History of the Mol Space Station

“The United States has been in space from the very beginning; its intentions are not sinister or evil. The United States is there to help preserve its security and to defend itself and it will use the tools and techniques that make strategic, tactical, and economic sense to achieve defense and security. If that proves to include military man in space, then it will acquire the systems to do that.”

On May 1, 1960 the United States and Soviet Union entered into an even more tense situation than before when American pilot Gary Powers’ U-2 Spy Plane was shot down by a Soviet Union S-75 Divina surface to air missile. As tension mounted, several questions began to arise; how was the United States supposed to protect itself and conduct surveillance if the one plane they thought was untouchable was now in jeopardy?

The beginning of the 1960s began a space race that went virtually unknown to the public eye. While NASA was creating plans to reach the moon, the United States Air Force, CIA and National Reconnaissance Office were all playing apart in beating the Soviet Union to the orbital paths of each other’s country.

On August 18, 1960, the United States successfully launched its first photographic spy satellite called Corona. Over the span of several years, over 100 Corona satellites were successfully launched and able to provide the CIA with photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other areas. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Corona had several successful launch and recover missions. The image filled film would be dropped back down to earth with a parachute and would be intercepted by a specialized airplane. While images were successfully taken over a period of several years, most of the film recovered was useless due to cloud cover. To counter this problem, military officials along with the CIA planned to create MOL or Manned Orbital Laboratory, a space station that could hold 2 trained military officers with the sole purpose of photography areas of interest in the Soviet Union, China and other countries. The MOL program was started in 1963. While the beginning idea of MOL was to prove that man was needed in space for military missions, it quickly turned into much more than that. During the mid 1960s, MOL’s objective turned strictly to reconnaissance purposes. In the beginning MOL seemed to be overlooked. “The MOL idea was part of government thinking since 1963…but with all the money NASA was spending to get to the moon, nothing was left to investigate the military potential of space.” President Johnson, however, did leave money for MOL and in 1965 the MOL Program was publicly announced and accepted by the President.

Meanwhile, the ears of the Soviet Union are listening and they do not like what they hear. At nearly the exact same time, the Soviet Union enters into a secret race to the sky with their own “вЂ?Orbital Piloted Station’, OPS, code-named Almaz or вЂ?Diamond’.” With the expected first launch date of MOL at the end of 1968, the Soviets got to work.

“The Almaz was designed for a three person crew and an operational life of one to two years.” Chief designer Vladimir Chelomei’s idea for the space station was a way to blow past the American MOL project. By increasing the operational life of the station, several missions to the station could be arranged while the MOL station was designed to burn up upon reentry into the atmosphere. However, both countries were headed in the same direction in terms of design without even knowing it. In order for the crew members to enter the laboratory cabin, both countries designed a hatch/tunnel system connecting the re-entry capsule to the laboratory through a small hole that was engineered in the heat shield.

On November 3, 1966, the United States seemed to be taking the lead in the race to orbit with a test launch of the Gemini 2 in order to see if the heat shield was still operational with the latch system that was engineered. Little did they know that this would be the first and last launch ever for the MOL program. By 1967, MOL started to interfere with efforts of secret department managed by the CIA called the NRO or National Reconnaissance Office. While the NRO was somewhat involved with MOL, they were not the primary project coordinators, the U.S. Air Force was. The NRO started to develop a “massive robotic spacecraft designated the KH-9 HEXAGON.” These programs soon found themselves making their cases for which program should stay and which program should be scrapped.

In 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey held a briefing on the two projects. MOL’s primary reconnaissance mission was to provide high resolution photographs of вЂ?areas of interest’. In order for these high resolution pictures to be accurate it would need the judgment and flexibility of a human operator. The NRO’s HEXAGON camera “had a lower resolution, but could photograph massive amounts of territory underneath, scanning vast swaths of the Soviet Union looking for changes” in territory and geography.

As money for space exploration became tight, the debate on which camera is more efficient and useful became a source of rhubarb. “The CIA conducted many studies of what trained human eyes could see in overhead photography. Although there was a natural drive towards better and better resolution, higher resolution came with other costs, primarily a smaller viewing area…the CIA concluded that MOL’s four inch resolution was excessive,