Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

The pilot who discovered this maneuver ended up leaving the program. It’s not because he did anything wrong, or that he didn’t like the work he was doing, or even that he didn’t think the Dyna-Soar was a cool plane.

He just got a better job offer. His name was Neil Armstrong.

The remaining six pilots (I suppose I should be calling them astronauts) assigned to the program were introduced to the public on September 19, 1962. Five of the six were U.S. Air Force pilots, and the remaining one was with NASA and had participated in the X-15 program. These were some of the best of the best.

But storm clouds were forming over the project. The problem was that no one seemed to be able to identify the role Dyna-Soar was supposed to play. During the Kennedy administration, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara questioned the logic of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a program whose mission parameters could be achieved by other platforms. America’s new satellites could take care of the global reconnaissance mission, while spy aircraft such as the U-2 and SR-71 could pick up any slack left over. ICBMs and SLBMs could maintain strategic deterrence. And NASA’s Mercury program was well on its way to answering many of the questions of thermodynamics and human spaceflight that Dyna-Soar was tasked to answer. For a numbers guy like McNamara, it didn’t make a lot of sense for the Air Force to spend that much taxpayer money for a space plane just because it was kinda cool.

It’s hard to dispute the logic, but it was still disappointing for all involved in the project when, in mid-1962, the Department of Defense renamed the Dyna-Soar the X-20. The experimental X-plane designation meant that innovation for the sake of science and knowledge would continue, but the Dyna-Soar would never become a full-scale production vehicle.

But it was still alive and kicking, at least for the time being. Boeing completed a mock-up of the Dyna-Soar/X-20 and paraded it in front of the public and press at an unveiling ceremony in Las Vegas in September 1962. They also announced that the Department of Defense had committed to $130 million for the program for 1963, and another $125 million for 1964.

Yet most of that money would never be spent—at least not on the X-20. In March 1963, the Air Force conducted a review of the project that directly compared the military potential of the X-20 to NASA’s new Gemini program. This wasn’t a fair fight. From the outside, Gemini appeared to be nothing more than a two-seater version of Mercury, the capsule that took the original seven American astronauts into space. But it was significantly different, and far more capable. It could maneuver, change orbits, and link up with other spacecraft. Gemini was the darling of the space program, and (as we will see) could be scaled up to maximize its national security/military/intelligence utility.

Despite having spent close to $3 billion in today’s dollars ($400 million at the time), in December 1963 McNamara formally dropped the hammer on the X-20 project. It had no military mission, and was too expensive to serve only as a research system. It had to go. Its budget was needed elsewhere.

On the same day the Department of Defense announced the cancellation of the X-20 program, December 10, 1963, they announced a new initiative for the development of what was called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL). In a press release, DoD explained their new shiny object: “The MOL program, which will consist of an orbiting pressurized cylinder approximately the size of a small house trailer, will increase the Defense Department effort to determine military usefulness of man in space.”

The MOL was appropriated the remaining funding set aside for the X-20. It would be a huge technological step forward for American ambitions in space. The space station would allow astronauts to conduct observations and experiments for up to a month at a time, before the crew would enter a modified Gemini capsule for their return trip to Earth. At that point, the longest trip in space had been the Soviet Union’s Vostok 5, which stayed in space for four days, twenty-three hours, and change in June 1963. The design of the MOL system also “permit[ted] rendezvous in space between the orbiting laboratory and a second Gemini capsule, so that relief crews could replace original crews in the laboratory.”

A little less than two years later, once the preliminary conversations about budget, logistics, testing, and so on were complete, President Lyndon Johnson announced to the public he had ordered the DoD to “immediately proceed with the development of a Manned Orbiting Laboratory.” According to LBJ:

This program will bring us new knowledge about what man is able to do in space. It will enable us to relate that ability to the defense of America. It will develop technology and equipment which will help advance manned and unmanned space flights. And it will make it possible to perform their new and rewarding experiments with that technology and equipment…. We believe the heavens belong to the people of every country… and we will continue to hold out to all nations, including the Soviet Union, the hand of cooperation in the exciting years of space exploration which lie ahead for all of us.

What a beautiful sentiment. It’s like we are in Star Trek and the MOL is the starship Enterprise . Its one-month mission: To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before. To split all the infinitives for the benefit of mankind, with “new and rewarding experiments” helping us to achieve our perfect utopia in space and here on Earth.

This was solely for public consumption. It was a massive pile of horse manure.

In reality, the MOL program was designed to include capabilities for a highly secret set of experiments and collecting vital intelligence from space. The project was called Dorian, and it called for the United States to use the MOL as a manned reconnaissance space station, to gather both imagery intelligence (IMINT—photography) and signals intelligence (SIGINT—in the most basic sense, intercepting communications and other electronic signals).

Its main asset was the Dorian camera system. Developed by Eastman Kodak (which had been making cameras for a number of top-secret American intelligence platforms for years), it had some unique capabilities. For one, compared to the current version of American spy satellite, the Gambit, it had a longer focal length, which gave it better resolution. It also had a spotting scope, which the crew would use before kicking in the main camera. The scope would allow the crew to see if the target area was clear enough for good imagery (so the camera is not taking pictures of pretty clouds but nothing else). Also, the camera system was extremely flexible. Imagery targeting priorities could change almost instantly, and the MOL’s crew and camera could quickly be ready to take advantage of any unforeseen opportunities. Finally, if the camera broke, malfunctioned, or for whatever reason was acting whompyjawed (a technical term in some parts of the United States), the crew would be trained to fix it in-flight. If an unmanned satellite like the Corona or Gambit went bad, there was very little anyone could do about it.

MOL would require a special (and somewhat unprecedented) partnership among three government entities: the Air Force, NASA, and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). It was nominally an Air Force program, and they would provide the manpower for the space station, but the Air Force needed NASA’s help to safely bring their airmen to and from the MOL. To do so, the Air Force secured the use of the aforementioned NASA space capsules developed for the Gemini program. These were modified with a hatch on the bottom of the capsule, to allow the MOL crew members to travel through a passageway to the laboratory section of the station—the orbiting “pressurized cylinder approximately the size of a small house trailer.” Once their mission was complete (perhaps a month later), the crew would return to the Gemini capsule (with their film and signals intelligence) for the return trip home.