Astronauts and Area 51: the Skylab Incident (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Astronauts and Area 51: the Skylab Incident (2006)

thespacereview.com

88 pointsLammy21 comments

This was the infamous Skylab 4:

Instead, after some discussion, they tossed the barf bag through the trash airlock—having decided, as David Shayler writes in Skylab: America’s Space Station, that “if the medics knew that the crew was vomiting, their influence over the rest of the the flight could be quite serious.” After a night of sleep, Pogue felt better.

All three forgot that a tape recorder had been running the whole time. The next morning, when Mission Control read the transcripts—which included the discussion in which the crew decided to lie to them—they were angry. “The crew was reprimanded—the first time astronauts had ever been publicly reproved during a flight,” wrote Henry S.F. Cooper in an article for the New Yorker. “The incident and the reprimand doubtless affected much that happened later.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/did-skylab-4s-astronau...

> There was no good way for an astronaut to record the precise time and pointing angle of a camera when he took a picture, and so the interpreters often had a very difficult time determining what they were looking at. This had been one of the factors that contributed to the demise of the US Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program.

This it not accurate. MOL was canceled in favor of adding black/dark projects to the NASA space shuttle “white” project. In fact a lot of tech developed for MOL ended up on the shuttle.

Source: my father worked on MOL

That makes me think of the near loss of the classified STS-27 mission.

https://www.americaspace.com/2018/12/09/dying-all-tensed-up-...

Star Wars themed wake up call and:

“In classified briefings, the crew presented a photograph of the classified payload to the unit commander for the mission, with the inscription "Suck on this, you Commie dogs"

Sure seems topical for radar satellite.

http://www.astronautix.com/s/sts-27.html

Now that's a detail I hadn't run across before.

Wow, I never heard of that. There is an amazing discussion of how the astronauts didn't trust nasa. Plus the one guy not getting strapped in until they were pretty far down. They definitely thought they were goners. I wonder what they needed to use the shuttle for, that was too big, giant telescope or dish?

I don’t think this is true. Yes a lot of MoL ended up on the shuttle, but that wasn’t why it was cancelled. The program was cancelled because it turns out that unmanned satellites could be made to accomplish the primary goal of MOL reliably and (relatively) cheaply. Keyhole and MOL were in direct competition, and Keyhole won.

Now there were secondary military benefits to MOL, and those requirements got rolled into the shuttle program. But what got MOL cancelled was the fact that Keyhole was better and cheaper.

Dynasoar was cancelled as well. Any idea why?

I assumed MacNamara was just on a cancelling power trip or somthing — the U.S. hemorrhaging too much cash in Vietnam....

> This it not accurate. MOL was canceled in favor of adding black/dark projects to the NASA space shuttle “white” project.

I thought the plan was that the US DoD would operate their own shuttles with military crews, rather than using NASA vehicles and crews. Wasn't that why Vandenberg was fitted-out to launch shuttles?

> Wasn't that why Vandenberg was fitted-out to launch shuttles?

I don't know about DoD operating their own shuttles with their own crews, but my understanding was that part of the pitch that got Shuttle approved was that they could do polar launches from Vandenberg to deploy Earth observation (read: spy) satellites. Or match the orbit of, observe, and even capture satellites belonging to other countries in polar orbits. It helped get DoD's backing for the program.

Being able to launch from Vandenberg as well as Cape Canaveral opens up more orbital options.

According to this [1] stackexchange answer, Discovery was built for use by the US air force, but seems to have been allocated to NASA after the loss of Challenger.

It also states that Vandenberg was never used for shuttle launches, which matches what I recall reading. I don't think the sts was ever put into a high-inclination orbit.

[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/a/38438

> Secrecy critics also argue that there is something wrong when America’s adversaries have better information about the federal government’s actions than its own citizens.

That makes a good sound bite, but does it really make sense? Like if any ordinary citizen of a nation can access some information, isn't it pretty much a given that at least that much will be known to the nation's adversaries?

Lots of people who have never held a clearance don't seem to understand why state secrets exist, and why they're often a deadly serious matter. If intelligence sources and methods get revealed, that can sometimes result in someone ending up in the basement of a prison in some tinpot dictatorship with a pistol round in the back of their head. Or otherwise being literally taken out back and shot.

Some people's only frame of reference is that there's nothing "secret" that's of more import than that spreadsheet Katie from HR left out on her desk, and now OMG, everyone knows what everyone else makes, the horror . . .

Many people I know don't believe there are any state secrets. They say somebody would leak it. Must be nice to think that's how the world works!

Dont think there are state secrets, or dont think a state should have secrets? I know a few libertarians who honestly believe that a government should be totally open with its citizens. But none of them believe that the country's military planning should be shared with the enemy. None of them believe that weapon designs should be shared worldwide in the name of openness.

When people choose to go into that line of work knowing that's the risk they could take on (or outsource to someone else through dubious means), not sure why people have to be sympathetic to that compared to all those who don't go into such line of work and still get killed everyday. But hey, dress it up in a flag and declare it a secret, makes it all better...

When I worked at the Pentagon, the security briefing I got said that anything that was classified as Confidential should be assumed to be in the enemies hands immediately. Anything classified Secret should be assumed to be in their hands within six months. Anything classified Top Secret should be assumed to be in their hands in eighteen months.

I think that's why they invented compartments (Secure Compartmented Information), so that something could be classified at a lower level but compartmentalized, and that would make it take a lot longer to get into enemy hands. You weren't allowed to access something unless you had both the clearance level and had also been read onto that particular compartment, plus were able to show "need to know".

We were also told that just because something was printed in a newspaper, that doesn't mean it's unclassified. There were more than a few times when certain newspapers were banned in the building, because of an article that got printed that day.

TIL there is a Sioux National Repository that apparently is an repository of open-to-public geospatial imagery, yet whose name I can't find associated with any other topic than this Skylab incident itself. [shrug]

There is a follow-up article by the same author: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1010/1

The photo in question actually got released in the end. You can see it at the top of the article.

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