posted 08-25-2016 08:02 PM               

In the earliest days of America's manned space program, NASA engineers considered ways to extend the Mercury Program beyond its primary goal of putting a man into orbit as quickly, affordably and safely as possible. One of these concepts was a temporary "space laboratory" that could stay aloft for as long as 14 days. Using an Agenda B booster as the launch vehicle's second stage, the Mercury Lab would carry a single astronaut and provide him with 182 cubic feet of working space during his two week-long mission.

The precursor to the Gemini-based Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), the Mercury Lab never got beyond the proposal stage.

posted 08-26-2016 04:33 AM               

Probably the record for the smallest space station design ever proposed belongs to the One-Man Space Station that McDonnell Aircraft, makers of the Mercury spacecraft, presented on 24 August 1960 to the Space Task Group (STG) at NASA's Langley Research Center (LaRC) in Hampton, Virginia.

The station, a pressurized 10-foot-long, six-foot-wide cylinder with dome ends, was meant to be launched with a Mercury and an Agena B restartable upper stage into a 150-nautical-mile-high Earth orbit inclined 30° relative to the equator. The Mercury/station/Agena B combination would have lifted off from Earth atop an Atlas D rocket similar to that tapped to launch standard Mercury orbital missions. The Agena B would have completed orbit insertion and retained enough propellants to maneuver itself, the station, and the attached Mercury in orbit.