Word: mol
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Eight days in space will seem like a short mission to the men who go up in the Manned Orbiting Lab (MOL). They will stay in orbit a month or more. Working and walking around in a fairly roomy, pressurized cabin, they will wear ordinary street clothes. Occasionally they will don space suits, step outside for a stroll or a bit of research...
...ordering the Pentagon to start building the MOL immediately, President Johnson made the U.S.'s most important and expensive commitment to manned space flight since the decision to aim for the moon. He also put the U.S. military into the manned space enterprise for the first time. The Air Force, which will control MOL, plans to test-launch some components in 1967, orbit an unmanned lab early in 1968, and send up a two-man MOL later that year. Altogether the $1.5 billion program calls for a series of unmanned test shots and five MOLS...
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...
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...