MOL discussion

[Yeknom-Ecaps]

I have come across a couple of informal notes referencing Norvin “Bud” Evans as "GE Astronaut Selectee" or "GE Selectee" or something similar.

Any Internet searches come up with: after retirement from USAF Bud Evans went to GE to work on MOL designing the interior and working on astronaut training.

Anyone have more information on Bud Evans role as an "GE astronaut"? Or anything about "GE astronauts at all?

Thanks.

[Blackstar]

https://thespacereview.com/article/4713/1

Diamonds and DORIANS: The Soviet Union’s Almaz and the United States’ Manned Orbiting Laboratory military space stations (part 2)
MOL and Almaz enter active development
by Dwayne A. Day and Bart Hendrickx
Monday, December 18, 2023

The American story
The Manned Orbiting Laboratory was initially started by the US Air Force in late 1963, studied throughout 1964, and received presidential authorization by summer 1965. Contract definition, proposal evaluations, and contract negotiations occurred thru late 1966, but by early 1967 it was clear that there was insufficient budget to proceed on the planned schedule and timeline and contract adjustments followed (see “Diamonds and DORIANS: the Soviet Union’s Almaz and the United States’ Manned Orbiting Laboratory military space stations (part 1),” The Space Review, December 11, 2023.) By mid-1967, the program was well underway, with various contractors around the United States building facilities and ramping up work. MOL, and its huge KH-10 DORIAN optical system, became a major military space program for the United States Air Force and the secretive National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
MOL design

Station design
MOL consisted of a Gemini spacecraft, a connecting section, a pressurized operations section known as the “laboratory module,” and a large unpressurized segment known as the “mission module” containing the optics. The Gemini was officially known as the Gemini B. It was similar to the NASA Gemini spacecraft with one significant difference: an access hatch located between the astronauts’ seats and passing through the heat shield. This was considered a potential vulnerability. In November 1966, the Air Force launched a Titan III rocket carrying a refurbished Gemini spacecraft equipped with the heat shield hatch. The rocket launched from Florida and the spacecraft flew a suborbital trajectory and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, proving that the heat shield worked.

[hoku]

https://thespacereview.com/article/4713/1

Diamonds and DORIANS: The Soviet Union’s Almaz and the United States’ Manned Orbiting Laboratory military space stations (part 2)
MOL and Almaz enter active development
by Dwayne A. Day and Bart Hendrickx
Monday, December 18, 2023

The American story
The Manned Orbiting Laboratory was initially started by the US Air Force in late 1963, studied throughout 1964, and received presidential authorization by summer 1965. Contract definition, proposal evaluations, and contract negotiations occurred thru late 1966, but by early 1967 it was clear that there was insufficient budget to proceed on the planned schedule and timeline and contract adjustments followed (see “Diamonds and DORIANS: the Soviet Union’s Almaz and the United States’ Manned Orbiting Laboratory military space stations (part 1),” The Space Review, December 11, 2023.) By mid-1967, the program was well underway, with various contractors around the United States building facilities and ramping up work. MOL, and its huge KH-10 DORIAN optical system, became a major military space program for the United States Air Force and the secretive National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

"General Electric also received a contract for $110 million for “experiment integration work,” which included aspects of the highly-classified KH-10 DORIAN optics system. However, Eastman Kodak, which had manufactured both the GAMBIT-1 (KH-7) and GAMBIT-3 (KH-8) camera systems, also was contracted to build the similar but much larger KH-10 system, although the contract amount remains classified. For other robotic reconnaissance programs, the camera system was the largest expense (the KH-9 HEXAGON camera system accounted for over half of the program’s total budget), so the DORIAN system would not have been cheap. "

Eyeballing the Jan 1969 "MOL budget costs" diagram yields a total of about 1B US$ cost for the "Camera System", i.e. 1/3 of the overall budget (this is from charts presented at a Feb 8, 1969 briefing to DepSecDef).

[Blackstar]

Eyeballing the Jan 1969 "MOL budget costs" diagram yields a total of about 1B US$ cost for the "Camera System", i.e. 1/3 of the overall budget (this is from charts presented at a Feb 8, 1969 briefing to DepSecDef).

Ah, wonderful! That gibes with my slightly-informed guess. I wrote:

"MOL, though, had the additional expense of all the systems, including the Gemini spacecraft, needed to support the astronauts. At its peak, Kodak had over 1,000 direct and indirect workers on DORIAN."

If we consider that HEXAGON's camera was over half the cost of that program, my reasoning was that the MOL spacecraft, plus the life support systems, plus the Gemini spacecraft, would add up to more than 50% of the cost, and I figured it would add up to 60-65% at least. And that was just guessing without looking at anything.

Now MOL is complicated by the fact that they also were working on an unmanned MOL. That was in many ways the equivalent of building a second spacecraft, and it would have required its own reentry vehicles and command system and film handling system (which probably would have been added to the camera system cost). I'll be discussing unmanned MOL in part 3 in a few weeks.

Something that I recently learned from talking to people is that the big building at Kodak that contained all the DORIAN fabrication and testing equipment (Building 101) was a federally built building, and Kodak only occupied it. I don't know if that means that Kodak or the US government paid for the equipment inside the building. I was told that this was part of Kodak's contract with the government; Kodak did not want to be responsible for infrastructure that was 100% government use. Kodak had other facilities, like film processing, that was mostly commercial, but occasionally used to produce government products (film for reconnaissance missions). So an interesting question is where was the budget for Building 101 kept? Was that in the USAF MOL budget, or some other government agency? (Note: this is not a burning question for me, but it does highlight how expensive MOL was.)

[LittleBird]

Eyeballing the Jan 1969 "MOL budget costs" diagram yields a total of about 1B US$ cost for the "Camera System", i.e. 1/3 of the overall budget (this is from charts presented at a Feb 8, 1969 briefing to DepSecDef).

Ah, wonderful! That gibes with my slightly-informed guess. I wrote:

"MOL, though, had the additional expense of all the systems, including the Gemini spacecraft, needed to support the astronauts. At its peak, Kodak had over 1,000 direct and indirect workers on DORIAN."

If we consider that HEXAGON's camera was over half the cost of that program, my reasoning was that the MOL spacecraft, plus the life support systems, plus the Gemini spacecraft, would add up to more than 50% of the cost, and I figured it would add up to 60-65% at least. And that was just guessing without looking at anything.

Now MOL is complicated by the fact that they also were working on an unmanned MOL. That was in many ways the equivalent of building a second spacecraft, and it would have required its own reentry vehicles and command system and film handling system (which probably would have been added to the camera system cost). I'll be discussing unmanned MOL in part 3 in a few weeks.

Something that I recently learned from talking to people is that the big building at Kodak that contained all the DORIAN fabrication and testing equipment (Building 101) was a federally built building, and Kodak only occupied it. I don't know if that means that Kodak or the US government paid for the equipment inside the building. I was told that this was part of Kodak's contract with the government; Kodak did not want to be responsible for infrastructure that was 100% government use. Kodak had other facilities, like film processing, that was mostly commercial, but occasionally used to produce government products (film for reconnaissance missions). So an interesting question is where was the budget for Building 101 kept? Was that in the USAF MOL budget, or some other government agency? (Note: this is not a burning question for me, but it does highlight how expensive MOL was.)

As per my older post, https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=23864.msg2512863#msg2512863 I'm also curious as to just how big MOL was in terms of personnel. The slides below are from #707 in "the MOL set" and date from just before cancellation. They show about 2500 people cleared for DORIAN just in Eastman Kodak, and a total of about 12000 people cleared into DORIAN overall, so one obvious question is how many extra people would be added by the unclassified USAF side ? Another is why the number for Aerospace is relatively small ?

[Blackstar]

As per my older post, https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=23864.msg2512863#msg2512863 I'm also curious as to just how big MOL was in terms of personnel. The slides below are from #707 in "the MOL set" and date from just before cancellation. They show about 2500 people cleared for DORIAN just in Eastman Kodak, and a total of about 12000 people cleared into DORIAN overall, so one obvious question is how many extra people would be added by the unclassified USAF side ? Another is why the number for Aerospace is relatively small ?

Thanks for the reminder about the 2500 clearances at EK. The guys I talked to generally referred to "more than a thousand" people at Kodak. But 2500 is a lot more than a thousand. I'll have to go back to them with that. Of course, they were all low level, and none of the senior people are still around.

[hoku]

"MOL, though, had the additional expense of all the systems, including the Gemini spacecraft, needed to support the astronauts. At its peak, Kodak had over 1,000 direct and indirect workers on DORIAN."
<snip>

As per my older post, https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=23864.msg2512863#msg2512863 I'm also curious as to just how big MOL was in terms of personnel. The slides below are from #707 in "the MOL set" and date from just before cancellation. They show about 2500 people cleared for DORIAN just in Eastman Kodak, and a total of about 12000 people cleared into DORIAN overall, so one obvious question is how many extra people would be added by the unclassified USAF side ? Another is why the number for Aerospace is relatively small ?
<snip>
Something that I recently learned from talking to people is that the big building at Kodak that contained all the DORIAN fabrication and testing equipment (Building 101) was a federally built building, and Kodak only occupied it. I don't know if that means that Kodak or the US government paid for the equipment inside the building. I was told that this was part of Kodak's contract with the government; Kodak did not want to be responsible for infrastructure that was 100% government use. Kodak had other facilities, like film processing, that was mostly commercial, but occasionally used to produce government products (film for reconnaissance missions). So an interesting question is where was the budget for Building 101 kept? Was that in the USAF MOL budget, or some other government agency? (Note: this is not a burning question for me, but it does highlight how expensive MOL was.)

Carl Berger's MOL History from Feb 1970 states that Kodak had almost 1700 MOL personnel at the time of project cancellation.

edit: Berger quotes at total cost of $32.5M for EKC facilities and equipment.

edit 2: Flax memo from April 4, 1966 on facility construction at EKC attached.

[LittleBird]

"MOL, though, had the additional expense of all the systems, including the Gemini spacecraft, needed to support the astronauts. At its peak, Kodak had over 1,000 direct and indirect workers on DORIAN."
<snip>

As per my older post, https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=23864.msg2512863#msg2512863 I'm also curious as to just how big MOL was in terms of personnel. The slides below are from #707 in "the MOL set" and date from just before cancellation. They show about 2500 people cleared for DORIAN just in Eastman Kodak, and a total of about 12000 people cleared into DORIAN overall, so one obvious question is how many extra people would be added by the unclassified USAF side ? Another is why the number for Aerospace is relatively small ?
<snip>
Something that I recently learned from talking to people is that the big building at Kodak that contained all the DORIAN fabrication and testing equipment (Building 101) was a federally built building, and Kodak only occupied it. I don't know if that means that Kodak or the US government paid for the equipment inside the building. I was told that this was part of Kodak's contract with the government; Kodak did not want to be responsible for infrastructure that was 100% government use. Kodak had other facilities, like film processing, that was mostly commercial, but occasionally used to produce government products (film for reconnaissance missions). So an interesting question is where was the budget for Building 101 kept? Was that in the USAF MOL budget, or some other government agency? (Note: this is not a burning question for me, but it does highlight how expensive MOL was.)

Carl Berger's MOL History from Feb 1970 states that Kodak had almost 1700 MOL personnel at the time of project cancellation.

Thanks. I realise that the briefing slides I was quoting were April '69 and thus a few months before cancellation, but 2500 to 1700 in a few months is already a lot of lost jobs. I would have suggested that explanation could be that 2500 was the total number of people who had ever been cleared into DORIAN at EKC, but I note fwiw that some of the other numbers in the April briefing slides don't match those in Berger either.

The April slides have 3681 people DORIAN-cleared at GE, Berger has 2628 "MOL staff" at GE in June

and, importantly,

April slides have Douglas Aircraft as 3058 with all others (bar Aerospace) as 1622 , whereas Berger has a MOL staff in June at the merged McDonnell Douglas of 6263.

Berger also mentions a Titan IIID [sic] group of several thousand people, though one guesses these would not all be  DORIAN-cleared anyway.

Not sure  all these numbers can be reconciled, but they'd certainly be worth Blackstar raising on his next trip to Rochester. 

[Blackstar]

One possibility is that the number for "cleared" is a total authorization, rather than the number of people who actually had the clearances. So Kodak might have been authorized to clear up to 2500 people, but they only had 1700 who had the clearances.

I'm not going to get that answer from the people I talk to because they were not the managers. They were down in the trenches. What I did get was an interesting story about how that played out at Kodak. When MOL got canceled, there were a bunch of companies like McDonnell Douglas that had public MOL contracts, so firing people from there was not unexpected. But Kodak's work on MOL was classified, and suddenly firing 1000 people from Kodak after MOL was canceled would have revealed that MOL was an optics system. So what they had to do was fire people in small batches over many months, to conceal the relationship. According to one guy, this destroyed morale within the division, because everybody was just waiting to get fired.

[hoku]

Personnel charged to the project and personnel cleared don't have to be the same. A mechanic in a workshop not necessarily has to be cleared. Folks in administration etc. might be cleared for multiple projects, w/o being charged to a particular project.

[LittleBird]

Personnel charged to the project and personnel cleared don't have to be the same. A mechanic in a workshop not necessarily has to be cleared. Folks in administration etc. might be cleared for multiple projects, w/o being charged to a particular project.

Thanks, meanwhile I see that although ~5-600 people at Aerospace seemed like a smaller number than I'd remembered, my memory was wrong, see grab below from https://web.archive.org/web/20070305205226/http://www.aero.org/publications/crosslink/summer2004/02.html and this was indeed a significant fraction of of the company's overall workforce.

Interestingly the docs hoku has just posted seem to show that TRW's effort on MOL was of a similar magnitude to Aerospace's-we know that one thing TRW did for MOL was computer programs.

[ExGeek]

Personnel charged to the project and personnel cleared don't have to be the same. A mechanic in a workshop not necessarily has to be cleared. Folks in administration etc. might be cleared for multiple projects, w/o being charged to a particular project.

This is true.  It also comes down to a particular company's accounting practices.  Some companies handled this with managers/admins/etc in these situations charging directly to the contracts.  Others created overhead accounts to pay for these folks, with each program/contract that "benefits" from their oversight paying into the overhead kitty, typically a fixed percentage.

It also comes down to whether the numbers are all "real people" or FTEs (full-time equivalents).  10 people in an admin support role (document control, for example), might charge only 10% of their time to any given contract.  10 people at 10% on a DORIAN contract would add up to 1 FTE.  Are those numbers reporting 10 people, or one FTE?  It's 10 people accessed into that compartment, but budgetarily, only one equivalent person.

[Blackstar]

Personnel charged to the project and personnel cleared don't have to be the same. A mechanic in a workshop not necessarily has to be cleared. Folks in administration etc. might be cleared for multiple projects, w/o being charged to a particular project.

This is true.  It also comes down to a particular company's accounting practices.  Some companies handled this with managers/admins/etc in these situations charging directly to the contracts.  Others created overhead accounts to pay for these folks, with each program/contract that "benefits" from their oversight paying into the overhead kitty, typically a fixed percentage.

It also comes down to whether the numbers are all "real people" or FTEs (full-time equivalents).  10 people in an admin support role (document control, for example), might charge only 10% of their time to any given contract.  10 people at 10% on a DORIAN contract would add up to 1 FTE.  Are those numbers reporting 10 people, or one FTE?  It's 10 people accessed into that compartment, but budgetarily, only one equivalent person.

Good points. I had not thought about the FTE issue. When I talked to the Kodak guys one of the things they said was that people with clearances would exit programs and go to work on the commercial side for awhile while maintaining their clearance, and Kodak could then put them back onto a classified project if necessary. I think at least one of the guys left GAMBIT for several years to work on the commercial side, but got called back for a short time to work on a problem with GAMBIT, then went back to commercial work. It was considered one of the strengths of Kodak that they had a huge base of skilled people to use when needed.

[ExGeek]

Personnel charged to the project and personnel cleared don't have to be the same. A mechanic in a workshop not necessarily has to be cleared. Folks in administration etc. might be cleared for multiple projects, w/o being charged to a particular project.

This is true.  It also comes down to a particular company's accounting practices.  Some companies handled this with managers/admins/etc in these situations charging directly to the contracts.  Others created overhead accounts to pay for these folks, with each program/contract that "benefits" from their oversight paying into the overhead kitty, typically a fixed percentage.

It also comes down to whether the numbers are all "real people" or FTEs (full-time equivalents).  10 people in an admin support role (document control, for example), might charge only 10% of their time to any given contract.  10 people at 10% on a DORIAN contract would add up to 1 FTE.  Are those numbers reporting 10 people, or one FTE?  It's 10 people accessed into that compartment, but budgetarily, only one equivalent person.

Good points. I had not thought about the FTE issue. When I talked to the Kodak guys one of the things they said was that people with clearances would exit programs and go to work on the commercial side for awhile while maintaining their clearance, and Kodak could then put them back onto a classified project if necessary. I think at least one of the guys left GAMBIT for several years to work on the commercial side, but got called back for a short time to work on a problem with GAMBIT, then went back to commercial work. It was considered one of the strengths of Kodak that they had a huge base of skilled people to use when needed.

This was fairly common with companies that had multiple compartmented programs.  Security policies varied from time to time (and compartment to compartment) as to how long you could carry an access without working on a program. 

[Blackstar]

https://thespacereview.com/article/4717/1

Diamonds and DORIANS: program troubles, operations, cancellation, and legacy (part 3)
by Bart Hendrickx and Dwayne A. Day
Tuesday, January 2, 2024

As both the United States’ Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) and the Soviet Union’s Almaz programs progressed, they naturally ran into problems common to large, complicated space projects. But the MOL program faced an identity crisis from the start: if most of the mission could be performed robotically, why were astronauts needed at all? That question was essentially answered for both countries by the 1970s—astronauts were not necessary for military missions—and almost all military missions in the five decades since have been performed with robotic spacecraft.

[LittleBird]

https://thespacereview.com/article/4717/1

Diamonds and DORIANS: program troubles, operations, cancellation, and legacy (part 3)
by Bart Hendrickx and Dwayne A. Day
Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Great series and great pics. The last one intrigues me, when does it date from ? Shows the VIB and SMAB (e.g. https://www.spaceline.org/cape-canaveral-launch-sites/launch-complex-40-titan-fact-sheet/ and https://www.spaceline.org/cape-canaveral-launch-sites/launch-complex-41-titan-fact-sheet/) and thus appears to refer to the ITL including pads 40 and 41 at ETR, unless there was originally an expectation that these would also be replicated on the west coast. Would thus seem to date from period when it was still thought some MOL flights would be from ETR (as well as the boilerplate one)-does it ?

Pic also mentions ETR airstrip but does so twice so not quite sure what was meant.

[Jim]

Great series and great pics. The last one intrigues me, when does it date from ? Shows the VIB and SMAB (e.g.  and thus appears to refer to the ITL including pads 40 and 41 at ETR, unless there was originally an expectation that these would also be replicated on the west coast. Would thus seem to date from period when it was still thought some MOL flights would be from ETR (as well as the boilerplate one)-does it ?

Pic also mentions ETR airstrip but does so twice so not quite sure what was meant.

The ITL would not be replicated on the west coast: no room for it.

Just for east coast test flights and to keep inquiries down.

First ETR airstrip is a mistake or misdirection so as not to reveal all factory locations.

[hoku]

https://thespacereview.com/article/4717/1

Diamonds and DORIANS: program troubles, operations, cancellation, and legacy (part 3)
by Bart Hendrickx and Dwayne A. Day
Tuesday, January 2, 2024
...

Very nice to see and read this side-by-side comparison of Almaz and MOL!

Attached are a few slides from John Shafer's talk from a while back on the Kodak facilities put in place for MOL. It interesting that the testing+alignment of the optics with the 70/72 inch mirrors required "master" mirrors with diameters up to 82 inch.

I'm still wondering why (and when) they decided to go for the "growth" option of all the chambers (i.e. that the next step after MOL would aim for recon sats with 90+ inch diameter primary mirrors)?

[Blackstar]

So that's an interesting question of how the facilities were sized for MOL. Did they size them to fit only MOL, or did they deliberately make them big enough to handle bigger systems? I'll have to dig some more, but I could see the NRO agreeing to add in a lot of margin to cover future growth in large optics.

[LittleBird]

Meanwhile there's a couple more docs in the large MOL set than I'd realised which give us an idea of what the PSAC was saying about manned vs unmanned use of MOL in 1965-66, see both attached and grabs of Martin's summary from first of the two. Always good to be reminded of just how stellar the panel was, e.g. Drell, Land and Purcell as well as Garwin.