Around same time McDonnell-Douglas try to sell MOL to NASA as Civilian Space craft As NASA orbital laboratory for 30-60-90 days missionproposed were Astronomy instruments or Earth resources scanning or as Resupplied Vehicle for space station source:PSAC BriefingNASA-MOL T.J.GordonJuly 20,1968
And I'll confess that I don't know the history of the NIIRS scale. I assume somebody has written about this in a photogrammetry journal, and I assume that before there was a NIIRS scale there was something else.The history of US reconnaissance satellites has an interesting side-story around 1963-1965 when the CIA (under Bud Wheelon) sought to codify the relationship between resolution and what you could learn from it. There are actually quite a few documents about this, but I have not looked at them closely. Wheelon told me way back in the mid-1990s that when he started battling with NRO, one of the things he wanted to find out what what photo-interpreters could see at different resolutions, so he started a study project to assess that. Some of those documents have been declassified. But what I don't know is the broader context of that. For example, I assume that since there were photo-interpreters during WWII, they had already established some scales/tables on this subject back then, and I don't know why Wheelon needed to do it in 1963. Maybe he simply was unhappy with the quality of the approach to the subject. He was a really smart guy and probably wanted some rigor applied to it.
in june 2014, some one uploaded Video about the Gemini B mock up on vimeo in a week the Video was remove "Do Copyright Issue" guess what its back, this time with audio !
New MOL book:https://www.nro.gov/Portals/65/documents/history/csnr/programs/Spies_In_Space-Reflections_on_MOL_web.pdf?ver=2019-07-11-135535-820×tamp=1562867746595
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3780/1Review: Spies in Spaceby Dwayne DayMonday, August 26, 2019In late 1963, the United States Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office began work on the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program. MOL quickly evolved into a reconnaissance satellite with a large camera system, soon named DORIAN, that would operate for approximately one month in orbit. Two astronauts would ride inside a Gemini spacecraft at the front of the MOL atop a powerful Titan IIIM rocket launched from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base into a polar orbit. The astronauts would look through spotting scopes at targets on the ground that MOL was about to pass over and feed instructions into a computer that would direct the DORIAN camera to take high-resolution photographs. As MOL progressed, the Air Force selected 17 astronauts to fly aboard it during multiple missions. By mid-1969, however, MOL was behind schedule and over budget and President Richard Nixon canceled it. Although parts of MOL were public, its mission and most of its technology was highly classified. It was not until October 2015 that the NRO declassified a large number of documents about MOL and allowed the surviving MOL astronauts to talk about the program.This summer the National Reconnaissance Office produced a book by historian Courtney V.K. Homer about the MOL program. Titled Spies in Space, the book is based upon the trove of documents released by the NRO four years ago, and interviews Ms. Homer conducted with six of the MOL astronauts: Richard Truly, Bob Crippen, Al Crews, Karol Bobko, Lachlan Macleay, and James Abrahamson. It can be downloaded as a free PDF from the NRO’s website, or purchased from the US Government Publishing Office.Spies in Space is the most comprehensive account of the MOL program published to date. At 104 pages long (albeit in rather small print), it is not a lengthy book and could be consumed by an avid reader in a day. Few people are going to plow through the hundreds of declassified MOL documents, so a book based upon them is valuable. But the most important material in the book is based upon the recollections of the MOL astronauts, primarily contained in chapters 3 and 4.
The kind of target of opportunities MOL astronauts would snap photos off ?