Index, Declassified Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) Records
http://nro.gov/foia/declass/MOL.html

A snapshot of MOL in 1968
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2898/1

The last spacemen: MOL and what might have been
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2866/1

Previous articles in The Space Review have described how the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) declassified and released 825 documents spanning the history of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program for a public gathering of MOL pilots, managers, historians, and fans at the National Museum of the US Air Force in October 2015. These documents are interesting because they reveal the organization and implementation of a largely unanalyzed manned space program of the early Space Age.

The Air Force started MOL in December 1963 as a general purpose orbiting laboratory to determine whether astronauts had any useful military role in space, but languished without authorization until August 1965. That is when the NRO agreed to incorporate its KH-10 DORIAN reconnaissance telescope into the program, but at a price: almost complete secrecy about the reconnaissance mission. Thereafter, budgets and content were either white (unclassified) if they originated from the Air Force or black (classified) if they originated from the NRO. When in doubt, secrecy prevailed.


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