Hacker News Reader

Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

> 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

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com