Even Science Needs Secrecy Sometimes

The hands fly up to cover the video of the Sample Science Projects when it flicks onto the classroom television screen. The boys of San Francisco's Cathedral School for Boys know about the secrecy order. They know they may not disclose the secret part of their Sample Science Projects to anyone unless that anyone has received a copy of the secrecy order that comes from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

''We've put a petition together to try to get the whole thing (the secrecy order) rescinded because it just doesn't make any sense,'' says Ron King, rocket scientist and parent of a kindergartner, who helped design the classified part with two other Lockheed engineers. A Lockheed patent lawyer put the petition together.

The secret part is a model for a rocket fuel supply tank. Cathedral School sixth-graders initially designed the other part of the experiment -- two fuel receiving tanks. A core group of six boys, in the fourth to seventh grades, is now refining the design and making sure it works, under the guidance of science teacher Paul Moos, King and Lockheed engineer Dave Pickett.

The students had been working on the project about a year when King applied for a patent on his fuel supply tank. Then things got complicated. They were slapped with the secrecy order just over a month ago.

''You are ordered to keep the subject matter secret,'' said the letter from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The Air Force had determined that unauthorized disclosure of this technology ''would be detrimental to the national security.''

The subject matter may be disclosed only to a legal and permanent U.S. resident who has been furnished with a copy of the secrecy order, it says. King had to come to class and make a speech about the order. He told the students not to tell anybody else what was going on.

Meanwhile, the secret design and the secret part of the project -- a model for a rocket fuel supply tank -- are locked in King's house. The Cathedral rocket tanks are among 13 experiments from California Central Coast schools, from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara, going to space under NASA's ''Get Away Special'' program, which signed up its first customer.

The other schools are, among other things, sending radish and pinto beans into space to plant later, growing crystals in space and experimenting with glue-bonding and bubbles, all in zero gravity.