Bill Wood who works on propulsion at the University of Michigan, and one who works on propulsion at Stanford, and a Bill Wood who wrote a proposal to NASA.

There's also a Bill Wood who is well-known in California in the field of model rocket propulsion. Now model rocketry requires expertise, but one can be a model rocketeer without having the required expertise to say definitively that the F-1 engines wouldn't have worked.

Such as? We don't care about the classified ones, if they exist. Strangely enough, I can find lots of papers written by people I know are experts in the propulsion field, but I fail to find any written by a "Bill Wood" who could fit.

Strangely enough the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) does not have a Propulsion Technical Committee. They're checking whether they ever had one and whether Mr. Wood might have chaired it.

Such as? If they're non-government then they won't be classified. Are they, perhaps, models?

The problem is when he goes to criticize the F-1. The plume, he argues, is "fuel-rich", meaning that the plume contains unburnt fuel. This is an indication of combustion inefficiency -- fuel which should have burnt in the combustion chamber to produce thrust is being ejected unburnt where it burns non-propulsively in the atmosphere.

Since all the hoax books, sites, and videos mention no more about Mr. Wood's claims than what has been given on the site under critique, we wonder what Mr. Wood believes is suspicious.

Plume incandescence, perhaps? The Saturn V sure does have a bright exhaust plume. Might Mr. Wood have mistaken incandescence for combustion? Unfortunately the LOX/RP-1 bipropellant is known for its highly incandescent flame, and the best examples of it are the very Delta rockets that Mr. Wood claims to have worked on!

What does he say?

Mysteriously, the F-1 exhaust plumes are dark for the first 8’ after the end of the nozzle, then ignition of a very fuel-rich exhaust plume occurs in the atmosphere.

You probably know the clip in question. It starts with a dark, grainy image looking up the skirts of a Saturn V. You see cryogenic oxidizer cascading from the nozzle in slow motion followed by the ignition. Then the view shifts to pad level and you watch the rocket rize slowly. As you see the nozzles rise above the MLP, you can see a portion of laminar flow, and underneath it a brighter turbulent flow.

Mr. Wood theorizes that there's a smaller engine hidden inside the F-1, and they just squirted additional kerosine into the space between the "little" engine's nozzle and the "big" F-1 nozzle and lit it up for a light show.

Well, any propulsion engineer can tell you that's a good way to blow your nozzle into a million pieces. Why do you think they make all those sparks under the space shuttle's engines? Cardinal rule: Thou shalt not burn thy fuel in thy nozzle, lest it go to pieces and smite thee.

Further, if the combustion took place outside of the nozzle, it would produce a dramatic spheroid fireball, not an 800-foot sufficiently laminar plume. The F-1 nozzle ration was optimized for sea level, to provide the most thrust at launch. (The N-1's engines were optimized for about halfway through the first-stage burn.) The Saturn V's plume just after launch is only about twice the diameter of the rocket itself, and almost perfectly cylindrical. That's a textbook plume.

Apparently Mr. Wood doesn't realize his "dark plume" argument is based on footage taken from a high-speed armored DAC and thus is trememdously underexposed. Though taken in daylight, most of the rest of the frame is dark. It's only when the F-1 plume becomes visible that the frame is sufficiently lit. Not only does this plume completely saturate film at normal exposure, we even get optical scattering in some lenses, centered right at the nozzle where the plume would be brightest.

The plume is not "dark" coming out of the nozzle, it's merely very slightly darker than the more turbulent flow beneath it. In terms of human visual perception both would be too bright to look at with the naked eye.

Mr. Wood's statements about "combustion instability" are fairly misleading. "Combustion instability" is a catch-all phrase in rocket engineering which is equivalent to the automotive, "My car's making a funny noise." What was really going on was that the injector scaled up from the H-1 design wasn't working. And the problem wasn't "suddenly" solved; it took Rocketdyne 12 months to design a new injector that damped out the instability.

The injector is basically just a big showerhead at the top of the combustion chamber that sprays fuel and oxidizer in a pattern for optimal combustion. That's hard to determine. It's easy for flow characteristics to alter the pattern, which in turn alters the flow characteristics and you get a divergent feedback that blows your engine apart.

Here's an example of divergent feedback. It's one of those "don't try this for real; just think about it" experiments. Accelerate down the street in your car. Now reach down and pull the release by which you adjust your seat. Since you're accelerating, you'll slide backwards. This pulls your foot off the accelerator, and your car begins to slow, This pushes you forward on the rail, which puts your foot back on the pedal and you accelerate, and back you go again. Now imagine those oscillations getting worse and worse each time. That's divergent feedback.

Once the Rocketdyne engineers found a suitable dynamically stable injector design, they simply had to refine it to damp out induced instabilities. That is, you find an injector that won't spontaneously develope an instability that diverges and blows up your engine. But what if something causes the fuel flow to fluctuate? What if something bangs on the size of the nozzle? You have to find a design that naturally damps out these effects.

Truth be told, they never actually got this fixed. The Saturn V was known for its "pogo" effect -- longitudinal vibrations caused by combustion instabilities. They just figured out how to work around it and limit its effects.

In 1970, NASA asked von Braun to move from Marshall Space Flight Center where he was Director to Washington, D.C., to head up the strategic planning effort for the agency.

Yes, to be sure, Mr. Wood gets his dates wrong. More than once. But the underlying concept is what's at issue. Mr. Wood insinuates that von Braun left NASA because NASA wasn't really going to the moon. That's consummate question-begging.

I imagine a hypothetical situation along these lines:

"Yes, Mr. von Braun, we know you've been very helpful designing our spacecraft and getting us to the moon, but that's going find now without your supervision. We'd like you to take a job in Washington D.C. where you'll be sitting in meetings all day with politicians and bureaucrats who will disagree with you just for the sake of disagreement. How does that sound?"

And then along comes Fairchild and says,

"Gee, Mr. von Braun, you're the most brilliant aerospace engineer that this century has ever known. Why does NASA have you sitting in meetings all day? Tell you what: we'll hire you as our V.P. of engineering, and you'll get to supervise all our design engineers and come up with great designs."

It's clear von Braun wasn't happy at NASA anymore, but the question is why he wasn't happy. The hoax believers just assume it's because of the reason they've postulated and go from there. It's all very circular.