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The Manned Orbiting Laboratory was a US proposal to send a crewed spy satellite into space in the 1960s.
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It would receive high-resolution photographic imagery of US enemies, such as the Soviet Union.
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The top-secret program was criticized amid decades of economic costs of war.
It was not easy for America to collect intelligence on foreign nations in the 1960s.
Spy planes like the U-2 captured high-resolution images but ran the risk of inciting and defeating foreign governments. Photo-reconnaissance satellites were safe from anti-aircraft missiles and less aggressive than overflights, but they produced lower-quality imagery and were slow in transmitting data to photo interpreters.
Enter the Manned Orbital Laboratory.
The program aimed to expand the US military’s ability to monitor foreign adversaries at a time of high geopolitical tensions by marrying two methods of reconnaissance: operating a manned spy satellite in space.
Manned space operations
The Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL) was a joint project between the US Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office that was driven by the need for fast and reliable information after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and during the Cold War and Vietnam War.
US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara publicly unveiled the program in December 1963, and President Lyndon B. Johnson formally approved the project in August 1965. Although the program was intended to provide space exploration vision the US army, it was shown. as an operation to find out what people can do in space.
“This program will give us new information about what man can do in space,” Johnson said at the time. “It will enable us to tie that capability to America’s defense. It will develop technology and equipment that will help advance manned and unmanned spaceflight. And it will make their new and worthwhile experiments possible.”
Operations on the MOL began in the spring of 1964. The MOL attempted to obtain high-resolution photographic imagery of foreign enemies such as the Soviet Union. Although satellites collected information effectively, they faced limitations such as cloud cover and time delays in retrieval that prevented them from consistently taking useful photographic images. An operator on board the satellite would allow them to circumvent those problems and identify where and when to capture an image in real time.
“The idea was that people could help pick targets in real time, they could identify cloud cover and save footage,” Richard Truly, a former MOL crew member, said in 2022. “The a resource-limited system because it was a film system, not electronic like we have now. But the whole idea was to have a much more capable intelligence capability because you had people there who could think and act and take action in real time during the flight.”
A space station 60 feet long
The MOL program originally planned for six launches with a flight duration of two to four weeks – an ambitious feat given that the longest a person had previously been in space was eight days during NASA’s Gemini V mission in 1965.
A crew of two would come out in a modified Gemini capsule on top of the spacecraft that would house the MOL. After the duration of the flight, the capsule would detach and return to Earth while the MOL remained in orbit.
Recommended configuration
The proposed configuration of the MOL was that the transfer tunnel and fuel cells would be at the front of the spacecraft, behind that would be the laboratory divided into working and living compartments, and at the back of the spacecraft would be the equipment module and breathing tanks.
Apart from the laboratory where astronauts would conduct experiments, the MOL’s main payload is a telescope used for military exploration.
The telescope was designed to have a primary mirror that was 72 inches in diameter, and its imaging system was codenamed Dorian.
Astronaut selection
After three rounds, the US Air Force selected 17 pilots to participate in the MOL program.
One of the pilots, Robert H. Lawrence, was the first African American selected to be an astronaut by any national space program. Lawrence was among the final selection group completed in June 1967, but died in an F-104 Starfighter crash in late 1967.
Astronaut trainer
The MOL crew members had a busy training regiment to prepare for various unexpected events while in space. They were given survival training to prepare for unexpected annihilation in the event of a spacecraft leak.
Crew members also trained in spacecraft simulators and went through underwater training at the Navy’s diving school in Key West, Florida.
Most importantly, they trained with the National Photographic Production Center to learn more about photographic intelligence and subject recognition – a central part of the MOL program’s purpose.
A space path is not required
The external design of the MOL spacecraft was similar to that of NASA’s Gemini. But the major difference was that a hatch cut into the heat shield allowed astronauts to pass between the capsule at the front of the spacecraft to the laboratory and living quarters at the back without a spacewalk.
Narrow passages
Astronauts needed a special space suit that was flexible enough to allow them to crawl through the narrow passage between the Gemini capsule and the laboratory on the MOB.
special space suit
Although the spacesuit never made it into space, NASA used the technology behind it in the development of future spacesuits.
Experiments and exploration
Although the MOL’s existence was public knowledge, its mission to gather photographic intelligence on foreign enemies was highly classified. However, press coverage at the time portrayed the MOL as a reconnaissance mission, and the secret classification of the program prevented officials from denying the claims.
Amid concerns about how other countries would react to the US military operating in space, Louis Mazza, the NRO’s Chief Program Security Officer, suggested that “let’s admit that we have an orbiting laboratory with DOD staff, and it’s its mission is to determine the potential usefulness of man in space.”
Thus, MOL operations were expanded to include 10 experiments known as Project Manifold, which studied cell growth and new technologies on board the spacecraft.
Test address
The first and only launch of the MOL program took place at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on November 3, 1966, two years after work on the project began.
The launch was just a test, consisting of a Gemini capsule and a model of the MOL without the imaging payload atop a Titan-IIIC rocket. The model entered Earth orbit and launched three satellites.
The Project Manifold experiments were also aboard the MOL model and were intended to operate for 75 days, but the MOL stopped transmitting data after only 30 days before decaying from orbit on January 9, 1967.
Anxiety and criticism
Since the program’s inception, the value of the MOL has been criticized and doubted. By 1969, the program was years behind schedule and over budget.
Since the MOL was operating under the guise of testing human “potential utility in space”, the program was publicly perceived to be too similar to NASA’s Apollo program, so much so that Congress saw it as a duplicate and that she cut her funding by 60% in 1967.
MOL advocates pushed for efforts to merge the USAF with NASA, which was backfired as it would damage NASA’s image as a peaceful agency.
As budget cuts and delays plagued the MOL, their military reconnaissance technology was becoming obsolete, rendering the original intent of the program useless.
Cancellation
President Richard Nixon canceled the MOL program on June 10, 1969 – just four years after Johnson approved the program.
At the time of the cancellation, there were 192 military personnel, 100 civilians, and 13,187 contractors working on the MOL program.
Although the MOL never officially went to space, its legacy inspired future space missions. The MOL waste management system was used aboard Skylab, America’s first manned research laboratory in space. The technology envisioned for the MOL imaging system helped develop NASA’s ground sensing systems.
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