Well, it seems that it is indeed a fantastic time to be interested in the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. We are beginning to see more and more new documents and first hand stories of the people who made the MOL come out of the “Top Secret” shadow. As has happened with several notable 1960′s government programs over the past few years, the MOL is finally old enough that people can start talking about it. This week Dwayne Day released a new article revealing many tantalizing new details about the craft and its camera. This appears to be the evidence required to finally settle the vertical vs. horizontal debate, unless they changed things later than these documents! It’s maddening sometimes…
As new documents are released, our picture of what the MOL astronauts were training to do becomes more clear, and honestly it was a very ambitious and somewhat dangerous mission. If they had flown the MOL, I’m not sure it would have gone smoothly- there were so many unknowns about human spaceflight at the time and the station was jam-packed with new systems. But that is the kind of things that good stories are made of
This update is a quickie to talk about something that has made the research for this project somewhat difficult: State Secrets. The Manned Orbiting Laboratory never flew and it was cancelled over forty years ago. Its existence was public knowledge- President Johnson delivered speeches both announcing and cancelling the program. The Astronauts who trained for this program are all known. There are diagrams, schematics, manuals, first hand accounts, even some images and video from the training and tests. (more…)
This week we have the first of hopefully many opportunities for you to participate in the making of this film. We are feeling like we have a pretty good idea of what the Manned Orbiting Laboratory might have looked like, but we’d like your 2 cents. Much of the final MOL configuration is still classified, so this is all going to be ‘best guesses’ based on the information at hand.
This week’s update is a little thinner because the progress we are making now is in the one area I am not going to be blogging about: the plot. Yes, it’s story time, and while it is coming along fantastically, I cannot really share very much about it. The basics of what we are going to film remain the same- 2 men stuck in space on a secret mission. While the script work is in progress, the research is winding down somewhat and the focus is moving along to funding and preparations. (more…)
Progress on the MOL project is picking up nicely, a lot is going on and a lot more still needs to be done. We are still deep in the research/story side of things, so most of the interesting things that we have done relate to that. Here’s the highlights: (more…)
This is the first of many updates on the newest project we are working on, henceforth referred to as “MOL”. It’s a working title, definitely not the real one, so don’t get attached to it
Those who know me well have heard me mumble about a “Mars Project” over the past few years. I was slowly and carefully outlining a massive production that would follow the first manned mission to Mars. I had the project well detailed, having done my research (I watched something like 80+ documentaries, films, and TV shows and read countless books and articles on the topic of space exploration) and talked it through with a lot of people much more experienced in Space matters than I. I was carefully building a network of contacts, advisers, and allies to help actually put this idea into production, and it was really starting to get some movement. Then this happened:
We did it again (made another entry for a video contest)! Here is our entry for Tongal’s Allstate DriveWise competition. Winners will be announced in a few days, so cross your fingers and toes for us.
UPDATE: We won 3rd place- $1500! We will use the funds to pay for more productions, so thanks Tongal!
We also did this video last week, for Zooppa’s “AT&T Simplify Your Life Video Contest”. If you have just a quick moment to click through and “Like” the video, we stand to win $20,000, which we would spend on making more new videos, so please help us out if you can.
