House Trailer in Orbit

To some Pentagon planners, the gift seemed magnanimous in the extreme. "You've got a mandate," said an Assistant Secretary of Defense to a group of Air Force generals. "He's given you space." The men in uniform were inclined to argue that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's decision to let them build a Manned Orbiting Laboratory was hardly as generous as all that. Space, they figure, has belonged to them all along. They have always maintained that it is merely an extension of the atmosphere -- a little higher and thinner, to be sure, but a proper place for Air Force operations.

With his MOL mandate, McNamara has given the Air Force a proper opportunity to prove its claims. The project will amount to a massive experiment checking on man's ability to function for long periods in space. And it will be a step toward demonstrating whether or not that functioning can have a military value to match its cost.

Delicate Tasks. The orbiting lab is still a drawing-board dream, and few details have been settled on for sure. It will be a pressurized cylinder, about 25 ft. long and 10 ft. in diameter --approximately the size of a small house trailer. It will be attached to the blunt heat shield of one of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's two-man Gemini capsules, and it will be heaved aloft by a hefty Titan III rocket, which, with its two solid-fuel boosters, develops as much as 2,000,000 Ibs. of thrust.

Once in orbit, the astronauts riding the Gemini's cramped capsule will open a hatch in the heat shield and crawl into the lab, where efficient life-support equipment will let them safely shuck their cumbersome space suits. They will have plenty of room to move around, and by making due allowance for zero gravity, they will be able to perform elaborate and delicate tasks. After several weeks in the lab, they will return to the capsule and close the hatch in the heat shield. After detaching the MOL and leaving it in orbit, they will ignite their retrorockets and make their flaming descent.

Dead Dyna-Soar. About the same time that he gave MOL to the Air Force, McNamara killed Dyna-Soar, the winged, piloted space glider on which the Air Force has already spent $400 million, and was planning to spend many hundred million more. Even if Dyna-Soar succeeded in returning to earth on glowing wings, McNamara argued, it would do little to ad vance the military use of space. The glider would have been able to stay in orbit for only a few hours; it is not likely that its pilot would have learned anything not already known from NASA's Project Mercury and the X-15. McNamara is now convinced that controlled re-entry and landing can be investigated better by smaller, cheaper vehicles, steered by instruments.

For optimists of the aerospace industry, MOL points the way to the Air Force's pet project: manned orbiting space stations. Building and supplying a fleet of these stations will cost many billions of dollars per year, but Air Force space enthusiasts believe that the stations will pay for themselves by serving as military patrols--watching and photographing activity behind the Iron Curtain, inspecting suspicious satellites and destroying them, if desirable. Patrols might carry nuclear weapons for use against the ground or other spacecraft. Some optimists believe that they might even detect hostile nuclear submarines below the surface of the ocean.

For all such promise, though, McNamara insists that the first step must be to find out whether humans can stay in top form in space and perform difficult duties better than nonhuman instruments. This is by no means sure. Said Albert C. Hall, DOD's space expert, "The astronaut will have to do more than throw a switch, which is about all they have done in Mercury." The partisans of such manned space stations must also prove that an alert enemy cannot destroy them with a small fraction of the effort that it took to put them in orbit. Says skeptical Dr. Hall: "When I came to the Department of Defense last summer, I didn't think much could be done with a man in space. My attitude is still 'I gotta be shown.' "

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