Did you ever wonder why it seems we haven’t made much progress in launch vehicles since the 1960s? The Saturn 5 was the largest rocket ever conceived until very recently. It was the rocket that was used by the Apollo program and when that program abruptly ended there were a few Saturn 5 rockets left over. One has to wonder if our government is hiding something when we talk about the Saturn 5 rocket. There has been a consistent rumor the plans for this rocket were lost. Some say only some of the drawings relating to the development of the Saturn 5 were lost, but even these may have just been discarded because they were no longer of any use since the program was ended. I find this hard to believe, on one hand we have the most powerful rocket ever built and on the other hand we are discarding documents which show how we built it. I think we all know we would’ve wanted to keep these documents to see if we could improve our rockets in the future.

I have heard a lot of stories about things getting lost which government agencies were responsible for. One of the most incredible losses concerned boxes of Apollo videos. It doesn’t take a genius to see these are very historical documents. There is more to this however. Those of us who have seen the video of Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon remember it as a very fuzzy film, but what a lot of people didn’t know was there were films recorded on earth which are extremely clear and would have presented us with a much better picture of what was happening on the surface of the moon at the time. Some investigators have told us the video we were allowed to see was purposely made fuzzy and the proof for that was the same video was being seen in places like our emergency base in Australia and it was very clear. They therefore reason something was being hidden which we were not supposed to see. Some people think it was ruins on the moon, while others believe they were alien ships watching the astronauts. Since NASA claims they supposedly lost all this video which was in many different boxes, we will never know what happened. It has also deprived future generations of historical data.

Sometimes things are lost not through incompetency, but through attacks. All through history there are cases where one side has destroyed important documents and artifacts belong to another side. One of the great tragedies of history occurred when the Romans destroyed the great library at Alexandria in Egypt. In that library was said to be all the knowledge of the ancient world. No one knows exactly how many scrolls were destroyed. The estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000. It is probably somewhere in between. Who knows if any of these scrolls could have advanced human technology if we would have been able to save them? A huge boulder stood at the entrance of the Singapore River. It wasn’t an ordinary Boulder, because it contained writing on it. It became known as the Singapore Stone. Since nobody could read it at the time, no one seemed to care what happened to it. In 1843 the British Army decided to build a fort and blew the stone up, because it was in their way.

There is not much we can do to prevent something from being destroyed in a war or during an attack, but how does one account for carelessness? Take the case of the worker who brought a laptop out of the Veterans Administration and proceeded to leave it on a train. The laptop contained the names and information on a few million former veterans. As far as I know it was never recovered and all of its  information may have been compromised. Also I never heard anything about the person who lost the computer being punished. It could be he was a political appointment, so he was allowed to get away with it. It is not always the government which does stupid things causing the public heartburn. How many times have we seen financial websites get hacked only to find out they had minimum or no protection? I have always been an advocate to punish these organizations for not adequately taking care of our data. I believe once a company or person asks for your personal data they are taking on a responsibility and as such should do everything in their power to protect this personal data and if they don’t, there should be consequences. This is not just a problem with US banks and other financial institutions and even ordinary business, it happens all over the world. I really can’t help but believe the banks figure why should they spend a lot of money protecting our data if they are not going to face punishment for losing it.

Even museums are not exempt from losing items. The Telegraph has reported nearly 200 artifacts were lost from the year 2000 to the year 2009. Were these items stolen or were they just misplaced? Some of these museums are huge and it wouldn’t take much to miss-file an object. Once misfiled it could lay in a drawer somewhere without being rediscovered. It is said the value of these items was over five hundred thousand pounds, which is roughly 800,000 dollars. Some museums have branches in other countries such as the Royal Armouries which has museums in London, Leads, Fort Nelson, Portsmouth and Kentucky. I think you can see how easy it would be to misplace something  or even send it to a different building or country and lose track of it. There is also the chance objects could have been stolen. The items lost during the time I quoted by this museum complex are hard to put a price on, because some of them have an unknown value.

There is no doubt humans lose and misplaced things, but there is a big difference when regulations are ignored such as those which prohibit the removing of objects from the premises for any reason and then objects or information is lost. What amazes me is some people who are on the bottom of the totem pole are given incredibly harsh punishments for acts which are nowhere near as bad as others who received no punishment at all.