Word: mol
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Question of Endurance. The purpose of the MOL project is to investigate the problems of manned space voyages that may last as long as two months. A pressurized cylinder about the size of a small house trailer, 10 ft. in diameter and 20 to 30 ft. long, the MOL would be heaved into orbit by the 2,400,000-lb. thrust of an Air Force Titan IIIC booster. But the size, shape and orbit of the capsule are the least of anyone's concern in a profession that already talks of manned journeys to the moon and beyond...
...With his MOL mandate, McNamara has given the Air Force a proper opportunity to prove its claims. The project will amount to a massive experiment checking on man's ability to function for long periods in space. And it will be a step toward demonstrating whether or not that functioning can have a military value to match its cost...
...will have plenty of room to move around, and by making due allowance for zero gravity, they will be able to perform elaborate and delicate tasks. After several weeks in the lab, they will return to the capsule and close the hatch in the heat shield. After detaching the MOL and leaving it in orbit, they will ignite their retrorockets and make their flaming descent...
Dead Dyna-Soar. About the same time that he gave MOL to the Air Force, McNamara killed Dyna-Soar, the winged, piloted space glider on which the Air Force has already spent $400 million, and was planning to spend many hundred million more. Even if Dyna-Soar succeeded in returning to earth on glowing wings, McNamara argued, it would do little to ad vance the military use of space. The glider would have been able to stay in orbit for only a few hours; it is not likely that its pilot would have learned anything not already known from NASA...
...optimists of the aerospace industry, MOL points the way to the Air Force's pet project: manned orbiting space stations. Building and supplying a fleet of these stations will cost many billions of dollars per year, but Air Force space enthusiasts believe that the stations will pay for themselves by serving as military patrols-watching and photographing activity behind the Iron Curtain, inspecting suspicious satellites and destroying them, if desirable. Patrols might carry nuclear weapons for use against the ground or other spacecraft. Some optimists believe that they might even detect hostile nuclear submarines below the surface...