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NASA Discovers Space Spies From the 60's
Saeed al-Sahaf writes "In a room forgotten for more than thirty years at NASA's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, NASA recently found suits for space spies. Originally thought to be Gemini suits, the manufacturer determined that they were suits from a short-lived Cold War-era military program to put a manned reconnaissance station in space. Begun in 1964, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program was an Air Force initiative that would have sent Air Force astronauts to a space station in a Gemini capsule. After spending a few weeks in orbit, the crew would undock and return to Earth. An interesting blast from the past."
Quoth TFA:
The spacesuit with identifying number 008 had the name "LAWYER" on the left sleeve. The suit was traced to Lt. Col. Richard E. Lawyer, a member of the first group recruited to be MOL astronauts in 1965. Records show that official ownership of this suit was transferred by NASA to the Smithsonian Institution in 1983. The suit itself has now been returned to the Smithsonian.
I thought the idea was to send lawyers in space WITHOUT environmental gear, sillies.
It's so quaint to see the evidence of paranoia and insecurity from back in the 1960s. Glad to be around in the 2000s.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
Articles like this make me look forward to the 1960's..
They were really advanced.. and we're lame - we just have Internets.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Holy smokes, they can build spaceships, land men on the moon, but they can't take an inventory? What else do they have laying around?
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Being concerned because your enemies are aiming a few tens of thousand nukes at you is not paranoid.
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The reason the suits looked like Gemini era suits was because the MOL program was based on Gemini technology.
A Titan IIIC booster with a 'Blue Gemini' atop would launch with the space station afixed, they would do their observation, then the Gemini would detach and land. Later missions could dock with the existing observation platform when feasible.
The launches would have taken place from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California. This is needed to efficiently put spacecraft into polar orbit without overflying populated land during boost.
A launch site was created at Vandenburg to handle manned spacecraft launches, but the program was cancelled as the article says. What it doesn't say is that the same complex was refurbished in the 1980s as part of the effort to launch the Space Shuttle into polar orbit for military missions. That program was cancelled as well (following the Challenger destruction).
For people interested in MOL, go check out the X-20 Dynasoar. It was a related program that would have had a reusable spaceplane 15 years before the shuttle.
The most innovative aspect of the space suit was that it's made so your tuxedo doesn't wrinkle under it.
So they had the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, the Dyna-Soar program, and the USAF Space School. None of those survived the 1960s, although they were all good, workable ideas. The MOL incorporated the Gemini spacecraft, the best space flying machine to come out of NASA. (Mercury was the "man in a can" capsule, and Apollo was less maneuverable.)
As for the blue MH-7 suit, there's one of those on display at Wright-Patterson AFB.
Send one or to to the Smithsonian and put the rest on ebay. I bet if NASA unloaded all their old junk they could probably fund another R/C car mission to Mars.
Back in the 40s and 50s, there was a lot of talk about doing things like surveillance (you can see a lot) and communications (a lot of people can see you) from orbit. One common assumption (which turned out to be correct) was that these things would be extremely important in the near future. Another assumption (which turned out to be totally wrong) was that this would be done by sending people to go live in orbit. Once there, they'd use photography, electronics, and other technology that wouldn't be much more advanced that what people were familiar with. You can see this in Arthur C. Clarke's original proposals for communications satellites and in fiction from Clarke, Heinlen, and others.
What really happened, of course, is that rocket technology progressed relatively slowly, while electronics progressed very rapidly. So long before it was practical to a space station in orbit, it was practical to put a simple electronic gadget in orbit that would do all those chores pretty cheaply. Kind of sad, really -- if building better rockets had been more of an economic and military necessity, we'd probably be the space-going civilization that eveybody back in the 50s assumed we would be.
Then again, the need to build smaller and more reliable electronics did a lot to jump-start the computer revolution -- so we mustn't complain too much!
"Sounds to me like someone at NASA was building up their own private collection, and used a room they thought they had the only key to, not realizing there was a master key system in use."
I don't know about that. I work at a certain military facility, and in the building where I used to work there was a room way in the back of the basement, through two sets of locked doors, that used to contain a computer system I was responsible for and still had parts and manuals and such. I found out about it from someone who used to work there, and when I went to get access it was determined that not only did no one have access, but no one was even declared as being responsible for the area.
And this wasn't just a matter of not knowing who had the key. All the doors were tied into the central entry control system and there simply weren't any prox keys issued with access, aside from some master keys used by maintenance.
Keep in mind that this is a military base, and very few active duty types stick around for more than a few years in one assignment. The room in question was run by contractors, and hadn't been used over the span of a couple of contract transitions.
I did finally get access and found a whole rack of modems (1200 or 2400 baud, I forget) still powered up and ready. A power line monitor had run itself out of recording tape years before but kept going. To this day there are still racks of VAX spares and tape reels down there.
Oh, and it turned out at least one portion of that area WAS being accessed. Turns out the maintenance guys had figured out no one ever came down there and had turned an adjacent office area into their private lounge.
Anyway, never underestimate the ability of the government to lose things. Portions of buildings included.
A related story:
:)
The aircraft carrier USS Independence (CV-62) was originally named the USS Constellation. But there was something that held up on the original Independence's shipbuilding process, so the original Constellation was completed as the Independence... sometime later, there was a fire on the Independence's forecastle, and when the layers of grey paint were burned off, there was the logo for the USS Constellation!
Many years later, during a refit some engineers were going over the ship's blueprints, and "discovered" a compartment along the midship line, down in the ship. The compartment was opened (it had no doors or hatches into it, so they had to cut through a bulkhead), and the shipyard workers discovered a complete machine shop - the drill presses and lathes still covered in original preservative grease.
Apparently, during the ship's original construction, someone had walled up the machine shop.
So yes, the gov't can occasionally misplace things...