This report was released by the NRO in May 2019. Between 1965 and 1969, quietly and without fanfare, 17 non-NASA individuals were astronaut-trained in order to meet the reconnaissance needs of the United States. They came from across the military services. Participants in the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program trained tirelessly and worked relentlessly because they believed they could contribute something unique to U.S. reconnaissance efforts and because they all shared a dream of flying in space. The purpose of this book is to offer a first-hand account of the MOL program for the first time. Shrouded in secrecy, the MOL program was declassified by the National Reconnaissance Office in 2015. This is the first opportunity many participants had to share their experiences with anyone outside their small cadres. The bulk of the book is written in their words, taken directly from transcripts of oral history interviews conducted over the last five years with program participants, as well as official documents and transcripts written by the officers who participated in and managed the programs.This compilation includes a reproduction of the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.Although the US Air Force announced the MOL project, they did not disclose the primary purpose of the program-to serve as a manned reconnaissance platform in space. Instead, the Air Force disclosed that the platform would be used for space experiments. During the early planning stages of the MOL program, the US Air Force sought a compelling reason for developing the program given NASA's mandate for manned space flight. The newly formed National Reconnaissance Office provided the most compelling reason for a military manned space program, putting a high resolution telescope into space to observe the activities of the Soviet Union and other US adversaries. At the time MOL was under development, the United States had already demonstrated that imagery and signals intelligen