Spies In Space: Reflections on National Reconnaissance and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory

In December 1963, while a student at New York University in its Air Force ROTC program, I was intrigued by a press release by the Air Force. The release had announced that the Air Force was developing something called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL). It was a program being developed to ". . . increase the Defense Department effort to determine military usefulness of men in space." This was a new domain for ROTC students to explore--Astronauts with a military mission! While I, my fellow students, and the public saw this merely as another major move forward by the US in its very public "space race" with the Soviet Union, little did we know that there was a hidden, highly classified aspect to the MOL effort. It was "Dorian," a deeply classified program managed by the then darkly hidden agency of the Intelligence Community, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).Fifty-two years later, on 22 October 2015 I had the honor of meeting five of these NRO astronauts (James Abrahamson, Karol Bobko, Albert Crews, Bob Crippen, and Richard Truly), along with the program's technical director, Michael Yarymovych. These five pioneering individuals were members of a panel that I was moderating at the National Museum of the United States Air Force (NMUSAF) in Dayton, OH.The compendium included Carl Berger's earlier MOL history, which is a record of the administrative efforts to develop and sustain the MOL Program. This current book, Spies in Space--Reflections on National Reconnaissance and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, goes well beyond that. The CSNR Oral Historian, Courtney Homer, conducted many hours of research, with a focus on oral history interviews. She based this new history on those interviews, as well as the findings from her additional documentary research.This book offers the reader a window into the experiences and insight of those who were training to be America's spies in space during the Cold War. It is the recollections of those who lived the Dorian and MOL experience.