What matters are kept secret in space companies?

Question

I already googled blueprint of rockets, I came to know that US space companies revealing their "blueprint of rockets".

But still are there any matters kept secret in space companies?

Answer 1

In the USA, rockets are subject to 'International Traffic in Arms Regulations' (ITAR), a set of laws that is designed to prevent weapons technology from falling into the wrong hands. Rockets are considered weapons technology because if you know how to build an orbital rocket, you have most of what you need to build an ICBM.

Commercial rocket companies have another incentive not to share their knowledge: keeping secrets is a commercial advantage. National space programs don't have this incentive, so organizations like NASA publish much more of their findings than commercial companies.

No rocket company is going to publish their drawings, for several reasons:

1. rockets are very complex. You'd need several hundred thousand drawings to document a rocket completely. That would make it time-consuming and expensive to publish them.
2. Publishing the drawings is pointless. Nobody is going to duplicate an entire rocket.
3. Drawings alone aren't enough: you need a lot of knowledge in addition to them. The materials specifications for each of the ~hundreds of thousands of parts, for instance. The program code for the control system.
4. Modern rockets aren't designed on paper, but in a CAD system. A specialized CAD system like CATIA, at that. Nobody outside the aerospace industry uses that, so you'd be publishing your data for a very small audience.