(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n
Other instruments included high-resolution optical and infrared cameras, a side-looking synthetic-aperture radar, built by the US Navy, with a resolution of 25 feet \u00e2\u20ac\u201c later cancelled because it was too large and heavy to be easily placed into orbit \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and an electronic intelligence (ELINT) antenna. Much of the Dorian hardware, analysts have speculated, was probably later employed on KH-9 Big Bird and KH-11 Kennan reconnaissance satellites and may offer hints that both the CIA and Air Force doubted that MOL would ever fly. <\/p>\n
For the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcaerospace research pilots\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 selected to travel to the outpost, there were also doubts, but in Hank Hartsfield\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mind they centred on budgetary matters, as more money was siphoned away from MOL to finance the escalating conflict in Vietnam. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It was depressing to see the funding issues that we had,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said in a June 2001 interview. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Every year, we had a big funding profile where we had to get $600 million\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6[so] the project planned on that, and then would come the budget [that] was actually passed: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcYou\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re only going to get 400, but plan on 600 next year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153So we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d spend about 90 days just rephasing the programme \u00e2\u20ac\u201c turning subcontractors off for a while \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s<\/i> expensive. Finally, you got the programme back on track and the next year went through the same cycle again. Well, we thought we were going to be, but \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcNo, you still aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to get the 600\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. Four-hundred-again plan. Of course, as the programme stretches out, the cost goes up because you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got a marching army\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6so the cost had almost doubled in three years\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n
In fact, by the time Stanley White\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s team met with NASA at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas to discuss the sharing of biomedical data, MOL had already guzzled $2.2 billion of taxpayers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 money. The station itself, in its final configuration, was quite different from the three-module triangular structure planned in 1962: it took the form of a 40-feet-long cylinder, powered by either solar arrays or fuel cells, and comprising a transfer tunnel from the pilots\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Gemini spacecraft, a laboratory divided into \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcworking\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcliving\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 quarters and lastly an equipment section loaded with oxygen and other tanks.<\/p>\n
One early plan actually called for a tunnel built into the base of the laboratory, extending to an aft docking collar, which would enable two<\/i> MOLs to be connected together in orbit. Such plans were never realised and had vanished from the Air Force\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s radar well before the project was cancelled in June 1969. An interesting aspect of MOL was that the Gemini would have been attached \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcbackwards\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 to the outpost: rather than linking-up \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcnose-first\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, as Apollo did with Skylab, it was through a hatch in the base<\/i> that crews would have traversed to reach their 30-day home in orbit.<\/p>\n
Gemini was, said astronaut John Young, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153like sitting sideways in a phone booth\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6really<\/i> tight\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, and enabling pilots to unstrap, turn around and get through a two-feet-wide hatch behind them would have been tricky. As a result, the Air Force tilted the seats slightly apart, as well as completely redesigning the spacecraft\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s instrument displays. However, it was not the size of the Gemini that caused concern; rather, it was the hatch <\/i>in its heatshield \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the very component upon which the crew\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lives would depend during their fiery re-entry through the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
The spacecraft and its pilots would have ridden into orbit already attached to MOL, neatly sidestepping the complications of rendezvous or docking, but at the end of their two-to-four-week-long mission, after closing the hatch, they would have had to hope that the tiniest \u00e2\u20ac\u201c yet potentially deadliest \u00e2\u20ac\u201c gap around the edge of the heatshield would not admit hot gases and tear the Gemini apart. As a result, it was decided to attach a MOL mockup, built from the propellant tank of a Titan II rocket, to NASA\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Gemini-2 spacecraft and launch them on an unmanned test of the new hatch.<\/p>\n
On November 3rd 1966, the unusual combo lifted-off from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral and instantly made history as Gemini-2 became the first \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcused\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 spacecraft to be refurbished and reflown. Originally launched in January 1965 for a final dress-rehearsal before the first manned Gemini mission, it was later modified by the Air Force with a MOL-specification hatch in its base. Following a 33-minute suborbital flight, it separated from the MOL mockup and began its fiery plunge to Earth. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It came through with flying colours,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d exulted Hank Hartsfield. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There was no heating problem or any burn-through. It proved the concept\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n
However, one of the key objectives of MOL was that it should operate in polar orbits, which would have resulted in higher-energy re-entries; consequently, the heatshield\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s diameter was increased to stick out from the base of the Gemini. Other changes from the standard NASA version of the spacecraft were that its manoeuvring thrusters were removed and its orientation managed instead by several forward-mounted reaction-control jets. Unlike the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccivilian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Gemini, which was designed to operate for periods of up to a fortnight with two men aboard, the systems of the Air Force variant were intended for longer-term \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcstorage\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n
After reaching orbit, the men\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first task would be to shutdown the spacecraft and spend their long mission aboard MOL. They would then reawaken the slumbering Gemini\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s systems shortly before re-entry, undock from the outpost and commence their return to Earth. To this end, the spacecraft had only 14 hours of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcloitering\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 capability in its thrusters and life-support systems after separating from MOL. Naturally, the two groups of astronauts \u00e2\u20ac\u201c NASA and Air Force \u00e2\u20ac\u201c prepared in similar ways to fly different versions of the same machine and Hartsfield later provided some insight into his first experience as a trainee spacefarer.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We got some of the routine survival training,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d had water survival [and] we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d gone down to Panama for jungle survival. We were getting that kind of training to get ready to go, because we were going to fly out of Vandenberg [Air Force Base in California] into a high-inclination orbit, which meant you covered a pretty good piece of the world. If you had to abort, you could almost go anywhere \u00e2\u20ac\u201c jungle or polar regions\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. <\/p>\n
Even three decades later, both he and Don Peterson were reluctant to talk in too much depth about their specific tasks and restricted their descriptions to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcgeneric\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 issues. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Of course,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d recalled Peterson, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153we were flying a capsule in those days, so we were going to land in the water. The Earth is two-thirds water and you might come down someplace that you hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t planned, [so] you had to be able to stay afloat and alive maybe for several days until [the Air Force] could get to you. Finding people in those days wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t nearly as good as it is now\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n
To this day, it is unclear as to which MOL missions Hartsfield or Peterson would have actually flown, although the first pathfinding flight \u00e2\u20ac\u201c scheduled for February 1972 at the time of the project\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cancellation \u00e2\u20ac\u201c would have been conducted, appropriately, by two Air Force pilots: Commander Jim Taylor and Pilot Al Crews. Further two-man teams would then have been despatched at nine-month intervals for roughly 30-day orbital stays until the fifth and final manned mission in February 1975. At least one MOL flight, it was expected, would carry two US Navy officers, probably Bob Crippen and Dick Truly.<\/p>\n
The pilots, like the project itself, were supposed to be highly classified. However, there was a problem: one of them \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Bob Lawrence \u00e2\u20ac\u201c would have become the first African-American spacefarer when MOL finally flew and, naturally, the media grew to recognise him. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The rest of us were unknowns,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Don Peterson, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and I could travel on false IDs and nobody had any idea who I was. But [the Air Force] worried because [the press] knew him on sight and it becomes much harder to run a secret programme when one of your guys is a high interest to the media\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n
Tragically, Lawrence was killed in an aircraft crash in 1967, two years before the MOL project was cancelled. Both Peterson and Hartsfield are convinced that, had he lived, he would have gone on to become a NASA astronaut and probably flown the Shuttle during the 1980s\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 <\/p>\n
After unstrapping and somehow curling and twisting themselves around and through the hatch in the base of their Gemini, the MOL crews would first have drifted along a tunnel surrounded by cryogenic storage tanks for helium, hydrogen and oxygen to supply the station\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s atmosphere and fuel cells. Indeed, following the Apollo 1 disaster in January 1967, it was intended that MOL would have an atmosphere of 31% helium and 69% oxygen, pressurised at five pounds per square inch, to reduce the risk of fire or detrimental medical effects on the pilots.<\/p>\n
The only adverse effect, it seemed, would have been some unusual chatter from the crew as they climbed to orbit: after breathing pure oxygen into their spacesuits, helium would also have been steadily pumped into the Gemini to better acclimatise them to the MOL environment. One can imagine that there would have been a few light-hearted smirks and chuckles among flight controllers as they listened in to the squeaky voices of two high-on-helium space explorers\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 <\/p>\n
After entering the outpost, and floating between the cryogenic strorage tanks, the crew would have found themselves in its pressurised section. This was organised into two \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcstories\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, each furnished with eight bays nicknamed \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthe birdcage\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. Providing further hints as to the kind of work the men would have done aloft, these bays would have contained biochemical test consoles, an experiment airlock, a glovebox for liquids handling, a motion chair on rails and physiology console to monitor their health and an Earth-facing viewport.<\/p>\n
By the end of the 1960s, however, with a launch seemingly getting closer, the reality was that MOL was drifting further into oblivion. Members of the workforce complained that, no matter how hard they worked, the project always appeared to be at least a year away from launch. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153General [Joseph] Bleymaier was the commander,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d recalled Don Peterson, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and he finally went to [President Richard] Nixon and said \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcEither fund this programme or kill it, because we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re burning time and money and we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not making progress because we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have enough funds\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. <\/p>\n
After cuts to the number of technical personnel, followed by woefully inadequate budgetary allocations, Nixon finally cancelled MOL on June 10th 1969 to save an unspent $1.5 billion of its estimated total pricetag. The Outer Space Treaty, signed two years earlier, had already imposed enough restrictions on the Air Force to effectively demilitarise many of their proposed activities in Earth orbit and the war in Vietnam was gradually soaking up more funds and resources. By now, MOL had swallowed close to three billion dollars, without even a single, full-scale unmanned flight. <\/p>\n
For the pilots, obviously, its cancellation was a devastating blow. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We all thought it was going to come to fruition,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Bo Bobko in February 2002. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It was a surprise that it was just cancelled one day. I can remember I had a classmate from the Air Force Academy [who] had come to the MOL programme and it was his first day and they called everybody down to the auditorium and [told us that it had] been cancelled\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Hank Hartsfield, who was travelling to Huntington Beach in California, was also astonished, particularly in light of the work accomplished thus far. <\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The crew quarters [at Vandenberg] were built, the training building was built, the pad was 90% complete,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he remembered. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It broke our hearts when it got cancelled. I won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t forget the day. I was on my way to a meeting at 7:30 [am], listening to the news and they announced the cancellation. When I got to [MOL prime contractor] Douglas [Aircraft] and walked in, it was like walking into a morgue. <\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It caught them completely by surprise. They heard it on the radio, like I did, or they came to work and found they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have a job. It was massive layoffs. People were getting pink slips almost immediately on the contractor force\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6a very<\/i> unhappy day\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. For the Air Force pilots, the next step seemed to be to volunteer for Vietnam, although they were excluded from flying combat missions. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We had a two-year duty and travel restriction,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Hartsfield, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153because of the classified things we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been exposed to, we couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be put in an environment where we could get captured\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n
Several of the MOL pilots did return to active duty, but seven \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Hartsfield, Peterson, Bobko, Crippen, Truly, Overmyer and Fullerton \u00e2\u20ac\u201c were ultimately selected in September 1969 as NASA\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s seventh group of astronauts. After a wait of more than a decade, each flew at least one Shuttle mission and, in Crippen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s case, as many as four. In fact, the final irony of MOL seems to be that, had Challenger not exploded in January 1986, Crippen would have commanded Mission 62A \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the first-ever manned space launch from the West Coast, just as he had been trained to do almost two decades earlier\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n
Click here: <\/em><\/font>www.springer.com\/0-387-21517-4<\/em><\/font> for more details<\/em>.<\/font><\/p>\n <\/font> Or here: <\/em><\/font>http:\/\/forum.nasaspaceflight.com\/forums\/thread-view.asp?tid=1058<\/em><\/font> to ask Ben questions about the book.<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n Specific forum thread for this article on the Historical Space Flight section: Removed Yet they were not, insisted their sponsor, the US Air Force, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcastronauts\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, but rather \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcaerospace research pilots\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, with an agenda that remains largely classified to this day. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153When the manned space programme started,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d remembered Peterson, who later rode Challenger on her maiden mission, in a November 2002 interview, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Cold War was in full […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42196"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.springer.com\/sgw\/cda\/content\/image\/cda_displayimage\/0,11855,0-0-16-154847-0,00.jpg\")
NASAspaceflight.com Features writer Ben Evans is the author of the newly released Springer Praxis publication \u2018Space Shuttle Columbia \u2013 Her Missions and Crews.\u2019<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n
<\/em>http:\/\/forum.nasaspaceflight.com\/forums\/thread-view.asp?tid=1141<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"