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No, there was no point to that.I sat down with a couple of MOL astronauts a few weeks ago and they explained how operations would have worked with MOL. They had a very sophisticated computer targeting system that showed them what targets were coming up on each pass and they would look at them with spotting scopes, figure out if they were clear or important, and prioritize them with the computer system which would then control the big camera. Human operations only made sense if you had that computer prioritization system and a really powerful camera. The UPWARD approach used a camera (the KH-7 GAMBIT-1) that was already obsolete. And it would not have had the targeting computer. No point.MOL satisfied a small niche requirement. And it was expensive. Maybe if they had gotten one or two of them up it might have demonstrated some valuable capability. But the robots (KH-4, 7, 8, eventually 9) were already working, and they were reliable, and they were getting better all the time. They did the job and eventually they did the job very very well.
No, there was no point to that.
I sat down with a couple of MOL astronauts a few weeks ago and they explained how operations would have worked with MOL. They had a very sophisticated computer targeting system that showed them what targets were coming up on each pass and they would look at them with spotting scopes, figure out if they were clear or important, and prioritize them with the computer system which would then control the big camera. Human operations only made sense if you had that computer prioritization system and a really powerful camera. The UPWARD approach used a camera (the KH-7 GAMBIT-1) that was already obsolete. And it would not have had the targeting computer. No point.
MOL satisfied a small niche requirement. And it was expensive. Maybe if they had gotten one or two of them up it might have demonstrated some valuable capability. But the robots (KH-4, 7, 8, eventually 9) were already working, and they were reliable, and they were getting better all the time. They did the job and eventually they did the job very very well.
