page_title: Manned Orbiting Laboratory
section_title: Delays and cost increases
hierarchical_section_title: Manned Orbiting Laboratory / Delays and cost increases
caption_attribution_description: English: The MOL used computers for design and simulation
context_page_description: The Manned Orbiting Laboratory was part of the United States Air Force's human spaceflight program. The project was developed from early USAF concepts of crewed space stations to be used for satellite reconnaissance purposes, and was a successor to the canceled Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar military reconnaissance space plane. MOL evolved into a single-use laboratory, for which crews would be launched on 40-day missions, and return to Earth using a Gemini B spacecraft derived from NASA's Gemini spacecraft.
  The MOL program was announced to the public on 10 December 1963 as an inhabited platform to prove the utility of putting people in space for military missions; its use for satellite reconnaissance was a secret black project. Seventeen astronauts were selected for the program, including Major Robert H. Lawrence Jr., the first African-American to be chosen as an astronaut. The prime contractor for the spacecraft was McDonnell Aircraft; the laboratory was built by the Douglas Aircraft Company.
context_section_description: Within weeks of the President's announcement of the MOL Program, it was facing budget cuts. In November 1965, Flax arbitrarily cut $20 million (equivalent to $124 million in 2018) from the MOL Program's fiscal year 1967 budget, bringing it down to $374 million. Brown learned that McNamara intended to limit the program to $150 million (equivalent to $905 million in 2018) in fiscal year 1967, the same allocation as in fiscal year 1966, in response to the rising cost of the Vietnam War. In August 1965, the first uncrewed qualification flight had been expected to take place in late 1968, with the first crewed mission in early 1970, on the assumption that engineering development would commence in January 1966. Since this was now unlikely, McNamara saw no reason to continue with the original budget. Brown examined the schedules, and advised McNamara that a crewed mission in April 1969 would require a minimum of $294 million (equivalent to $1.77 billion in 2018) in fiscal year 1967, and that the minimum budget that the MOL Program required was $230 million, which would impose a delay of the first flight of three to eighteen months. McNamara was unmoved, and $150 million was the sum requested in the President's budget submitted to Congress in January 1966.
  When the MOL engineering development phase commenced in September 1966, it became clear that the USAF estimates of project costs and those of the major contractors were a long way apart. McDonnell requested $205.5 million (equivalent to $1.24 billion in 2018) for a fixed price plus incentive fee (FPIF) contract to design and build Gemini B, which the USAF budgeted $147.9 million; Douglas wanted $815.8 million for the laboratory vehicles which the USAF budgeted at $611.3 million; and General Electric sought $198 million (equivalent to $1.19 billion in 2018) for work budgeted at $147.3 million. In response the MOL SPO reopened negotiations for systems not under contract, and halted the issuance of Dorian clearances to contractor personnel. This had the desired effect, and by December the major contractors had reduced their prices, bringing them closer to the USAF estimates. However, on 7 January, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) informed the MOL SPO that it intended to limit contracts in fiscal year 1968 to $430 million, which was $157 million short of what the MOL SPO wanted, and $381 below what the contractors wanted. This meant that the prime contracts had to be renegotiated,
  Budget cuts were not the only reason for the project's schedule slipping. On 9 December 1966, Eastman Kodak advised that it would not be able to deliver the optical sensors by the original target date of January 1969 for a crewed mission in April, and asked for a ten-month extension to October 1969, which pushed the date of the first crewed mission back to January 1970. Eventually, $480 million (equivalent to $2.9 billion in 2018) was found for fiscal year 1968, with $50 million (equivalent to $302 million in 2018) obtained by reprogramming funds from other programs, and $661 million agreed upon for fiscal year 1969. To meet this, the date of the first qualification flight was pushed back still further, to December 1970, with the first crewed mission in August 1971.
  Contracts were signed in May 1967. On 17 May, a $674,703,744 FPIF contract (equivalent to $3.96 billion in 2018) was signed with Douglas, which also received $13 million (equivalent to $76.2 million in 2018) in black funds. A $180,469,000 FPIF contract (equivalent to $1.06 billion in 2018) was signed with McDonnell the following day, and a $110,020,000 (equivalent to $664 million in 2018) to General Electric, which was expected to receive another $60 million in black funds (equivalent to $352 million in 2018). The delays increased the projected costs of the MOL Program to $2.35 billion (equivalent to $14.2 billion in 2018). Aware of the program's budgetary and political difficulties, the astronauts in early 1968 advised MOL deputy director, General Joseph S. Bleymaier, to eliminate the unmanned qualification missions; the August 1
caption: The MOL program used state-of-the-art computers for design and simulation.[57]
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