I'm not sure they are as real as OP claims, unfortunately. I looked up NASA-TN-D-6193 for you, but its actual title is "Dynamic and static wind tunnel tests of a flow direction vane".
Edit: happily, the content of the paper really is about formalizing the performance rating of a device that had been used in conditions beyond its original intended use.

















Did you really get other results, or did you get papers that were still accurately described by the editorialized titles? On the one I looked up, the author and publication date were the same, and it really was about "the repeated survival of systems never intended to work [under the more extreme than designed conditions they were subjected to]" even if the actual title wasn't that spicy.