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

The NRO provided the reconnaissance equipment—the whole reason for MOL’s existence—and the rigid security guidelines for the program. The latter already existed for military space projects, so no one needed to reinvent the wheel. It would be as secret as you can get.

Now, it was one thing to have a broad outline of a technology and a general sense of potential mission goals and parameters. It was another to know specifics of what you would like to accomplish. That took some thinking. The Department of Defense set up a working group to brainstorm ideas and identify proposed MOL experiments. Starting with four hundred proposed experiments submitted by various defense and industrial agencies, the working group categorized them into technical areas—optics, infrared, radar, communications, and so on—to figure out the best way to consolidate these ideas into a coherent mission objective. After a first cut, they trimmed the list down to fifty-nine. A second, and final, series of eliminations pared it down to twelve primary (and eighteen secondary) MOL experiments. Here’s what they decided (with my annotation in brackets):

P-1–ACQUISITION AND TRACKING OF GROUND TARGETS. “To evaluate man’s performance in acquiring pre-assigned targets and precisely tracking them to an accuracy compatible with the requirements for precise Image Motion Compensation (IMC) determination.”

[How good will MOL crews be at finding and tracking important preselected intelligence targets?]

P-2–{Remains Classified}

[It’s totally about you. It probably refers to the NRO’s mission to spy on your house.]

P-3–DIRECT VIEWING FOR GROUND AND SEA TARGETS. “To evaluate man’s ability to scan and acquire land targets of opportunity, to scan and detect ships and surfaced submarines, and to examine ships and surfaced submarines for classification purposes.”

[How good will MOL crews be at finding and tracking unexpected but important targets of opportunity?]

P-4–ELECTROMAGNETIC SIGNAL DETECTION. “To evaluate man’s capability for making semi-analytical decisions and control adjustments to optimize the orbital collection of intercept data from advanced electromagnetic emitters.”

[How good will MOL crews be at grabbing SIGINT from space, and can they do the analysis—sorry, semi-analysis—to make good decisions about targeting and collection?]

P-5–IN-SPACE MAINTENANCE. “To evaluate man’s capability to perform malfunction detection, repair, and maintenance of complex military peculiar equipment.”

[If something breaks, can we fix it?]

P-6–EXTRAVEHICULAR ACTIVITY. “To evaluate man’s ability in the performance of extravehicular operations peculiar to future military operations, including external spacecraft maintenance.”

[Floating around in space while conducting military operations (push-ups? Laser battles?), and fixing things.]

P-7–REMOTE MANEUVERING UNIT. “To evaluate the astronaut’s ability to control the Remote Maneuvering Unit (RMU).”

[Jetpacks. Or more precisely, space jetpacks.]

P-8–AUTONOMOUS SPACECRAFT POSITION FIXING AND NAVIGATION. “To evaluate the capability of a man using various combinations of equipment to act as a spacecraft navigator and provide autonomous navigation.”

[Can’t really pull over for directions.]

P-9–NEGATION AND DAMAGE ASSESSMENT. “To evaluate man’s ability to carry out a negation and damage assessment function.”

[This doesn’t tell us much, but it is arguably the most interesting experiment. This is all about checking out other countries’ satellites, to see if they are hostile, and if they are, to “negate” them. The documented stated that to “incapacitate or physically destroy the satellite as required… it is presently anticipated that negation missiles would use non-nuclear warheads.” Well, that’s good. I guess.]

P-10–MULTIBAND SPECTRAL OBSERVATIONS. “To evaluate man’s ability to detect high radiance gradient background events and missile signatures using multiband spectral sensors and to provide additional measurement data on backgrounds and missile signatures.”

[This is referring to an intelligence collection method known as MASINT—measurements and signatures intelligence. It is a catchall phrase used for intel collection using advanced scientific technologies, such as spectroscopy and seismology. In this case, it is primarily focused on gathering information on enemy missile launches.]

P-11–GENERAL PERFORMANCE IN MILITARY SPACE OPERATIONS. “To obtain reliable and valid measurements of more basic performance as it relates to applied mission functions and physiological changes occurring during the stresses of the MOL flights.”

[Push-ups and sit-ups.]

P-12–BIOMEDICAL AND PHYSICAL EVALUATION. “To evaluate those effects of weightlessness which can potentially compromise mission success. Sufficient data are required to validate supporting measures employed, devise improvement methods, if necessary, and afford plausible estimates of biomedical status for missions longer than 30 days.”

[This was a pretty big deal. Humans had been to space at this point, but the missions were measured in hours. No one knew how the body would react to a mission longer than five days, let alone one that lasted a month].

Three other experiments were added later: P-13 (Ocean Surveillance), P-14 (Manned Assembly and Service of Large Antennas), and P-15 (Manned Assembly and Service of Large Telescopes).

Sounds like a solid plan to me. Who could possibly object to a program that has the potential not only to provide insanely high-resolution imagery intelligence, but could also give us valuable insight into the abilities of humans to operate in space for an extended period? Seems like a no-brainer. The U.S. government had already poured significant resources into the project and, as we have seen, thousands of man-hours of plotting and planning future mission parameters. Why would anyone be against this idea? What organization would be so bold as to take on NASA, the NRO, and the Department of Defense?

Yep. The Central Intelligence Agency. Who else?

The CIA had been responsible for America’s first two satellite programs, Corona and Gambit, and was now angling for a new and highly advanced third generation of reconnaissance satellite known as Hexagon. MOL and Hexagon were both extremely expensive, and thus direct rivals for limited funding appropriations. They had similar purposes—spy on the bad guys—but significantly different capabilities. The Hexagon was designed to capture photos with a resolution of less than two feet. But it could also photograph huge tracts of land in a single pass—thousands of square miles at a time, during a single mission (some of the specifics of its resolution capabilities are still classified). The Hexagon was big, and carried sixty miles of high-resolution photographic film. The CIA couldn’t wait to get it into service.

The MOL, on the other hand, focused on small areas using extremely high resolution—as small as twelve inches. A very narrow scope, but still. Twelve inches. From space.

I suppose it’s unkind to blame CIA parochialism and bureaucratic infighting for the end of the MOL program. Unkind, but not unfair. In early 1969, President Richard Nixon decided to cancel the CIA’s Hexagon program, citing cost considerations and redundancy concerns (with, of course, the MOL). This sent CIA director Richard Helms into a flurry of action, all aimed at reversing the decision. There could be only one—and it should be Hexagon, not MOL.

Helms and the Agency had anticipated having to fight for their program, and so more than a year earlier they began to prime the proverbial pump. On March 5, 1968, the CIA sent a statement to the DoD expressing the Agency’s views. It read, in part, “Mr. Helms, Director of Central Intelligence, has reservations as to the value of better (than one foot) resolution photography for national intelligence purposes. He recognizes that photography with resolutions better than that obtainable by the Gambit-3 system would be helpful but does not believe studies conducted to date show that the value of this increased resolution justified the expenditures associated with the MOL Program.” To translate the government-speak: It’s too expensive and we don’t need it. But we do need something better than what we have.