Category The Story of Manned Space Stations

• Complete assembly of the International Space Station, including the U. S. com­ponents that support U. S. space exploration goals and those provided by foreign partners by 2010.

• Return the space shuttle to flight as soon as practical, based on the recommen­dations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

• Retirement of the space shuttle by the end of 2010

The Moon

• Undertake lunar exploration activities to enable sustained human and robotic exploration of Mars and more distant destinations in the Solar System.

• Starting no later than 2008, initiate a series of robotic missions to the Moon to prepare for and support future human exploration activities.

• Conduct the first extended human expedition to the lunar surface as early as 2015, but no later than the year 2020.

Mars

• Conduct robotic exploration of Mars to search for evidence of life, to understand the history of the Solar System, and to prepare for future human exploration.

• Conduct robotic exploration across the Solar System for scientific purposes and to support human exploration. In particular, explore Jupiter’s moons, asteroids, and other bodies to search for evidence of life, to understand the history of the Solar System, and to search for resources.

• Conduct advanced telescope searches for Earth-like planets and habitable en­vironments around other stars.

• Develop and demonstrate power generation, propulsion, life support, and other key capabilities required to support more distant, more capable, and/or longer duration human and robotic exploration of Mars and other destinations.

• Conduct human expeditions to Mars after acquiring adequate knowledge about the planet using robotic missions and after successfully demonstrating sustained human exploration missions to the Moon.

New spacecraft

• Develop a new crew exploration vehicle to provide crew transportation for missions beyond low Earth orbit.

– Conduct the initial test flight before the end of this decade in order to provide an operational capability to support human exploration missions no later than 2014.

• Separate to the maximum practical extent crew from cargo transportation to the International Space Station and for launching exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit

– Acquire cargo transportation as soon as practical and affordable to support missions to and from the International Space Station.

– Acquire crew transportation to and from the International Space Station, as required, after the space shuttle is retired from service.

The second step came two weeks later when an Executive Order formed a commission comprising several industry leaders. It would be their job to outline the best way for NASA to achieve the goals that President Bush had set in his speech; this commission had only four months to report its findings back to the White House.

At last it seemed that NASA would have a clear path forward that it had been craving since Apollo 17 left the surface of the moon so many years ago. It was clearly understood what was required of the space agency, for the first time in many years they would be striving for achievable goals, rather than pushing frontiers that it couldn’t hope to reach. Most importantly, the funding for these goals had been committed, and as long as NASA made good progress, the money would continue to flow. It remains to be seen how this policy will be carried over from one President to the next, but for now NASA has a clear goal to work towards.

Perhaps the largest single task ahead of NASA is the development of a replace­ment spacecraft for the space shuttle, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), or Orion as it would later become officially known. What would such a vehicle look like? Would it be wings and wheels again, like the space shuttle, or would a simpler design be a surer bet for success? A significant complicating factor was the need for such a spacecraft to not only fly to Earth orbit and the ISS, but also be adaptable enough to form the basis of a Moon and Mars orbiter. In September 2004 NASA issued contracts to eight aerospace contractors to begin studies into the kind of designs which would fullfil the following requirements:

• Support a minimum crew of four (NASA preferred six) from the Earth’s surface through mission completion on the Earth’s surface.

• Have a mass less than 15-18 tonnes (the precise value to be determined in preliminary contract studies).

• Have an abort capability during all phases of flight. Preferably such abort capability would be available continuously and independent of Launch Vehicle (LV) or Earth Departure Stage (EDS) flight control.

• Integrate with the Constellation Launch Vehicle (LV) to achieve low Earth orbit.

• Integrate with the Earth Departure Stage (EDS) to achieve lunar orbit.

• Integrate with the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM) to achieve lunar sur­face mission objectives. Preferably the CEV would be capable of transferring consumables to and from the EDS and the LSAM.

Perhaps not surprisingly the selected companies came back with very different design solutions, they did, however, agree on some basic principles. Namely that it would be most cost effective to make use of either an existing launch vehicle, or one derived from existing technology. This launch vehicle would also make use of extra stages or strap-on boosters to make launches to the Moon or Mars possible from the same core rocket. They also agreed that a four-man craft, at least for Earth orbit missions, would be ideal, and should weigh less than nine tonnes. By June 2005, NASA had narrowed the contractor list down to two; Lockheed Martin, and a joint team of Northrop-Grumman and Boeing, these two “finalists” would build a CEV of NASA’s design, and the decision between the two would be made without either party having to build a prototype. NASA’s own design had changed somewhat from the original requirements, the crew had grown from four to six, and the launch weight had grown with it, to 30 tonnes. The increased weight also rather narrowed down the list of launch vehicles available, in fact no existing rocket was considered suitable to launch the CEV in its new form. A new launcher, derived from existing shuttle technology would have to be created. In fact NASA seemed intent on pushing its own design for both the CEV and launch vehicle rather than embracing the designs submitted by experienced aerospace contractors after months of detailed technical and practical study. It seemed clear that NASA had never intended to make use of the innovative designs that many of the contractors had come up, and had always planned to make use of its design. Many industry experts felt that NASA’s basic design assumptions were flawed, and likened the situation to the initial designs of the Apollo spacecraft that took Americans to the moon nearly forty years earlier.

Whatever NASA’s intentions the winning contractor was announced on the 31 August 2006, it would be Lockheed Martin that would build the new spacecraft named Orion. The spacecraft’s new name had been officially announced the previous day, but unfortunately some of that fire had been stolen when astronaut Jeff Wil­liams, speaking during a press conference on board the ISS, had let the name slip eight days earlier.

With that announcement made, NASA’s attention turned to the launch vehicles that would be used for Orion. The first, most basic, is called Ares 1, it is otherwise known as “the stick’’. This is the launch vehicle that will be used for all of Orion’s Earth orbit missions, including those that rendezvous with the ISS. Initially it appeared as if Orion’s great weight would be far too much for the shuttle solid rocket motor derived Ares 1, many within the industry feel that NASA has more problems with its design than it is letting on, but during recent press conferences NASA has assured everyone that Ares 1 will be ready on time for Orion’s first flight, not thought to take place sometime in 2012.

On 13 December 2004 Sean O’Keefe resigned as Administrator of NASA. He had maintained this position for three years, through the Columbia disaster and the troubled planning for the shuttle’s return to flight.

The space shuttle returned to flight with Discovery flying STS-114 in July 2005. This flight was not without its problems, but NASA is now back in the business of flying space shuttles and completing the construction of the International Space Station (ISS).

The new NASA Administrator, Mike Griffin, has vowed to reverse the fortunes of a beleaguered agency, and focus on Project Constellation. On 28 September 2005 Griffin said that the shuttle and ISS, indeed the whole of the U. S. manned space program for the past three decades, had been mistakes! He said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo program of moon visits in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth. These decisions can be directly connected to the Apollo mode decision made during the 1960s.

“It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,’’ Griffin said. “We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can. It cannot be done instantaneously.’’

Only now is the nation’s space program getting back on track, Griffin said a week after the announcement that NASA aims to send astronauts back to the moon in 2018 in a spacecraft that would look like the Apollo capsule and would be carried into space by a rocket built from shuttle components.

When asked whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, “My opinion is that it was. It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible, especially with the amount of funding allocated to the problem.’’ He added on the subject of the ISS which was started in 1999, “Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we’re building in the orbit we’re building it in.’’

Griffin’s statements have sparked a great deal of analysis of the space shuttle and ISS programs. Hindsight of course is a wonderful thing, but at the time, at the end of Apollo and Skylab, NASA had very little choice about its next manned spaceflight program. Had money been no object, then clearly things would have been different, but Congress and President Nixon would only allow a certain amount to be spent; there were, as always, other priorities. Had NASA pushed for more moon flights, or missions to Mars they would simply have been turned down, and possibly left with no manned program of any kind. NASA hoped that by going ahead with the shuttle, compromised design though it was, they would eventually be able to add the other components, such as the space station, at later dates. To a certain extent this turned out to be the case, but it took far longer than NASA had envisaged, and it had already cost the lives of the seven Challenger shuttle astronauts before anything else was built or flown. The birth of the ISS has already been covered in earlier chapters,

but one thing is worth considering. Griffin suggests at the end of his statement that he would not have built the station in its current orbit. He is presumably alluding to the fact that NASA agreed to change the inclination of the ISS orbit to 51 degrees in order to enable the Russians to launch payloads and crews from their launch site at Baikonur. The detrimental effect of this decision was that the shuttle effectively had its payload to ISS orbit capability cut by as much as 30%; or to put it another way, the change added a further 10-15 shuttle flights to the building schedule. Griffin apparently views this concession as a mistake, but imagine if the ISS had been placed in its original 28-degree orbit, out of the reach of the Russians, the station would have had to be abandoned after the Columbia accident in February 2003, as NASA would have had no other means to reach it.

The Chinese, on the other hand, have made their intentions quite clear. They now have two successful manned flights under their belts with the launches of Shenzhou 5 in October 2003, and the two-man launch of Shenzhou 6 in October 2005.

The second of these flights is more significant because it lasted for just over five days, had a crew of two, and for the first time for the Chinese that crew carried out scientific experiments. To call the Shenzhou 6 spacecraft a “mini space station” would be taking things too far. After all, Shenzhou is an evolution of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, although it is larger and has been changed a great deal from the original Soyuz design. However, the Chinese clearly have that kind of development in mind with this design. The orbital module is larger than Soyuz, and has its own propulsion and solar arrays that allow for autonomous flight. This means that the orbital module can be left flying, and carrying out automatic experiments after the crew has left the module and returned to Earth. Just such a mission profile was followed during the first manned flight of Shenzhou in 2003, the orbital module remained circling the Earth fulfilling a six month long military imaging mission. It also means that these modules could be launched to attach to an existing space station by themselves allowing the station to grow. It is thought that the orbital module comes in different sizes for different mission profiles.

They will have a manned station in orbit by 2015, and whilst nobody could say that this is an accelerated program, the station will be of their own design, and not borrowed Soviet/Russian technology. The Chinese are in space to stay, and seem keen not to repeat the unfocused programs of NASA and its partners, but to take one step at a time in a logical fashion. In more recent times (11 January 2007), the Chinese have angered the rest of the world with their testing of an ASAT (anti-satellite) resulting in the destruction of an obsolete weather satellite; such tests have not been carried out by either the U. S. Air Force or the Soviets for about twenty years. This further underlines the fact that the Chinese are following their own agenda both in space and on the ground, and have little regard for the opinions of the rest of the world.

The Russians too have plans for the future despite their more limited financial resources. A design intended to replace the venerable Soyuz and Progress spacecraft is on the drawing boards, and it is called Kliper. Design work on this new spacecraft began back in 2000, but its configuration has changed many times since to reflect both the needs of the Russian, and ISS space programs, and of course the budgets of the agencies involved. The specification is now set to carry six people to and from Earth orbit, plus carry 500 kg of cargo/supplies. The new spacecraft will have a service life of 10 years or 25 flights. The design was first revealed to the public in February 2004 at a press conference held by Yuri Koptev of RKK Energia; however, by April 2005 no funding from the Russian government had been forthcoming according to Valery Ryumin of RKK Energia. Good news for Kliper came in June 2005, when the European Space Agency (ESA) seemed to commit themselves to the development of the project. This would allow Kliper to be launched from the ESA Korou launch site as well as the existing Russian facilities. The support from ESA could mean that Kliper should launch sometime in 2011. Kliper will be launched by a Soyuz-3 booster, and in August 2005 a model of the Soyuz-3 booster with Kliper atop was shown at the Moscow Air and Space Show, MAKS-2005. Japan has also shown interest in the project as involvement would give them independent access to the ISS and its own Kibo Spacelab without requiring seats on the U. S. space shuttle. However, in the summer of 2006, ESA changed its plans, and forced RKK Energia to revisit the design of the Kliper spacecraft, it now seems unlikely that the Kliper will ever fly as Russia’s focus had returned to the Soyuz, and a possible upgrade of that spacecraft.

Space stations have literally come a long way since 1971 and the launch of Salyut 1. The Soviets/Russians have arguably made the greatest leaps, both in terms of hardware design and crew organization and motivation. NASA, however, has learned to apply its greater levels of technology relevantly and with great effect. It has, perhaps, taken them longer to embrace the finer points of crew interaction and scheduling, probably understandable all the time they were flying the space shuttle as well. Now NASA, with Orion, has the opportunity to make great strides beyond low-Earth orbit, to the moon and Mars, but what of the future of the ISS, this is much less clear. Orion will service the ISS once the shuttle completes construction of the station before the end of 2010, and Russia will continue to send Soyuz spacecraft and Progress cargo ships, the ESA will also send its ATV to the ISS for replenishment of consumables for the crew. Beyond that, Russia has plans to expand the station with

more modules, but that initiative is solely reliant on finding the money to finance it. The ESA and Japan will at long last have their labs to carry out research in, and that will probably keep both organizations busy for some time to come. Beyond all of these possibilities, the future of the ISS is unknown, in fact none of the participating nations are saying very much about the future; presumably they are all too tied up in getting construction completed.

The next space stations will probably not even be in Earth orbit, stations orbiting the moon and Mars seem more likely to be the next stage of development, and clearly this represents an even greater challenge, for both man and technology.

In 1971, Viktor Patsayez gazed out of the small windows on Salyut 1, and looked at the Earth below. The enormous area of the Soviet Union slowly drifted past, and he watched quietly, totally absorbed by the sight. He marveled at the fact that he was here at all. That his country was capable of producing a technological miracle such as Salyut 1 he had no doubt. However, without the succession of recent crew changes, his presence on this mission was most unlikely. He had certainly not thought that he would spend his 38th, and last, birthday in space.

In 1973, Owen Garriott spent a lot of his time looking at the Earth through Skylab’s huge wardroom window. This window was the only one of note on the station, and to begin with, the stations designers had resisted including it, finally giving in to pressure from the potential crews. Now the crew could not imagine life without it. The work schedule aboard Skylab was intense, but each crewmember of the three missions tried to find some time each day just to look.

Georgi Grechko loved being back in space. He had flown to Salyut 4 two years earlier, in 1975, but the Salyut 6 station that he was now aboard was a great improvement in many ways. For one thing, it had a bigger, clearer window, and Grechko never tired of gazing at his homeland, and the far reaches of space. Many things had changed on the surface of his home planet in the time between the launch of Salyut 1 and now. Relations with the United States were more open then ever since the Apollo-Soyuz docking mission in 1975, and it was possible that more joint missions would take place in the future.

Ulf Merbold had trained for five years for the opportunity to fly aboard America’s space shuttle, and now in 1983 he was here with his five crewmates aboard Columbia for the first flight of the European Spacelab. The schedule was unbelievably tight, but when he could steal a few moments, often before going to sleep, he would look at the Earth through the shuttle’s flight-deck overhead rendezvous windows. Eleven years later, he would look again, but not through the windows of a space shuttle, but the windows of a Russian space station, called Mir.

The period that Michael Foale most enjoyed was when he had finished exercising. Hot and sweaty, he would float to one of the windows in Mir’s Kristall module, this window was special because it had an air jet fitted that was originally used to cool a camera. The camera was long gone, but the jet remained and it was the ideal thing to cool down a steaming astronaut as he watched the world go by. Six years later Foale was looking through a much larger window than had ever been in space before. He floated in the U. S. Destiny laboratory module aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after exercising in the station’s node module, Unity, and looked through the 20- inch-wide window at the Earth below.

Sergei Krikalev had flown in space six times: twice on the Mir space station, twice on the U. S. space shuttle, and as a member of the very first crew of the ISS. Now he commanded that station’s eleventh expedition, and when this mission was complete, he would have flown over 800 days in space, more than any other human being. He had looked at the Earth from four different spacecraft, and once literally watched the world below change as the Soviet Union dissolved into the Confederation of Inde­pendent States before his very eyes. When he landed the communist state was no more, and he was a Russian citizen.

For Frank Culbertson it was the most painful experience of his life. Below him, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York lay in ruins, and every orbit allowed him to see the devastation from an unprecedented viewpoint on board the ISS. The Pentagon had been hit too, of course, and Frank was to learn that the pilot of that plane was a friend that he had been in flight school with. Tears don’t flow as easily in space, he would later observe.

The history of man’s space stations is a long one, and one that is necessary if we are to journey beyond the orbit of our own planet again. The glory days of Apollo are a long way behind us, many more manned hours aboard the ISS the space shuttles, and the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) lay ahead before we can fulfil our destiny to land human explorers on Mars. Here is the story of what has gone before, the human story, the technical story, and the sometimes tragic tale of “The Story of Manned Space Stations’’.

After the disasters of the Soyuz 1 and N-1, and the continuing disagreements between Mishin and Chelomei, the Soviet government decided that the rival teams should pool resources, under the program name DOS, in order, finally, to get the space station project off the ground. The basic Almaz design was thought to be sound and was kept, but the TKS ferry was thought to be too complicated for rapid develop­ment, and so modifications were made to the Almaz design to allow it to accept a Soyuz as the crew ferry. Other changes included replacing Chelomei’s design for propulsion with the proven Soyuz engine module,

The result of this enforced collaboration was Salyut 1, the first chapter in the story of manned space stations.

Scheduled Flight

launch date designation Flight crew

9 April 2007 Soyuz-TMA 10 Commander: Fyodor Yurchikhin

Flight engineer: Oleg Kotov

Flight engineer: Simonyi

Resident ISS crew Expedition 15 Commander: Fyodor Yurchikhin

Flight engineer: Oleg Kotov Flight engineer: Sunita Williams

8 June 2007 STS-117 Commander: Frederick Sturckow

Atlantis Pilot: Lee Archambault

MSI: Steven Swanson MS2: James Reilly MS3: Patrick Forrester MS4: John Olivas

STS-118 Commander: Scott Kelly

Endeavour Pilot: Charles Hobaugh

MSI: Rick Mastracchio MS2: Tracy Caldwell MS3: Dafydd Williams (Canada)

MS4: Barbara Morgan

MS5: Clayton Anderson (Exp 15—Up)

MS5: Sunita Williams (Exp 14—Down)

Resident ISS crew Expedition 15 Commander: Fyodor Yurchikhin

Flight engineer: Oleg Kotov Flight engineer: Clayton Anderson

6 October 2007 Soyuz-TMA 11 Commander: Yuri Malenchenko Deliver Expedition 16 crew

Flight engineer: Peggy Whitson (ISS Cdr) to ISS Flight engineer: Sheik Muszaphar Shukor

20 October 2007 STS-120 Commander: Pamela Melroy ISS 10A:

Discovery Pilot: George Zamka Node 2, sidewall

MSI: Stephanie Wilson MS2: Scott Parazynski MS3: Paolo Nespoli MS4: Douglas Wheelock MS5: Daniel Tani (Exp 15—Up)

MS5: Clayton Anderson (Exp 15—Down)

Scheduled Flight

launch date designation Flight crew Mission objectives

Resident ISS crew Expedition 16 Commander: Peggy Whitson

Flight engineer: Yuri Malenchenko Flight engineer: Daniel Tani

6 December 2007 STS-122 Commander: Stephen Frick ISS 1 E Columbus

Atlantis Pilot: Alan Poindexter

MSI: Hans Schlegel MS2: Stan Love MS3: Rex Walheim MS4: Leland Melvin MS5: Daniel Tani (Exp 16—Down)

MS5: Leopold Eyharts (Exp 16—Up)

Resident ISS crew Expedition 16 Commander: Peggy Whitson

Flight engineer: Yuri Malenchenko Flight engineer: Leopold Eyharts (ESA)

14 February 2008 STS-123 Commander: Dominic Gorie Endeavour Pilot: Gregory Johnson MSI: Takao Doi (Japan) MS2: Richard Linnehan MS3: Michael Foreman MS4: Robert Behnken MS5: Garrett Reisman (Exp 16—Up) MS5: Leopold Eyharts (Exp 16—Down) ISS 1J/A JEM ELM PS / SLP-D1 Resident ISS crew Expedition 16 Commander: Peggy Whitson Flight engineer: Yuri Malenchenko Flight engineer: Garrett Reisman ^ IN I KKNATIONAI. ЖІ Sl»ACK STATION 8 April 2008 Soyuz TMA-12 Commander: Sergei Volkov Flight engineer: Oleg Kononenko Flight engineer: Ко San or Yi So-yeon Deliver Expedition 17 crew to ISS

Scheduled Flight

launch date designation Flight crew Mission objectives Mission insignia

Resident ISS crew Expedition 17 Commander: Peggy Whitson

Flight engineer: Sergei Volkov Flight engineer: Oleg Kononenko

24 April 2008 STS-124 Commander: Mark Kelly ISS 1J JEM PM, RMS

Discovery Pilot: Kenneth Ham

MSI: Michael Fossum MS2: Karen Nyberg MS3: Ronald Garan MS4: Stephen Bowen MS5: Akihiko Hoshide

Resident ISS crew Expedition 17 Commander: Sergei Volkov

Flight engineer: Sandra Magnus Flight engineer: Oleg Kononenko

9 October 2008 STS-126 Commander: ISS ULF-2

Atlantis Pilot:

MSI:

MS5: Koichi Wakata (Exp 17—Up)

MS5: Sandra Magnus (Exp 17—Down)

Resident ISS crew Expedition 17 Commander: Sergei Volkov

Flight engineer: Oleg Kononenko Flight engineer: Koichi Wakata

8 September 2008 Soyuz TMA-13 Commander: Salizhan Sharipov Deliver Expedition 18 crew

Flight engineer: Michael Fincke to ISS

Flight engineer:

Life in the United States of America in the 1950s was pretty good. After the end of the Second World War, America was entering a Golden Age. The war effort which had provided tanks, planes, and ships, was now focused on providing more luxurious items to an eager population that may have only made up 5% of the world’s total, but that was wealthier than the other 95% combined.

The only blot on the landscape was the Soviet Union. This was the McCarthy era, and the Senator from Wisconsin had made it very clear to all Americans that the enemy was without doubt Red. Most of his accusations were, in fact, totally groundless, but his point had been well made and remembered by the U. S. public. When the U. S.S. R. launched the first satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957, the paranoia that Joseph McCarthy had begun returned with full force. It suddenly seemed that America could not do anything right. When the U. S. responded with their attempt at a satellite launch in December, it exploded after achieving the heady heights of about two feet. They were finally successful in January 1958, but the other four launches that year also failed publicly, and there were many further very spectacular, very public spaceflight failures over the next decade. Meanwhile, it seemed like the Soviet Union could do nothing wrong, they seemed to enjoy success after success in the field of spaceflight, up to and including the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first human into orbit, in April 1961. By comparison, the U. S.A. were not yet ready for a manned spaceflight, and just one week after Gagarin’s flight, the U. S. suffered the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba that brought further embarrassment to the nation. The truth, of course, was a little different. In much later years we would learn that the U. S.S. R. suffered many failures in their space program, but this was not known at the time, and anyway the American public was not going to let a little thing like the facts get in the way of their opinion that somebody somewhere was sleeping on the job.

In 1961, therefore, the pressure was on new U. S. President John Kennedy to restore some pride to the nation, and if that sent a message to those pesky Russians at the same time, all the better. The question that Kennedy asked his advisors was,

“What can we beat the Russians at?” He was advised that simply trying to launch a space station ahead of their rivals would be a waste of time; the Soviets had already demonstrated that they had the lifting capability to achieve that goal before the U. S.A., and another “first” to the communists at this stage was unthinkable. So Kennedy’s mind was made up for him, a month after Gagarin’s flight, and with only 15 minutes of U. S. manned spaceflight experience behind him in the shape of Alan Shepard’s ballistic flight, he announced the challenge of putting a man on the moon before the Soviet Union, and of doing so before the end of the decade. This was not to be a scientific endeavor, nor a noble crusade, it was to be a simple politically motivated challenge to the Russians to get there and back first, ideally without killing anyone in the process. It was not really what NASA wanted to do. The space agency knew that it was not ready for this, it had not even put a man into orbit yet, and now it was being asked to build the equipment needed to send men 250,000 miles to the moon and back, whilst at Cape Canaveral it seemed that every other rocket launch ended in a big bang. As we will see this crash program to send men to the moon and back did little to promote the cause of manned space stations, and in fact, simply got in the way of a logically progressive manned spaceflight effort. Not that Project Apollo and the Soviet moon program stopped all thinking about space stations, it did not, but it certainly meant that such ideas took a back seat to the preparations for landing a man on the moon.

America began to claw back the ground lost to the U. S.S. R. at the opening of the space race. In February 1962 Project Mercury put John Glenn into Earth orbit. In 1965-1966 Project Gemini, a two-man spacecraft, managed its own “firsts” in space­flight, and out-stripped the Russian space program, which was having problems of its own behind closed doors, in every area. And Project Apollo succeeded in landing men on the moon even before the Soviets were on the starting block. Meanwhile, others were thinking about space stations, all about a more permanent presence in space, where science and discovery were the motivating factors. Such thinking had begun many years earlier, almost as early as the dawn of flight itself.

The successful launch of Salyut 1 on 19 April 1971 was a truly historic event. Salyut had not always been its name, indeed the word Zarya was written on the side of the station. Just before launch the official name became Salyut, apparently to prevent confusion with a ground station already named Zarya. After so many years of dreams and plans, humankind had an orbiting space station, and it was ready to accept its first crew. The launch was particularly noteworthy for the Soviets as it came a full two years before America could launch its planned Skylab. This had been one of the main motivations behind combining the Almaz design with Korolev’s Soyuz ferry vehicle. As with many of the Soviet’s spaceflight achievements, political considerations had pushed the space station program forward faster than it might have on its own. This first station was not huge, weighing about 18 tonnes and measuring 20 m in length, and certainly not luxurious, but it represented a milestone in manned space exploration.

The crew of Soyuz 10 would be the first to inhabit this new outpost in orbit. The crew comprised commander Vladimir Shatalov, flight engineer Aleksei Yeliseyez, and researcher Nikolai Rukavishnikov. They were launched four days after Salyut 1 had successfully made orbit, and rendezvoused with the station shortly after. The docking was carried out without any problems, Shatalov having exploited his previous experience of docking Soyuz 4 and 5. Unfortunately, despite a hard docking having been achieved, the crew were unable to swing back the Soyuz docking probe that had to be removed before the crew could access the tunnel that joined the two craft. It was later determined that a failure in the Soyuz docking port’s electrical system had caused the problem. The crew of Soyuz 10 had no choice but to undock from the station and return home, having filmed the Salyut docking port for later analysis on the ground.

The back-up crew for Soyuz 10 consisted of commander Alexei Leonov, with flight engineers Valeri Kubasov and Pyotr Kolodin, and they were now advanced to the prime crew for Soyuz 11. For Leonov this was a significant event. In the three

years following the historic Voskhod 2 flight that had made him the first human to walk in space, he had been training for a flight around the moon in a Zond spacecraft. The flight of Apollo 8 in lunar orbit in December 1968 and a less than successful unmanned test of Zond, had led to his flight being canceled. Ultimately, the entire Soviet manned lunar program was canceled, and Leonov was promoted to lead the training of cosmonauts for the Salyut program. However, fate was to intervene in Leonov’s career once more when Kubasov developed a lung infection shortly before launch. This was later determined to simply be an allergic reaction, but that did not help Kubasov at the time; he was removed from the Soyuz 11 crew and replaced with Vladimir Volkov, his back-up. Then, just eleven hours before launch, it was decided to replace the entire Soyuz 11 crew as a precaution against Kubasov’s lung infection having been passed on to the rest of the them. Leonov was replaced by Gyorgy Dobrovolsky, and Kolodin by Viktor Patsayev. Volkov remained on the crew. The replacement crew for Soyuz 11 were as shocked as Leonov by the decision. They had only been training together for a few months, and had not expected to be launched on an actual mission for several more months, and were concerned that they were not ready. Leonov’s crew were sent away for a holiday before they began training for a flight to Salyut 1 upon the return of Soyuz 11.

The launch, rendezvous, and docking of Soyuz 11 all went smoothly, and the crew were able to enter the station with none of the problems that had affected the previous flight. Despite their concerns and relative lack of training, the flight pro­ceeded well for 12 days until 18 June when the smell of burning was detected and a small electrical fire was found. The crew were very alarmed by this and urged the ground controllers to let them evacuate the station and return to Earth. In preparation, they powered up the Soyuz ferry vehicle, but returned to the station when it was realized that the danger had passed. Nevertheless, this incident had badly dented their morale, and although they continued their work, it was with less passion and drive than before. After a week, the ground controllers decided to let the crew come home early, and on 29 June they packed the Soyuz for the return trip. Their mood was significantly lifted as they strapped themselves in and undocked from Salyut 1, thereby bringing to an end the first mission to a manned space station, which had originally been planned to last 30 days, but was cut short to 23 days.

The Soyuz re-entered the atmosphere as expected and parachuted to a soft landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan. The recovery team opened the hatch to find all three men dead in their couches.

The Soviet people were horrified by the deaths of three brave men that they had come to know well from their nightly broadcasts from the Salyut station, and they now mourned their loss as they would a family member. The crew were interred in the Kremlin wall alongside other space heroes such as Yuri Gagarin, Sergei Korolev, and Vladimir Komarov. The inquest soon determined that a pressure relief valve designed to equalize the internal pressure in the capsule as it descended through the atmo­sphere had opened prematurely, possibly when the explosive bolts that separated the descent module from the orbital and propulsion modules were fired after the de-orbit burn, prior to entry into the atmosphere. It would probably have not been immedi­ately apparent to the cosmonauts that the valve had opened; and even if it had, the

valve was not easily accessible by the crew, although there was evidence to suggest that they had tried to stem the flow of air from their craft. This failure would not have been a problem except for one important fact, the crew did not have pressure suits; Soyuz crews simply wore flight overalls. As the pressure inside their capsule vented, the crew slowly lost consciousness, and eventually died from embolisms in the blood due to the vacuum. The Soyuz landed automatically as if nothing was wrong. Alarm bells rang throughout the spaceflight community. NASA even contacted the Soviets to determine if the long duration of their mission had been a factor in their deaths. Clearly, changes needed to be made to the Soyuz design to prevent a future cata­strophe, and Salyut 1 would not be able to be inhabited in its lifetime again, so it was commanded to de-orbit by firing its engines to initiate a ditching in the Pacific Ocean in October 1971.

The redesign of the Soyuz spacecraft turned out to be substantial. It was clear that in the future cosmonauts must launch and land wearing pressure suits, and this would require more room than was currently available in the descent module. The only way to accommodate the newly designed Sokol K1 spacesuits, along with the extra equipment needed to support the space-suited crew would be to remove one man from the Soyuz configuration. This had implications for future space station designs, as a crew of two would obviously have more work to do. The Soyuz 11 crew had spent much of their 23 days aboard Salyut 1 simply looking after the station’s systems; two men would be even more pressed to keep up with a station’s needs.

Alexei Leonov was assigned to command the first crew to occupy the next Salyut station, along with Valeri Kubasov, but his luck was to betray him again. The next Salyut was actually the back-up for the Salyut 1 mission, and therefore identical to its predecessor. Unfortunately, only two and a half minutes after launch on 29 July 1972 one engine on the Proton rocket’s second stage failed, and the vehicle crashed into the Pacific Ocean, taking the Salyut with it. Officially it was never called a Salyut or anything else; only in later years would it become apparent that this launch had taken place.

Mission patches have been part of manned space flight for such a long time that it is easy to forget their origins. It is also easy to think of them as being predominantly an American initiative, but this not so.

The Mercury astronauts wore the first patches, but they were simply the insignia of NASA. Instead of mission specific patches, these pioneering astronauts gave their spacecraft names. The practice began when Alan Shepard named his spacecraft Freedom 7, the number 7 came not from the number of astronauts in the group as many have thought, but simply from the fact that this was the seventh spacecraft built. Subsequent crews named their craft with the seven suffix, and instead of the simple stencilled names on the spacecraft sides that Shepard and Grissom had, they came up with designs, logos if you like for their missions, with the help of an artist. These designs were much later made into woven patches, but they never existed in that form at the time of the missions.

Once the first crew had been announced for the Gemini program, Mercury veteran Gus Grissom, who would command the flight of Gemini 3, naturally wanted to continue the tradition of naming his spacecraft. He came up with the name “Molly Brown” after the Broadway musical of the time “The Unsinkable Molly Brown”, clearly this was a reference to his Mercury flight that had ended up sinking. NASA officials thought that this name was inappropriate, and had been privately thinking for a while that this whole naming thing was getting out of hand, so they banned Grissom from using this name and demanded that he come up with an alternative. When he revealed that he rather liked the sound of “Titanic”, they banned the future naming of spacecraft forthwith. NASA officials thought that the whole thing had been put to bed, but the next crew for Gemini 4 also wanted to commemorate their flight in some way, they had intended to name the spacecraft “American Eagle”, but the recent banning had put paid to that. Instead, they decided that they would wear U. S. flags on the shoulders of their spacesuits, and every U. S. crew since then has done the same.

Mission patches officially came into being with the flight of Gemini 5, the crew of Gordon Cooper and Peter Conrad had already done battle with NASA Headquarters about naming their craft, and when they were also turned down they came up with the idea of a personal mission patch. It reflected the idea of U. S. military personnel having individual unit patches, and since the astronauts considered each crew to be a unit it seemed appropriate for each mission to have a patch. Conrad’s father-in-law came up with the idea of a covered Conestoga wagon as part of the design, the idea being that it reflected the early pioneering spirit, and Cooper and Conrad added the slogan “8 Days or Bust’’ since that was the intended duration of their flight. Unfortunately, Jim Webb the then NASA Administrator, did not share the crew’s enthusiasm, in fact it’s fair to say that he lost his sense of humour over the whole thing. Both crewmembers pointed out that it was perfect for morale for the whole team of people involved in the flight to be able to wear such a patch. Webb saw their point but insisted that the slogan be covered up until the flight had successfully flown for that long, only at the end of a successful eight-day flight could they reveal it. The mission patch was here to stay, but NASA Headquarters insisted that they approve the design of every patch before it was made public, a practice that continues today. The naming of spacecraft made a brief re-appearance during the Apollo program when there would be two separate spacecraft flying at the same time, which needed to be identified by radio. Again, NASA Headquarters had to approve these names in advance.

All subsequent mission patches have featured the names of the crew, and imagery appropriate to the nature and objectives of the flight. Only six patches have appeared that did not contain any names at all. Gemini 7 and 10, Apollo 11 and 13, and much more recently, ISS Expedition 14, 15, and 16. This is becoming a more common practice with ISS missions, as many now routinely include several changing crew members. Expedition 15 has six different versions with different crew names, and this situation needs to be avoided in the future.

The appearance of names on patches has caused some headaches in the past, and indeed continues to do so today. In the early days of the space shuttle program, some crews decided to add the name of the particular shuttle that they were going to fly on board. Of course, this was a problem if the mission scheduling changed, and they were assigned a different shuttle, the patches would have to be changed. This particular problem came to a head with the flight of 41-E/41-F, which was originally assigned to fly Discovery, it was then changed to Challenger and renamed 51-E, and in addition, a payload specialist was added to the crew, his name was added as a tab sewn onto the bottom of the design. Unfortunately, for the patch manufacturer who had just completed these changes, a seventh crewmember was added, so they cut off the existing tab and replaced it with a new one with two names. This was not the end of the nightmare, however, since 51-E was then canceled, and crews jumbled around, the original core crew of 51-E remained, now given the flight 51-D, but one of the payload specialist had changed, and so had the space shuttle, it was to be Discovery again. The good news was that the manufacturer used the original 41-F Discovery patch, with a new tab sewn to the bottom. Because of all of these changes, 51-D was the last flight for quite some time that included the name of the

shuttle, and all payload specialists tended to have their names on separate sewn on tabs.

On one occasion, the first shuttle flight to rendezvous with Mir, STS-63, caused some patch problems when one crewmember, Janice Voss, got divorced part-way through the approval cycle, the official patch originally said Ford, but was changed to Voss before any were produced.

The Soviet Union had also adopted the tradition of producing patches, but in a slightly different way to their American counterparts. In the Soviet system, cosmo­nauts have their own personal call sign, which they generally maintain during their entire career, the call sign of the commander of the flight is adopted as the main call sign for the mission. Therefore, patches have tended to be of a personal nature rather than a mission specific one. This has changed over the years, particularly when there is some special significance to the mission, for instance all of the Interkosmos inter­national flights had a mission patch usually including the flag of the nation involved. The first known use of a personal patch was that used by Valentina Tereshkova during her Vostok 6 mission in 1963, it consisted of a white dove, and the letters СССР. In fact, this was the first use of a mission patch by anyone, the U. S.A. not officially introducing them until Gemini 5 in 1965. Over the years, Soviet crews have worn a number of standard patches, many of them produced by Zvezda, who are the manufacturers of the crew’s spacesuits. The patches produced by Zvevda have displayed the company’s logo and the Russian word for Salyut, or Mir, and now

ISS. Zvevda also produced the patch that was first worn by Alexei Leonov during his pioneering spacewalk, and later by the crew of Salyut 1. Since those early days, Soviet and Russian mission patches have been something of a mixture; many cosmonauts have carried their own personal patches, as well as patches that are specific to their mission. Many patch collectors have recently become dismayed at the sheer number of different patches that become available for just one mission. The more recent Soyuz taxi missions to the ISS have featured customized designs for each cosmonaut, often the same basic design, but with a different colour border for each crewmember.

Quite how patches will continue to evolve is unclear, Orion will carry crews of six at a time to the ISS, and the ISS standard crew complement is due to grow to six crewmembers at a time, it seems likely that mission specific or expedition patches may be on the decline, but astronaut/cosmonaut personal patches will increase. Time will tell.

In 1928, Hermann Potocnik Noordung published his first and only book Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums—der Raketen motor (literally translated as The problem of driving on space—the rocket engine). This book was primarily con­cerned with manned space stations, the first in history to do so. It contained a design for a wheel-shaped structure for living quarters, with a power-generating station attached to one end of the central hub, and an astronomical observation station at the other end. He was among the first to suggest a wheel-shaped design for a space station in order to produce artificial gravity, and he pointed out the scientific value of such a station in a synchronous orbit above the Earth. His ideas were to inspire Hermann Oberth, and later Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev.

Sadly, Noordung himself did not profit from his amazing foresight, he died at the

early age of 36 in great poverty, and his obituary in the local newspaper mentioned nothing of his spaceflight publication.

In March 1970, the Skylab project received official approval by President Nixon when he referred to it during a speech about America’s goals in space for the coming decade and beyond. However, this was a difficult time for NASA, they had achieved President Kennedy’s challenge of landing a man on the moon before 1970, indeed they had done it twice with Apollo 11 and 12, and now they faced the inevitable post­success anticlimax, and the people of the United States lost interest. The Soviet threat to the moon landings had failed to materialize, and the risks of further moon landings were all too clearly demonstrated during the flight of Apollo 13 in April 1970. NASA’s budget had been slowly reducing for years now, and finally they had to cut flights: two Apollo missions were deleted from the program that would now end with Apollo 17 in 1972. It was at this time that the first hint of co-operation with the Soviets became apparent, with a suggested docking of a Soyuz with the Skylab workshop. This was at a time, of course, when the Soviet’s plans for their Salyut stations was completely unknown to the Americans until Salyut 1’s launch in 1971. NASA then suggested that perhaps an Apollo CSM could dock with a Salyut station, but the Soviets were not keen on this idea, and NASA had already decided that a Soyuz docking with Skylab was also not an option any longer. These discussions continued, and eventually an Apollo-Soyuz docking was suggested, and this would lead to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) of 1975.

In 1971 Chief of Flight Crew Operations, Deke Slayton, began the process of selecting crews for the upcoming Skylab missions. At that time, three missions were definitely scheduled with the possibility of two more. It had also been suggested that the crews should consist of one pilot/commander, preferably a flight experienced astronaut joined by two scientist-astronauts in order to maximize the scientific output from these flights. Slayton quickly put a stop to that idea; his feeling was that Skylab was a totally new kind of mission, and he wanted two pilot astronauts on each crew in case something went wrong. He came up with the following crew assignments based on those criteria.

Even these initial assignments had undergone some change. Walt Cunningham had originally been assigned as back-up commander for the first flight, but he choose to leave NASA rather than stick around for another two years as only a back-up. He was replaced by Rusty Schweickart, who in turn was replaced on the Skylab 2 and 3 back-up crews by Vance Brand. Also added at a later date was the possibility of a Skylab Rescue mission. This was the first time that planning a rescue mission had even been possible in NASA’s space program. It involved flying a special Apollo Command and Service module fitted with two extra couches underneath the outer­most couches already installed; this was a small area that had been used as a sleeping space during Apollo moon missions. This modified CSM would be flown by a crew of two, and come back with five crewmembers after docking with the second port on Skylab.

It was at this point that some confusion entered the Astronaut Office concerning the design of the mission patches for Skylab. The official designation for the three manned flights was SL-2, SL-3, and SL-4, with the first unmanned launch of the lab itself designated SL-1. The crews had designed their patches according to this numbering, but were later informed by the Skylab Program Director that in fact their flights were being referred to as Skylab 1, 2, and 3, so the patches were changed. When the patches were submitted for official approval, they were rejected by NASA’s Associate Administrator for Manned Spaceflight, Dale Myers, because of their numbering, and he ordered them to revert to the original designations. However, it was too late for the crews to do this, as their clothing for their upcoming missions had already been stored on board Skylab ready for its launch. It was deemed far too expensive, and unnecessary to change the clothing and labels at this late stage, so although the office designations for the missions remained, the patches are labeled, 1, 2, and 3. Such are the difficulties of managing a space program!

With the flight crews and launch dates now defined, some modifications were required to the launch pads to support the launch of the Saturn IB rocket. This had been used only once previously for a manned launch, when Pad 34 had been used for the Apollo 7 mission. As that pad was no longer available, it was decided to modify Pad 39B to accept the Saturn IB, and leave 39A largely as it was to launch the last ever Saturn V booster with the Skylab workshop on board. Given that most of the upper connections on the much shorter Saturn IB were the same as for the Saturn V that Pad 39B had been designed for, it was decided that the easiest modification to the pad would be to build a 127 foot high pedestal for the Saturn IB to sit on. This pedestal became known as the milkstool.

The Skylab workshop itself had undertaken quite a journey. Built originally as the second stage of the Saturn IB launch vehicle, it now had to be converted into a useable orbital workshop. S-IVB second stage number 212 had been built in 1966 by McDonnell Douglas, and its accompanying J-2 rocket engine built and tested during 1967 and then installed into stage 212 later that same year. At that point in time this stage was not assigned to a specific mission, so it was put into storage at McDonnell’s Huntingdon Beach assembly plant until March 1969. At the end of this period it was identified as being ideal for refurbishment as the Skylab orbital workshop. As 1969 progressed, the J-2 engine, thrust structures, and various other parts were removed to

leave the stage consisted only of its two fuel tanks. It took a further two years of work to prepare the interior of the hydrogen tank for human habitation in space. The second smaller tank, originally intended for liquid oxygen, would be used by the crew for storing all of their trash. By the end of 1972 the Saturn S-IVB stage 212 was ready to be launched as the primary Skylab workshop. At the same time, another S-IVB stage, number 515, this time from a Saturn V, had been identified as the back-up Orbital Workshop and had gone through the same conversion process as stage 212. It never flew, of course, and it was delivered to the Smithsonian Institution for display at the Air & Space Museum in Washington D. C., where it has been since July 1976.

Before any of the announced crews could visit the station, it was decided to run a full mission length simulation on the ground. This simulation would allow all the experiments and equipment aboard the station to be tested before launch. It would also help to alleviate any medical fears regarding the crew’s long-term exposure to a artificial closed ecological system. If there were any problems, it would be better that they happened first on the ground. In order to run the simulation as accurately as possible, a complete mock-up of the Skylab interior had to be built in an altitude chamber in order that the correct pressure and mixture of gases could be used. It was

decided to use the 20 foot diameter chamber at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. The program was known as SMEAT, which stood for Skylab Medical Experiments Altitude Test. Originally planned to consist of two simulations, one lasting for 28 days and a second lasting for 56 days, it was decided to limit the program to just one 56-day test. The crew for the SMEAT test was to be selected from the pool of existing astronauts, but not to include any of the selected Skylab crews, their back-ups or support crew. Bob Crippen was selected as commander, with Karol Bobko as pilot and Bill Thornton as science-pilot. They designed their own mission patch, which featured the cartoon character Snoopy with a tightrope around his neck; this was said to reflect how they felt about some the medical experiments that were to be performed on them.

On the 26th July 1972 the three men prepared to start their marathon simulation with a medical check before beginning a long pre-breathing period to purge nitrogen from their blood. During the “mission” the crew participated in all the experiments that the actual crews would perform in flight. This allowed them to discover any problems with procedures, and to set a baseline for the experiments that were to be performed in orbit. The test ended on 20 September 1972, and undoubtedly made a massive contribution to the success of the Skylab missions.

By the end of 1972 the Skylab program was ready for its first launch. The thirteenth and final Saturn V booster to be launched would be used to haul the Orbital Workshop into space, where it would be visited and lived in by three separate crews launched by Saturn IB boosters from an adjacent pad. With the crew of the first mission watching, the Saturn V lifted itself from Pad 39A, and at first, everything appeared to be quite normal.

Unfortunately just as the vehicle was passing through Max Q (a term for maximum aerodynamic pressure) about 70 seconds after launch, the first signs from telemetry showed that the booster was in trouble. The telemetry showed that the micrometeoroid shield and the number two solar array had already been deployed. This, of course, should have been impossible, for the Skylab workshop was still surrounded by the aerodynamic launch shroud. In fact, the shroud enclosed only the structures atop the OWS. The skin of the OWS was the S-IVB, which was exposed to the airflow. However, the Saturn V continued its pre-programmed path and delivered Skylab to orbit. It now remained to be seen what condition the lab was in. Initial telemetry suggested that there had been a major problem with the solar arrays, as the amount of power being generated by them was a small percentage of what it should have been. Clearly if the station could not generate enough power, it could not be occupied for any length of time. After more detailed investigation by NASA officials, it was determined that a design imperfection had caused the micro­meteoroid shield to move away from its flush location against the workshop, and aerodynamic forces had then ripped the entire shield away, taking the left-hand solar array with it. It was uncertain whether the right-hand array had been similarly lost, or was trapped against the lab by debris from the departing shield. It was hoped that the

latter was the case. Pete Conrad’s crew were stood down until they could be trained to free the trapped array. Unfortunately, the micrometeoroid shield was to have served as the thermal shield to keep the interior of the workshop cool. With its demise, the internal temperature was climbing steadily to the point where it would exceed the limits designated safe for human habitability. The obvious thing for ground con­trollers to do was to maneuver Skylab such that the area of bare skin was pointed away from the Sun in order to keep the internal temperatures under control. How­ever, this also meant facing the remaining solar arrays, which were located on the Apollo Telescope Mount, away from the Sun, thus depriving the fledgling station of power. Eventually the Skylab controllers alternated the station between different attitudes in an effort to find the best compromise. A further complication caused by the increasing internal temperatures was the condition of the food supplies aboard the station for all three of its future crews. The temperature had risen to 54°C but it was determined that all of the canned food on board would survive such temperatures for quite a while if necessary. Further concerns affected the medical supplies and film—it was decided that the crews would carry fresh supplies with them.

Ultimately, however, it would fall to the first crew to make repairs to the station if the entire planned program was to be carried out. Many possible solutions for both the shield and the solar array problems were put forward, but most were not prac­tical. Eventually 10 solutions were shortlisted, and after further deliberations this list was cut to two. It was decided to supply the first crew with both solutions. An improved Sun shield solution would be made ready for the second crew to install after the first crew had reported on the condition of the station. Testing of the components to be used by Conrad’s crew was carried out by Schweickart and Kerwin in the neutral buoyancy water tank at the Marshall Space Flight Center, to develop proceedures and verify that the equipment would function as anticipated. The Extra­vehicular Activities (EVAs) planned for Conrad’s crew were arguably the most complex, and the requirement to undertake them so early in the mission by a rela­tively untrained crew was greeted with nervousness by many within NASA. A simpler method for deploying a replacement temporary Sun shield was therefore devised that would enable the crew to remain inside the workshop, but for the stuck solar array there was no choice but to proceed with the planned EVA. The command module for the first crew would therefore be crammed with improvised and off-the-shelf tools to aid in the freeing of the remaining solar array.

Pete Conrad and his crew lifted off from the milkstool on Pad 39B on 25 May 1973, their destination the damaged Skylab Orbital Workshop. The rendezvous proceeded normally, and the first order of business was to fly around the workshop to carry out a visual inspection of the damage. After first docking with Skylab in order to conserve station-keeping fuel, the crew undocked to carry out a stand-up EVA. Conrad drew the command module up to the damaged solar array for a closer inspection; which revealed that a couple of metal straps were preventing the still intact array from deploying. They depressurized the command module and Paul Weitz and Joe Kerwin prepared to attempt to free the trapped wing. The procedure was for Kerwin to remain in the hatch and hold on to the legs of Weitz, who was hanging out of the hatch with a long-handled cutting tool. Every time Weitz

attempted to cut the metal straps he would inadvertently pull the command module nearer to the hull of the Skylab, which meant Conrad at the controls had to fire thrusters to prevent a collision, which in turn made Kerwin’s task difficult. It just was not going to work. The crew now attempted to dock their spacecraft with Skylab’s axial docking port again, but this time they had trouble, only completing a successful docking after they had disassembled the command module’s docking mechanism and carried out repairs. Mission Control decided that this would be a good time for the crew to have a meal and a sleep period before entering the station.

When the crew did enter Skylab the next day, they found the temperatures to be extreme, about 125°F; Conrad likened it to the engine room on an aircraft carrier. Entering the workshop in short shifts and returning to the command module to cool off, the crew set about deploying the makeshift parasol. Making use of a small scientific airlock in the wall of the workshop on the sunward-facing side, they deployed the temporary sunshade in the fashion of a chimney cleaner extending his brush by adding a new section of rod and pushing it further up the chimney. Conrad and Weitz carried out the deployment, whilst Kerwin watched their progress from the command module. Once the parasol had been fully extended, it began to flatten itself in the warmth of the Sun, and soon the temperatures in the workshop

began to drop; although it took about a week for the temperature to drop below 70 ° F. The workshop was now habitable, and the crew moved their belongings into their individual cabins and began to unpack the contents of the station in preparation for carrying out their assigned scientific duties.

Power, however, was a big problem; with only the solar arrays on the telescope mount available, Skylab had less than half the power it required. The crew would have to venture outside and attempt once more to free the trapped solar wing. Conrad and Kerwin ventured outside with the various tools that had been loaded on board their command module. One tool was a very-long-handled cutter of the type used by telephone repair men to remove branches that interfered with telegraph poles and wires. The crew had decided after their earlier inspection that this tool would be ideal to cut the metal straps that restrained the solar wing. However, when Kerwin tried to use it he found that it was impossible to place the cutting jaws precisely where he wanted them, partly owing to the length of the handles, but mainly because he was unable to get the leverage he needed for his own body in the weightless conditions. After many exhausting attempts, he noticed an attachment point on the hull and by connecting his dual tethers to this point, and one other, he discovered that he could “stand” on the hull with the tethers strained against him. This gave him the leverage and positioning that he needed, and he was able to snap first one of the restraining straps, and then the other. Almost unbelievably, the solar wing refused to deploy. Both men looked on in exasperation, until it was realized that the hinges were probably frozen and holding the wing in place. Kerwin decided to venture out into the middle of the wing and push against a rope that was tied to it, and eventually the hinges were freed and the wing began to deploy. Conrad, meanwhile, had been shot from the wing like an arrow; but his umbilical line caught him and he returned to the station hand over hand in time to see the wing fully deploy. Conrad and Kerwin re­entered the station whilst delighted ground controllers confirmed that the wing was now fully deployed and generating electricity, Skylab was saved.

Conrad and his crew could now settle into more of a standard routine, more like the one originally envisaged. They immediately discovered that Skylab was big and roomy, much larger than any spacecraft they had previously experienced. To give some idea of its size, the interior usable volume of Skylab was about 361 m3, which is a fairly meaningless number; by comparison an average semi-detached three-bed­room house has a volume of about 270 m3. That made Skylab pretty big, but bear in mind that in your three bedroom house on Earth, in normal gravity, you only get to use the floor space of that 270 m3, any space above your head is essentially wasted. In orbit, in zero-g, all of that space is habitable whether its floor, ceiling, or wall. The early Salyut stations had little more than 100m3 of space so you can see that Skylab was large for its time, and in fact its internal size would not be surpassed until the Mir space station had been fully constructed twenty-five years later.

The hydrogen tank that the crew now lived in was split into two decks, if you imagine Skylab standing upright as it was on the launch pad with the workshop at the bottom, and the docking adapter and telescope mount at the top. The very first thing we see working from the bottom of our stack, is the original oxygen tank of the Saturn rocket stage, this tank has been basically left alone, and was used to store all of the crew’s rubbish. The crew put the rubbish into the tank via an airlock connector which ran between the oxygen tank and the much larger hydrogen tank. The “bot­tom” floor of the hydrogen tank contained the crew’s individual sleeping quarters, the ward room, the bathroom, an experimental rotating chair, and the airlock for the rubbish tank, as well as a shower, a first for any manned spacecraft. Each crewman had his own sleeping compartment, with a sleeping bag hung on one wall, and storage space for personal items. Pete Conrad found that he did not like the way his sleeping bag was hung because the airflow went up his nose, so he turned the sleeping bag around; of course it’s all the same in zero gravity. The wardroom contained a table that all three crewmen could assemble around with a separate area for each of them; this allowed them to heat their food with a kind of tray to eat from. In the center of the table there was a water dispenser, both for drinking directly from, or for re­hydrating their food packs. The table also included a kind of bar stool arrangement for each man, but they found these very awkward to use as it meant that they had to conscientiously bend over the whole time, and their abdominal muscles quickly became tired. The shower, which many might think would be a very welcome addition to any spacecraft that you are going to spend a significant amount of time aboard, proved to be not as useful as hoped. The shower compartment was not a permanent glass structure that you might expect on Earth, but a collapsible enclosure to aid cleaning. In the absence of gravity the water had to be pressurized for it to “flow” from the shower head, and the water had then to be collected by means of a suction head much like a vacuum cleaner that was used to suck the water from the interior of the shower, and the astronaut. The crews found that whilst it was a pleasant experience to have this facility, it took a great deal of time to set-up, use, and clean up after, and they therefore used it less often than they otherwise might have. The bathroom was not quite such a chore to use, but the three crews did all find it a little odd that the designers had chosen to place the toilet on the wall, which meant that the crewman ended up facing the floor. In all other respects that system worked well, which was just as well, as the alternative meant reverting to the Apollo plastic bag method!

The main reason for the crew’s presence on board, of course, was to carry out scientific experiments. A great many of these were carried out on the crew themselves, to study the effects of long-term weightlessness on the human body. One of the other important roles of Skylab was to study the Sun. An entire suite of equipment had been designed for this purpose, and the crew trained extensively in its use. Once the power problems were solved, the crew were able to carry out their full schedule of Sun observations using the ATM (Apollo Telescope Mount).

An important milestone was achieved on 17 July when Conrad’s crew surpassed the 23-days-in-space mark set by the Soyuz 11 crew on board Salyut 1 in 1971. They spent their final week finishing the current experiments, stowing results for return to Earth, and getting the station ready to be unmanned for a period of time before the arrival of the next crew. Once the crew had separated from Skylab, another fly – around was carried out to photograph the condition of the station, then they fired the SPS engine to initiate the return home. The crew had completed 28 days in space, and Conrad was now the new spaceflight record-holder with over 1,179 hours in space. Years later, when asked, he would say that Skylab 2 was the mission that he was most proud of, and that when he thought about space, he always thought of Skylab and all of that room. Most people he met assumed that his mission to the moon would have been the highlight of his career, but as far as he was concerned Apollo 12 had gone by the numbers, and had been relatively routine; he would not trade it for the world, but it really had not been that exciting. Skylab was different; he and his crew had faced unknown problems, and surmounted them, and they had left the station able to continue the mission for which it had been launched, as well as achieving nearly all of the mission’s scientific objectives.

Skylab’s mission continued after the departure of the first crew. The ATM had been designed to be controllable from the ground, and therefore solar observations

continued. Unfortunately, a primary gyroscope used to control the orientation of the station failed, and observations were stopped until the next crew could arrive. It was decided to bring forward the launch of Skylab 3 so that they could replace the failed gyro, and also install an improved sunshield, as controllers feared that the temporary solution deployed by Conrad’s crew was deteriorating faster than expected.

The Skylab 3 crew consisted, as planned, of commander Alan Bean, pilot Jack Lousma, and science-pilot Owen Garriott, and their command module was almost as packed with additional items as the first crew’s had been, partly because the intention was to increase the mission duration by three days, to the originally planned 56 days. The improved sunshade was one thing, but they also carried extra film canisters, extra food, various spare parts, including a replacement set of gyros. Launch was set for 28 July 1973, and the countdown proceeded smoothly. Only Bean had flown pre­viously; Garriott and Lousma were rookies. Lousma fell asleep whilst waiting for lift­off. As he would later recall, “Just about thirty seconds before launch, you reach over to your buddies, shake their hands and wish them good luck, because their luck is going to be the same as yours!’’

Skylab 3 was launched flawlessly, and had no trouble docking with Skylab. After many checks, the crew entered the workshop to mark the first time that a space station had been reoccupied by a different crew. However, the mission had not been without some complications at this early stage. Lousma had started to suffer from some “stomach awareness”, or Space Adaption Syndrome as we now call it, shortly after reaching orbit, and later as they entered the station Bean and Garriott had also begun to suffer too. Bean had, of course, flown on Apollo 12 with no problems at all, and it caused some surprise in Mission Control when he reported feeling ill. The crew did their best to carry on with their duties, but inevitably fell behind schedule. The net effect was that Mission Control tried to give the crew additional rest time in an effort to speed their recovery, and also postponed the first planned EVA by 24 hours. Over the next couple of days, the crew slowly began to feel better and began to catch up on the schedule; however, the entire episode caused concern for mission planners, especially with the next Skylab crew—all rookies—scheduled for a longer mission.

The problems did not end there unfortunately. It had also been noticed early on that one of the thruster quads on the Apollo service module had sprung a leak, and eventually it was deactivated. The spacecraft was able to fly perfectly well with the three remaining quads. However, several days later a second quad also started to leak and had to be shut down. This still did not represent any immediate danger for the crew, as Apollo was quite capable of flying on two, or even one thruster quad, but it did cause concern that eventually all four quads might be rendered useless. NASA’s contingency planning came into its own at this point; a rescue mission had been planned for all three missions to Skylab, and it was this option that saved the mission. If there had been no possibility of a rescue mission, the Skylab 3 crew would have packed up and come home as soon as possible, whilst the two remaining quads were still operational. But the possibility of flying a rescue command module meant that both the crew and Mission Control could afford to wait and see. In the meantime, the rescue crew of Vance Brand and Don Lind rehearsed in the simulators and their modified command module was readied for flight. The engineers on the ground were able to determine that the leaks in the two thrusters were unrelated, and that there was nothing to suggest a systematic fault. The rescue crew were stood down, although they did spend time simulating the Skylab 3 return with only two working thrusters. Lind would later remark that he had effectively talked himself out of his first flight by showing that the Skylab 3 crew could return safely without the need for a rescue flight.

After these dramas, life settled into a gentler routine for the Skylab crew. There were a few equipment malfunctions that had to be attended to, but on the whole the rest of mission was quiet. Garriott and Lousma installed the improved sunshield during an EVA 10 days into the mission. The same pair also retrieved film cassettes from the ATM later in the mission, and later still Bean and Garriott retrieved more film cassettes and also retrieved a sample of the new parasol to determine its con­dition after a month’s exposure. When the time came for the crew to leave the station, they had more than completed their objectives, and after the initial problems with space sickness had subsided, had consistently been ahead of the flight plan, always asking for more work, and by the end of the mission they had in fact achieved over 150% of their targeted work. Whilst this was a fantastic achievement, it would not bode well for the crew that was to succeed them.

The crew for the third and final Skylab mission broke from Deke Slayton’s usual rules of crew selection; they were all rookies. Their mission had changed somewhat, too. A comet had been discovered that would approach the Sun toward the end of 1973, and the launch of the third crew was delayed from its original October launch date until November so that they could carry out observations using Skylab’s ATM and other instruments. The booster for the last Skylab mission had been sitting on the pad for some time, as it had originally been rolled out to serve as booster for the Skylab rescue mission; when this mission was stood down, the booster became the Skylab 4 launch vehicle. However, just five days from launch a routine inspection crew discovered cracks on the stabilizing fins of the first stage. Perhaps this was not surprising, as this stage had been manufactured over seven years earlier, but clearly it

could not be launched in this condition. It was decided to replace the fins on the pad, which would take about a week. The crew faced a tight squeeze in their Apollo Command Module due to it being packed with additional items for the long mission ahead, most of it food to allow the length of the mission to be extended from the planned 70 days to 84 days if all else was well. The launch itself was routine and seven hours later the crew sighted Skylab and prepared to dock—which they had some difficulty with initially, but managed at the third attempt.

With the experiences of Al Bean’s crew very much in mind, Mission Control had ordered the astronauts to take more precautions against space sickness in order to prevent disruption to the early mission flight plan, and they took anti-sickness pills as soon as they reached orbit. It was also decided that the crew would have a sleep period before entering the station for the first time. Unfortunately, it was swiftly proved that this approach did not help, as Bill Pogue was overcome with nausea almost as soon as the rest period began, and relieved himself of his last meal. The crew made the first mistake of the mission when they decided not to mention Pogue’s symptoms to Mission Control. Confident that he would feel better before they entered the lab for the first time they simply explained that he had not felt hungry and had left most his last meal uneaten. This plan might have worked if it were not for the on-board automatic taping system which recorded the entire conversation and relayed it later to the ground, and most importantly to Chief Astronaut Alan Shepard. As a result Shepard talked directly to the crew commander, Gerry Carr, and voiced his opinion on what he called “a fairly serious error in judgement”. Carr realized the error of his ways and put his hands up and agreed that “it was a dumb decision”.

Despite the best efforts of the mission planners, Pogue’s sickness would impact the early activation of the station by limiting his participation with the rest of the crew. In fact, the planners seemed to assume that this crew could pick up at the same pace as Bean’s had left off, which ignored the fact that it took Bean’s crew several days to get near that pace of work. The planners also seemed to assume that procedures in space took the same amount of time as taken during training on the ground, and as hard as the crew tried to keep pace, they simply could not, and fell further behind the timeline set by the ground controllers. Even worse, the planners on the ground did not seem to realize that they were making things worse; they even added extra tasks to the crew’s day, causing them to fall even further behind, and consequently start to believe that they were not doing a good enough job. On the seventh day of the mission, Pogue and Ed Gibson carried out a planned EVA to replace film cartridges successfully, but even then the tired crew left some stowing away tasks until the next day. All in all, the first three weeks or so were very difficult. But things began to improve as the crew realized how to make things better, and better communicate those thoughts to the controllers on the ground. This was about the same period of time that Al Bean’s crew had taken to reach their peak efficiency, but this fact was apparently forgotten by the mission planners, who seemed to assume that the new crew could immediately start where the previous crew had left off. The crew desperately tried to remain on the timeline, and explain the problems to those on the ground, but their pleas went unheeded. The mission planners, for their part, always felt that the crew were about to reach their best performance level, and were therefore reluctant to reduce the workloads. After all, this was the last chance for these scientific experiments to be flown and NASA wanted to take advantage of every waking moment. It all came to a head after the crew had been in orbit for about six weeks. During a call with the crew’s boss, Deke Slayton, all of the problems were voiced and discussed, the ground were persuaded to ease off on the workload, and also leave some of the scheduling to the crew rather than providing a daily minute-by­minute task list. This meant that the crew felt more in charge of their activity, and were able to follow a more “normal” day. The rest of the mission proceeded at a similar pace to the previous ones, and by the end of January 1974 the crew were making preparations to return home. The orbit of Skylab was raised slightly with a firing of RCS jets on the Apollo service module, in the hope that this might allow Skylab to survive for longer, and perhaps be visited again before its expected orbital decay in 1981 or 1982. The Skylab 4 crew landed about 5 hours after undocking having spent a total of 84 days and 1 hour in orbit.

The possibility of a Skylab revisit and re-boost mission would now be left to the space shuttle, which at this stage did not exist, so a choice had to be made between trying to preserve the station for some future visit by Apollo CSM or the space shuttle, or a mission to send a crew in Apollo to carry out a controlled re-entry burn to send Skylab to its destruction. There were some risks attached to the latter, as it involved the docked CSM firing its service module engine until Skylab had almost reached entry interface, which meant that a prompt undocking was a very important action; if the docking latches failed in some way the crew would follow Skylab to destruction! In part due to these risks, it had been decided to boost Skylab to a higher orbit before the final crew left, effectively deferring the decision until the early 1980s. Once the space shuttle program was underway, it was tentatively planned that during its third flight the shuttle would rendezvous with Skylab and attach a booster rocket to the docking port, at which time it would be decided whether to boost the station to a higher orbit once more, or send it to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Ironically, Jack Lousma of Skylab 3 was assigned to pilot the shuttle’s third mission, and revisit his old home. In the end, two factors decided Skylab’s fate. The first was the protracted development of the shuttle, it became clear over time that the shuttle would simply not be ready in time to save the orbiting station, especially as it’s orbit was deteriorating faster than expected owing to increased solar activity inflating the upper atmosphere and causing increased drag. Skylab would have to be left to make an uncontrolled re-entry sometime in 1979, and it seemed every nation in the world was worried that it would fall on them. Shortly before its crash to Earth, it was determined that Australia was the most likely target, and at least 25 tons of various parts of the station were predicted to survive the re-entry process. In the event, several parts did survive, and a young Australian claimed the $10,000 prize that a U. S. newspaper had offered as reward for any genuine Skylab parts. The largest items found were a door from one of the film vaults, and some oxygen and nitrogen tanks, and these along with various museum pieces like the back-up Skylab are all that remain of the United States’ first space station.

Was Skylab a success? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, because NASA successfully carried out a great deal of science during the three manned periods, and even during the unmanned intervals as well. For an agency that had no real experience of carrying out scientific experiments, other than those on the surface of the moon, and none at all over long periods of time, it was a very successful project. Detailed photography and data about the Sun was collected—enough to keep researchers busy for some years, human medical experiments, materials processing, and more besides, were all carried out with precision and accuracy by the various crews. On the other hand, Skylab was not a success, because the mission planners in particular seemed unable to learn from the experiences of previous crews. The work schedule for all of the crews was always unrealistic. It was an easy mistake to make on your first space station project; the Soviets had experienced similar problems after all with the early Salyut mission. Amazingly, NASA would be doomed to repeat these mistakes in years to come on board Mir and the International Space Station.

In a 1946 summary of his work during World War II, Wernher von Braun prophesied the construction of space stations in orbit. The design, which owed a great deal to the earlier work of Noordung, consisted of a toroidal station spun to provide artificial gravity. Von Braun elaborated on this initial design at the First Symposium on Space Flight on 12 October 1951 hosted by the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. The design was popularised in 1953 in a series in Colliers magazine, illustrated with a gorgeous painting by Chesley Bonestell.

1948—THE BRITISH INTERPLANETARY SOCIETY STATION—H. E. ROSS

In a paper presented to the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), and reprinted in the Journal of the BIS in 1949, H. E. Ross described a manned satellite station in Earth orbit that would serve as an astronomical, zero-gravity, and vacuum research labora­tory, and also serve as a way-station for the exploration of the moon. His suggested design comprised a circular structure that housed the crew of the space laboratory

(numbering 24 specialists and support personnel) as well as telescopes and research equipment. The station, he suggested, could be resupplied with oxygen and other life – support essentials by supply ships launched every three months.