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.
