[FPSPACE] NIIAO Almaz Control Panels Site (WOW!)

[DwayneDay]

-----Original Message-----
From: "Saunders B.Kramer Sr." <sbetk5 at earthlink.net>
Sent: Aug 10, 2004 9:14 PM

>Re: the notes on the USAF  MOL program. I am puzzled at the indications 
that there is some mystery about the MOL program. I was a senior staff 
member on that program for LMSC (Lockheed Missiles & Space Co.) in 
charge of having auxiliary hardware built and tested. LMSC provided $5 
million+ of it own money to respond to the USAF RFP (I had a $1 million 
budget for my portion of the effort). 


What years were you on the program?

It's clear from circumstantial evidence that I have, as well as some info that has been published, that the program was substantially reoriented around 1965.  I have a document from around April 1965 (I think) recommending that the NRO become involved in the program.  The NRO refuses to confirm or deny any involvement in MOL, which is quite simply not believable.  After all, by all accounts it included reconnaissance and reconnaissance is the NRO's middle name.  (But this is a legal strategy that they have taken.  If they acknowledged their role in MOL, then they would have to justify their decision to not declassify it.  But by not doing so, they have an extra layer of legal defense.)

I have also been told that the final MOL design was different than the illustrations we've seen.  Someone said that it looked somewhat like a Hubble telescope with a Gemini capsule on top, pointed down toward the earth.  Earlier versions were horizontally oriented, with no big single telescope at one end.  Can you shed any light on this?


>If there is any mystery it might 
be why Pres. LBJ cancelled the program. It was decided at the highest 
levels of our Gov't that unmanned reconnaissance birds could do the job 
at considerably lower cost than the MOL would have engendered.  An NRO 
decision I feel certain terminated the effort of MOL. There are other 
LMSC aspects to all this but nothing mysterious.

Actually, it was canceled in summer 1969 under Nixon, not LBJ.  This followed a high-level study that determined that the operational problems of a manned reconnaissance platform were significant.  My guess is that the study identified several things, including lifetime (an unmanned platform could stay in orbit for longer than 30 days, which was the nominal MOL lifetime), image distortion due to things like urine dumps, vibration due to life support systems and perhaps clumsy astronauts, and probably poorly-defined mission requirements.  In addition, MOL was costing a lot of money at the time that R&D budgets were being squeezed by the Vietnam war.

It has been reported in a number of places that the MOL cancellation surprised a lot of people.  Michael Yarymovych, who was the NASA spaceflight expert detailed to USAF to work on MOL, was actually testifying in front of Congress in a closed session when somebody handed him a note saying that Nixon had killed the program.  Yarymovych then told the Congressmen, who he said were outraged at Nixon's decision.  Yarymovych said that he too was surprised by the sudden cancellation.

However, I have been told that the program was nearly canceled in 1968.  And the high level study in 1969 was apparently not the first one that said that MOL was not a good investment.  So it seems that the program was skating on thin ice for several years, but only a few very senior people were aware of this.

In addition, MOL was competing for funding with the KH-9 program, which although funded by the CIA, included substantial USAF involvement.  The CIA was opposed to MOL and did not think that its high resolution was necessary.  Someone once told me about a briefing of Vice President Hubert Humphrey about MOL and the KH-9 where the Director of Central Intelligence very quietly prodded the Vice President to ask why MOL's high-resolution camera was necessary.  My guess (I don't have direct information on this) is that there was no formal requirement from the United States Intelligence Board for MOL's high resolution.  The USAF/NRO simply wanted to build it, but there was no national level statement of need for it from an intelligence standpoint.

The documentary record on MOL after 1964 is virtually nonexistent, leading me to believe that those records all got sent to NRO.  (Then again, the entire USAF documentation system started to fall apart around the mid-1960s, so who knows?)  Many of the articles about MOL have focused upon astronaut selection and things like that.  But we have no illustrations of the final configuration, no documents about NRO involvement or the KH-10 camera carried aboard (the mirrors were eventually donated to astronomers) and virtually nothing other than press releases from the latter years of the program.  I've toyed with the idea of writing this all up sometime, but the unknowns are significant and I cannot get anybody directly involved in the late part of the program to talk about it.  My research has pretty much hit a dead end on MOL's final years.



DDAY