The National Reconnaissance Office is starting a series on the history of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, a small space lab that was designed in the early/mid 1960s for the Air Force. Officially just a basic space lab, in reality it was an advanced (for the time) spy satellite. So far there is only Part One on the NRO website, and there’s not much to it… but we’ll see how it goes.
The story of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory – part one
As a reminder, there is a whole freakin’ mountain of MOL documents on the NRO website:
Index, Declassified Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) Records
2 responses to “The story of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory”
I’ve never understood why they went off on this tangent of using Gemini hardware. It was a good idea at the time but it seems to me they should have incorporated MOL into the Apollo Program. They could have used the Apollo vehicle and Saturn 1s and it wouldn’t have been nearly as awkward. After all that’s what they eventually did with Skylab to the same result.
MOL preceded Apollo Applications Program by some years. MOL was also all USAF, not NASA, so using NASA launchers and capsules wasn’t much of an option. And the USAF already had the Titan III launch vehicle, designed initially for the X-20 Dyna Soar… which was cancelled to make way for MOL.
Near the end of the MOL program there were efforts to interest NASA in MOL hardware, launched by Saturns. NASA wasn’t much interested.