This week ... in space!
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Robert Lawrence was selected as an astronaut for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory project, which was announced in 1963. If the MOL project sounds unfamiliar, it’s because in the end it never flew. And because it was all, in the way, a giant lie. The prograThis week ... in space!
Robert Lawrence was selected as an astronaut for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory project, which was announced in 1963. If the MOL project sounds unfamiliar, it’s because in the end it never flew. And because it was all, in the way, a giant lie. The program existed, and astronauts like Lawrence trained for the mission which would supposedly put up a series of small, single use space stations that would orbit the Earth for 40 days at a time. At one end of this mini-station would be a Gemini spacecraft, which the two astronauts on board would use to return to Earth at the end of the mission. The station itself would eventually fall into the atmosphere and incinerate. Manned Orbiting Laboratory concept drawing But the MOL wasn’t quite what the public was being sold. It was presented as a program that would show men could handle long space missions — and there was a discussion around military missions. But really, what made MOL attractive to the government at the time was using these low-flying, polar-orbit stations as manned spy satellites. The program was eventually cancelled because it was demonstrated that unmanned satellites could do the job much more cheaply. Still, work on MOL didn’t all go to waste. Included in the planning for these small stations were systems and ideas that made it into later craft. The MOL program even included development of the “Astronaut Maneuvering Unit,” a precursor of the Manned Maneuvering Unit that allowed Shuttle astronauts to perform untethered space walks. However, before the program was cancelled, Robert Lawrence was killed in the crash of a training jet. Lawrenced, an expert pilot, was in the backseat acting as a instructor for a flight test trainee. The trainee was able to eject and survived. Lawrence did not. When you’re remembering those astronauts that NASA lost over the years, keep Robert Henry Lawrence on the list. Read more