Lockheed Archives ?

galgot

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Don't know exactly where to ask this... Anyways :
Is there something like some Lockheed Archives, like there is the Boeing Archives in Seattle.
Do they have a centralized place, were to consult their archives if asked kindly ?
 
I don’t know. But in a similar vain, I was reading yesterday about the declassification of documents and how back in 2013, 100+ million documents were “released”, but they’re still sitting dusty in the archives because nobody(at least in the public) has any idea what’s in them, how to search them or what to search for and that there’s not even an index.

A good number of them are supposedly files on SAP projects from the early 80s, but nobody really knows what to look for or project names or numbers, and doing a generalized FOIA search and resulting declassification review is REALLY EXPENSIVE if you don’t know what your looking for, you can’t really ask people to sort through hundreds of thousands of documents on the basis of a general search.

Lots of cool information is probably out their in the archives, but unless there’s a general declassification and release, they’re never going to be seen, simply because we don’t have either the resources or money. :(
 
:/
raiders_of_the_lost_ark.jpg


While searching , found that Lockheed uses a third party storage company service called Iron Mountain to store some of their archives. But no idea if it's accessible. Would have to know someone at Lockheed certainly...
 
galgot said:
While searching , found that Lockheed uses a third party storage company service called Iron Mountain to store some of their archives. But no idea if it's accessible. Would have to know someone at Lockheed certainly...

Lots of places use Iron Mountain. Here's a hint: they have everything. You'll never see any of it.

When I worked at United Tech in California, when an engineer retired one of the things he'd have to do was oversee boxing up his files for transfer to Iron Mountain. You'd end up with a box the size of a file cabinet drawer labeled "Titan Stuff." And that's it. Probably a date, probably the name of the employee, but the sum total description of what's in the box with *thousands* of pages and likely hundreds of files is... "Titan Stuff."

If you have ownership of the box, and you know which box you want, you can get Iron Mountain to fish it out of their storage facility and deliver it to you. Best of luck as an outsider trying to figure out which box out of *thousands* has what you want. Especially since a lot of the files were stored away before current computer data systems, rather the data simply written down... somewhere.

And of course sometimes engineers died, got fired, quit. In which case their stuff would get dumped into a box and shipped off, and *probably* labeled something like "Scott Lowther Box 2, 2004-03-03" or some such. I know that when *I* left United Tech, at no point was I tasked with making anything remotely resembling a detailed accounting of my files.
 
A link to a previous post... just wonder where are the original color negatives made by Lockheed photographers (like Erik Miller) at Burbank, Van Nuys and so on... P-38, P-80, F-90, Constellation, Constitution, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, XP-58 and so on... https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,28418.0.html
 
So what can actually be done by members of the public or academics who would like to search their files? It seems over the past 20 years all this historical information has been going to commercial entities who aren’t under FOIA or put away in government archives uncataloged and gathering dust. :(
 
John21 said:
So what can actually be done by members of the public or academics who would like to search their files?

Bribery.

And I ain't even kidding.

To get these boxes would be a bother for Lockheed, United Tech, whoever. It would take time and manpower, and their first question would be "why do we care enough to expend the resources on this?"

Get in good with someone who has influence, a corporate head or perhaps a Senator. Hire a private detective to dig up dirt on a corporate head for the purposes of blackmail. But bribery is the more reliable approach, as that will make them more willing to be helpful especially for future endeavors. Blackmail might work, but you'll be constantly having to worry about sabotage and back stabbery.
 
Hummmfff… Depressing…

What I don’t understand, for a company such as Lockheed, it would maybe be useful to have all these boxes/files sorted out, just for the simple fact that it’s useful to know what the company have been working on and if can be reused, I mean calculations, concepts and all that… No ?
 
galgot said:
Hummmfff… Depressing…

What I don’t understand, for a company such as Lockheed, it would maybe be useful to have all these boxes/files sorted out, just for the simple fact that it’s useful to know what the company have been working on and if can be reused, I mean calculations, concepts and all that… No ?

The history of this kind of thing would make you cry and angry all at the same time.
 
Just over 20 years ago I was working on a case involving a large petroleum company. Among the documents I came across were a few boxes retrieved from (coincidentally) an Iron Mountain storage facility, relating to the construction of the Glomar Explorer, including correspondence between the shipbuilder and US Navy-connected "consultants."

The documents were wholly unresponsive to the case matter, but I was well aware of what the Glomar Explorer was and what was going on in between the lines of what I was reading.

I told a couple of the attorneys about my excitement seeing the docs, and tried to explain what the ship was really constructed for. They looked at me like I was nuts. Maybe years later as Project AZORIAN became a little bit more well known by casual observers, they had an "A-ha!"-moment about a document review years earlier, but I doubt it.

Alas, as exciting as those documents were to me, they were unresponsive to the case matter and had to go back to Iron Mountain, likely never to be seen again. Although that was proper for the task at hand, I thought it was a shame for the sake of history that it is likely that no one will ever lay eyes on those documents again.
 
galgot said:
What I don’t understand, for a company such as Lockheed, it would maybe be useful to have all these boxes/files sorted out, just for the simple fact that it’s useful to know what the company have been working on and if can be reused, I mean calculations, concepts and all that… No ?

Generally... no.

Having seen a number of boxes destined for Iron Mountain, if my examples were representative, the *vast* majority of the contents would really have been better off being burned. Because the *vast* majority of the contents were things like receipts, travel vouchers, memos that took an entire page to contain a single unenlightening line like "in answer to your question, no." Stuff that seemed elevant to keep for a *little* while, but which at some point became not only pointless but incomprehensible. There is no conceivable business case to be made for wasting an employees or interns time digging through a mountain of literal trash looking for nuggets of gold... nuggets that on one hand won't be understood by an intern, and on the other hand might be classified and thus *shouldn't* be seen by an intern.

At some point robo-slaves like the NS-5 will become commercially available... machine physically capable of digging through the files, intellectually capable of separating the good stuff from the trash, and dumb enough to not go blabbing to the National Enquirer when they find a test report on that Lockheed warp drive project. When such robo-slaves have been around long enough that older models are essentially free, companies like Lockheed *might* set them to work on the task of going through all those boxes.

That said... there is another reason why such companies wouldn't go to the bother. Information you don't have is information that cant be subpoenad by opposition lawyers. If one of your products fails, kills a bunch of folks and the lawsuits come out, and in the process of discovery it's found that your engineers knew about the problem *thirty* years ago and noted it in test logs and memos... that information can be used against you. If all that old info is unavailable, either because it's buried in the heart of Khazad-Iron-Mountain or because you simply incinerated all the old documentation, then it can't be used against you.

Also also: there is information enough to let people know *what* your company once worked on. Example: when I worked at United Tech I was contacted by someone at Lockheed-Denver because they heard I had information on the old Martin Astrorocket, and the USAF suddenly decided, for about 15 minutes, that they wanted themselves an Astrorocket.

If you are an engineer, you want the complete files on that old project, so that if it starts up again you can hit the ground running. If, however, you are a suit, you *don't* want that info available so that the customer has to pay you to start over from scratch. As the aerospace industry has amply shown over the last half century, there is a *lot* of money to be made by simply trying to build the same thing, over and over again. Where would the $50 billion spent/wasted on Ares V and SLS be if NASA had simply jammed through an equivalent Shuttle-derived heavy lifter in the mid-80s for a tiny fraction of the cost?


You want those buried nuggets. I want those buried nuggets. The people who own them don't.
 
One of king John royal charters (ie a hand written order) has just found in a library archive in Durham U.K.

These are ultra rare, very sought after by historians due to personal insight they give into the old days and no one was aware it in the archive for a mere 819years.

My guess is Lockheed archive is several orders of magnitude bigger than Durham’s.
 

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