Category HOMESTEADING SPACE

A Skylab bonus of three unscheduled science demonstrations performed by the sl-ii crew in their spare time has resulted in plans for expansion of this activi­ty by the crew ofsl-iii. The demonstrations, to be filmed by tv, movie and still cameras, will require a degree of inventiveness from the crew and will provide a change of pace for them during the mission. The activities will also provide material for educational applications. In addition, nasa scientists believe that examination of the photographs and video data of these demonstrations will be ofconsiderable assistance in designing even more valuable and complex science experiments onboard the Space Shuttle.

All of these new activities and others added to the mission at the last min­ute meant that crew training for Skylab ill presented a real challenge. The crew had been working to prepare for one mission and suddenly found itself with little time left to prepare for a greatly expanded one. And its position as last in line made getting adequate and proper training even more diffi­cult. “We didn’t have a chance in the beginning to get much real simulator training because the two crews ahead of us were going to get it all, and all of us Skylab guys had to wait till the Apollo Program was over,” Carr said. “So even Pete Conrad and his crew were only getting catch-as-catch-can training whenever the simulator was available. We were left playing with cardboard and other low-fidelity mockups to try to figure out what to do in flight.”

Pogue agreed: “We were the last crew. The first crew dominated the simu­lators when they were training. Then obviously the second crew also had to spend a lot of time in the simulators. In addition, the backup crew required increased training when the potential arose of rescuing the second crew if their rcs [thruster] problem worsened. Thus, we were left doing only peripheral stuff. We’d go wherever they weren’t getting trained. Whichev­er simulator or trainer they weren’t using, we would use, if it wasn’t down for maintenance. Then, of course, as soon as they launched, we finally got three months of relatively intense training.”

Despite being low on the priority list for the simulators, the crew kept busy with training activities. “One of our main tasks was to help put togeth­er the training program for all Skylab crewmen, so we worked hot and heavy with people in the training department to help them brainstorm and get that sort of stuff out of the way,” Carr said. “Since we didn’t have any sim­ulators to work with, and we couldn’t do anything else, it was probably an excellent use of our time.

“We each ended up with individual jobs: Ed was the guy in charge of experiments, and particularly the solar physics experiments. He had recent­ly written a textbook called The Quiet Sun and was the solar physics expert in the astronaut corps. Ed really focused heavily in that area. Bill managed a lot of the Skylab fluid systems and other experiments. My main focus was the Skylab navigational, guidance, and related systems. We structured our training so that all of us could operate anything, but if something went wrong, there was always one expert.”

The crew put particular focus on preparing for the Earth observations tasks during their training. Jerry Carr explained: “We did not want to be in the position at a debriefing of having someone ask us about something we saw and being able to say nothing more than ‘Yeah. We saw it. Sure was pret­ty.’ We went to Ken Kleinknecht and said that we really wanted to be intel­ligent observers of the Earth when we weren’t doing other things and asked if he could help us. They gave us forty hours of training time and promised to find at least twenty world experts on various Earth phenomena. Each of them was to come to the center to give us two-hour briefings on what’s impor­tant, what they wanted to know, and how we were to look for it.

“That turned out to be probably the most exciting and rewarding of all of the experiments that we did (Ed would probably put the atm first by a nar­row margin) because it provided the opportunity to ad lib, and ad lib intel­ligently. The kinds of people we worked with included Lee Silvers, who was an earthquake-fault expert from southern California; John Campbell, who was an expert on ice formation in the northern and southern latitudes; Bob Stevenson, who was an outstanding oceanographer from La Jolla; a des­ert formation expert; and several meteorologists. These people were pro­grammed into our training, enthusiastically came to the center, and talked about what data we could acquire that would provide them with the best insights into their particular studies of the Earth.

“We thoroughly enjoyed those forty hours of training. They also gave us a lot of extra film, partially to make up for some of the film that got ruined by the high temperatures in the station early on. On balance, we were able to do pretty well with what we had.”

While the first two missions left legacies that would create challenges for the third crew, there were some benefits as well. “We drew a lot of conclu­sions from what we saw on the first two missions,” Carr said. “I think the most important one was that when the first crew came back after twenty – eight days, they were pretty wobbly, pretty weak. So the second crew and ours decided to bump up the exercise periods. Al Bean’s crew doubled their exercise period from a half hour to an hour a day. Turns out that that didn’t appear to be enough either, so we increased it again to an hour and a half.”

“We were determined that we would stay longer and come back in bet­ter condition than the previous crews,” Gibson said, “partially because we learned from their experience on how to best exercise to counter the effects of zero gravity.”

Looking at the results of the second crew’s mission, Carr saw the roots of a potential problem for his flight and took action to prevent it. “We watched the way experiments were being done, and some of our procedures were mod­ified based on what the first two crews had learned,” Carr said. “We noticed that the second crew was really hustling all the time. By the end of their mis­sion their rate of activity was extremely high. We began telling some of the managers that we didn’t think that rate of work was wise for a ninety or an eighty-four-day mission because we weren’t sure that we were going to be able to sustain it. We thought that the workload should be slacked off some and there should be more rest. Everybody agreed to that, and the experi­ments were slowed and spread out quite a bit.”

It was to be a short-lived respite, however. “Unfortunately, they then added a whole bunch of new experiments, and we allowed ourselves to get trapped into this new situation. All of these experiments that were added at the last minute came with a lot of problems that we didn’t have the time to detect and take into consideration,” Carr said. “So, when we got up there, we found that we were overcommitted just like the first crew and that we were going to have to sustain the high Skylab II work pace for eighty-four days instead of the fifty-nine that they experienced.”

“The first crews really performed well and set pretty high standards for us to live up to,” said Gibson. “But in critiquing their performance, we couldn’t let them get swelled heads. Yes, the troops on Skylab I faced temperatures of 140 degrees and did a great job of making the space station useable. But after all, it was a dry heat!

“The second crew erected a larger sun shade that further lowered the temperatures down into the comfortable range except for one hot spot that formed when the station was in nearly continuous sunlight (technically, high beta angles)—at my sleep compartment! At those times, I just floated my cot into the mda and slept there.”

Finally, launch day drew close. And then it was postponed. Skylab ill’s scheduled 10 November launch date had to be delayed when cracks were found in the fins at the base of their Saturn IB booster—something that could be blamed on the thruster problems of the second Skylab crew. The SL-4 booster had been transported to the launch pad during the summer to serve as a booster for the potential Skylab II rescue mission; it was thought that this additional period of resting on the fins had caused the cracks. After the fins were replaced, the final Skylab crew left the launch pad at one-and – a-half minutes after 10:00 a. m. on 16 November.

“I went to bed early that night knowing full well I wouldn’t sleep worth a hoot,” Jerry Carr said. “Several days earlier we had started trying to shift our circadian clocks to allow us to go to bed at something like six in the evening and then wake up at two or three in the morning. So at about four o’clock in the morning, Elmer Taylor, who was our flight crew systems coordina­tor, came into my room and said, ‘The bird’s waiting. It’s time to go.’ I had actually fallen asleep, finally, but then I awoke with a start and got up.

“The first thing scheduled was our physical. They took microbiological swabs from many parts of our bodies to find what kind of flora and fau­na were living on us. They catalogued their findings as part of a long-term experiment to determine how much microbiological material we would leave on the spacecraft and what we would pick up, if anything, left by the crews ahead of us. It turned out that we did pick up some of the bugs left behind by the Skylab II guys.

“After our physicals, we went into the crew dining room and had break­fast with Deke [Slayton], Al [Shepard], Kenny Kleinknecht, and other man­agers. It’s interesting that our meals at the crew quarters were always steaks, eggs, and all those good things that are just wonderful for cholesterol. In the subsequent years, my wife and I have totally modified our diet so that now we don’t touch any of these foods mainly because of their high choles­terol and fat content. It’s amazing that dieticians in those days thought that lots of steak and eggs was the best thing in the world for us.

“After the meal, we began suiting up. I put a watch on my ankle, although I was not supposed to be taking anything extra up. But I had this Movado, which was a self-winding watch with one of those little counterweights in it. I was very curious to find out if this self-winding watch would still work in a weightless environment or whether the weightlessness would inhibit the motion of that little counterweight and keep it from winding the watch. Our official watches, Omegas that we wore on our wrists over the pressure suit, were regular hand-wound, plain old mechanical watches. So I put the Movado on my ankle and finished suiting up.

“Launch went off perfectly. It was a beautiful, clear day. I remember when the escape tower was finally kicked off, and it took the shroud with it. The light that came in the cabin was just blinding for a minute. It was incredi­ble. I tell a lot of people that riding on a booster like that is kind of like rid­ing on a train with square wheels. You’ve got lots of noise, lots of vibration. Then sure enough, when you hit that first booster shutdown, staging, and then the next booster kicking off, it’s just exactly what everybody has called it: a train wreck. I thought that was very apt.

“We got into orbit without any problems. Everything worked just fine. Eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds later we were on orbit and things were beginning to quiet down. Looking out the window for the first time, I was totally disoriented. I didn’t recognize a thing. Suddenly, somewhere in the first thirty minutes or so, I saw Italy, and I said to myself, ‘Italy really is shaped like a boot.’ I’ve never forgotten that particular experience.”

Ed Gibson described the experience: “Liftoff is an exciting time, and any crewperson who is not excited doesn’t really understand what’s about to happen.

“On that crisp cool morning of November 16, we rode in the standard NASA van out to the launch gantry, a thirty-seven-story building, and our Saturn IB booster resting on a structure that brought the Command Module hatch to the same level as if it were on top of a Saturn v booster, a structure that resembled the world’s largest milking stool. As we rode, the big blue eyes of Al Shepard bored into each of us looking for any sign of weakness, any indication that one of these rookies was not ready to go. I looked back with a defiant smile, ‘Not you, Big Al, or anyone else is getting my seat!’

“Then we took an elevator to the top floor of the gantry, walked along a narrow but exposed hallway, and waited to get strapped into the Com­mand Module. Since I sat in the center seat under the hatch, I was the last one in, which gave me a chance to just stand outside and gaze at the vehi­cle. For most of the preflight time we were busy and didn’t have time to reflect. But then I had about twenty minutes where I could just stand back and drink it all in.

“It was dark, but the booster was brightly illuminated by search lights on the ground. Because it had just been fueled, it was creaking, popping, and groaning from the weight and frigid temperatures of the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, which caused continuous shrinking and readjustments of the metal. All of the electrical systems were up, gases were venting, and lights were blinking unlike what we had ever seen before. No longer just pas­sive metal, the vehicle had taken on a life of its own—it was alive!

“I found it difficult to get the wide grin off my face as I was strapped in. It was an exhilarating few moments of anticipation that to this day I high­ly value and feel fortunate that I had, an experience similarly noted by the previous two science pilots on their missions.

“As we waited for launch, we learned who was really in charge, who would have the last word. A few days before launch they discovered cracks in the fins on our booster. Because we were eager to go and not happy with the five-day delay required to replace the cracked fins, we started to refer to the booster as old Humpty Dumpty. Well, somehow that got out in the press and of course didn’t sit too well with those good troops who were working around the clock to get the booster ready in time. But, much to their credit they said nothing. . . at least not until twenty minutes before launch when we got a message, ‘Good luck, and God speed, from all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.’

“Finally we heard launch control start counting backwards from ten, then a tremendous sucking sound as propellants got ripped into combus­tion chambers, a noise Bill later said ‘sounded like they had just simultane­ously flushed every toilet in the Astrodome.’ Far below and lasting less than a second, we felt eight engines ignite in a ripple fire, and we crept off the pad. The front of my mind was focused on gauges and abort procedures, even as a little whisper spurted up from the back of my mind, ‘The base­ment just exploded!’

“The ride on the first stage was noisy and rough, like a Hummer doing eighty miles per hour over moguls. At about one minute into the flight, we went through the speed of sound and also reached the maximum of the aerodynamic forces and turbulence that built up as we rammed through the wall of air resistance ahead of us. The vibration became severe; I felt like a fly glued to a paint shaker. Then it smoothed out a little until staging at two minutes, which jolted us like a head-on crash quickly followed by a sharp impact from the rear.”

Bill Pogue recalled the incredible noise and vibration of the launch: “The noise caused by airflow over the booster had been building all during the first minute of launch. It was so loud that it was difficult to hear the inter­com between our suits. Once we were supersonic, all the outside noise ceased because the air noise couldn’t penetrate the shock wave attached to the Com­mand Module. Then we could hear the creaking and groaning of the struc­ture as it responded to abrupt swiveling and gimbaling of the engines. We also heard liquid propellants rushing through feed lines.

“Because of the intense vibration, I had difficulty reading my hardcopy checklist, which I was supposed to use to compare the predicted performance against our actual performance as indicated on the computer display.”

Ed Gibson said, “The second stage reminded me of a long, smooth ele­vator ride that accelerated ever faster as the mass of the propellants burned away. Eventually we weighed three times our normal weight, which was not bad because our hearts were at the same elevation as our heads so graying out was not even a possibility. But it was hard to lift a hand, and I noticed my cheeks and ears sliding towards the back of my head.

“Then, at a little over eight minutes, the engines cut off— sharply! Imme­diately, everything floated. Our spacecraft, which they tried so hard to keep clean at the Cape, filled up with small dirt and debris that floated up from its hiding places on the floor. In short order the air conditioning system cleaned it all up.

“Outside I saw the curved horizon and the coast of Florida receding. This was the best simulation yet! I looked back in to study the gauges and threw a few switches as we reconfigured the spacecraft for rendezvous with Skylab.

When I glanced out again, Italy going by and I understood what it’s like to travel at five miles a second. After a presentation when I got back, a high­way patrolman stepped forward and presented me with a ticket. Said he’d clocked me at 17,682 mph. . . in a 40.

“After several orbital maneuvers, a distant speck expanded into Skylab. It was missing one wing and a micrometeoroid-thermal shield, and it was covered by two jerry-rigged sunshades. I felt a warm glow—we had arrived at our new home. This was going to be great!”

After docking, the crew was to spend the night in their Command Mod­ule before moving into their new home. The delayed entry was prompt­ed by the problems the second crew had encountered with space sickness upon their arrival. Mission planners decided that in order to try to avoid the adaptation problems the second crew had encountered the third crew should spend a night in their Apollo capsule, giving them time to adjust to weightlessness before moving into the open volume of Skylab and getting to work. So after arriving at Skylab, instead of going inside the crew worked late stowing equipment in their Command Module.

“About that time,” Jerry Carr said, “Bill was saying, ‘I’m not really feel­ing too terribly well,’ So we talked about it, and I said, ‘Well, best thing to do, probably, is to eat. You’ll feel better.’ So we went ahead and ate our din­ner. One of Bill’s items was stewed tomatoes. He ate them down, waited for a while, then said, ‘It’s coming back up.’ So he got out his bag and barfed.

“The day before we left jsc, the doctors said, ‘Now, we’re real concerned about this space-sickness thing. We want you to take medications.’ In the medical sensitivity tests they’d done on us, they found which of the antinau­sea medications were best for each of us and which had the least side effects. The doctors said, ‘Jerry, we want you to take something. In fact, we want all three of you to take something.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m driving this multimillion-dollar vehicle, and I’m not even allowed to drive an automo­bile or fly an airplane when I take Scop-Dex [one of the medications]. Why do you want me to do it now?’ They said, ‘We don’t want you to get sick.’ I said, ‘I’ll take the sickness rather than the disorientation,’ and decided not to take the medication.

“Well, Bill wanted to be a good patient and said, ‘Okay. I’m not driving, and I’ll be able to manage fine, so I’ll take the Scop-Dex.’ What surprised us was that Bill was the one who got sick. Whenever Bill and I went up in a

Т-38 to do acrobatics, I was usually the one that turned green, not Bill, and he had taken the medication!”

Gibson agreed: “We called Bill ‘Old Iron Ears.’ You could never make him sick on the ground. Put him in a rotating chair, and he’d never get sick. He used to fly for the Thunderbirds, so you figure that if there’s anybody going to get sick, it’d be me, the real novice, or maybe even Jerry, but not Bill, which showed us that we didn’t really understand the problem.”

Bill Pogue said, as his experience proved, “There’s not a direct correlation between who suffers from motion sickness on the ground and who has prob­lems in space. I’ve observed that people who are susceptible to motion sick­ness, particularly susceptible, on Earth tend to not be in space, and vice ver­sa. Clearly someone like me who went through the full limit of head motions at the highest rpm in the rotating chair at the Pensacola naval facility and could have continued indefinitely is, by definition, highly resistant to motion sickness on the ground. They never could make me sick. But who got sick first on Skylab? I did. It’s sort of an inverse relationship.”

Faced with Pogue’s sickness, the crew discussed what to do about it. One of the biggest things on their mind was the burden they carried for the future. Right then, down on Earth, work was beginning on the Space Shuttle. Right then, also down on Earth, there were those in Congress who were opposed to the program. The success of the Space Shuttle depended on astronauts being able to make that one-shot glider landing. Sick astro­nauts, the Shuttle’s opponents would argue, would not be able to make that landing. The future, it seemed, was resting on the third crew proving that there wouldn’t be a problem.

And so with the future of spaceflight in mind, they decided what to do about Pogue’s sickness: “With all the pressure they were putting on us not to get sick, Ed and I said, ‘Well, look. Maybe we just won’t say anything,’” Jer­ry Carr recalled, “In fact we thought it might even be best to toss the vom­it down the Trash Airlock and not to report it. That way we wouldn’t get people all fuzzed down on the ground, and we could get the mission off to a smooth start. We knew we had a lot to do. So we said, ‘Okay. That’s what we’ll do. We hope Bill will feel better tomorrow, and we can press on.’

“Well, unfortunately Bill, being the sick one, was also the guy in charge of the communication system, and he had left the switch on to the equip­ment that was recording all the intercom conversation. So while we slept that night, people on the ground played it back and heard all of our previous conversations. The next morning, Al Shepard came up on the Capcom loop and said something like, ‘You guys have made a mistake here, and I hope you haven’t destroyed the vomitus bag.’ I said, ‘No, we haven’t done anything like that, and I agree with you. It was a dumb decision. We’ll put it in our medical report, weigh it, do all the necessary things, and go from here.

“So they discovered that we were trying to conceal information, which we felt pretty bad about. But that was our motive: we didn’t want to fuzz things up anymore on the ground. It was dumb. Yet we did it, we wish we hadn’t, but we did.”

That mistake behind them, it was time for the third Skylab mission to truly begin. After a night’s sleep, the crew awoke and prepared to move into the space station. “The next morning, Bill wasn’t feeling great but he was feeling better,” Carr said. “Ed and I were both okay. I had a feeling in my stomach that was kind of like a big knot, but I wasn’t sick. Ed just didn’t have any problems at all. We always thought that was kind of a marvel. Ed, the one who had the least flying time, was the nonsick one.”

The crew opened hatch and entered Skylab. Upon moving in, though, the crew found that they were not alone. Three figures, wearing the unmis­takable brown Skylab flight suits were waiting for them in the workshop. Before their departure, the Skylab II crew had stuffed the suits and posed them at various work locations on the lower deck. “When we arrived, we found three dummies that had been packed and put there by three previ­ous dummies,” Carr said. “It was quite a surprise to roll down through the tunnel and come across three other people in the spacecraft that we weren’t expecting.”

“Because we were really rushed at the beginning,” Ed Gibson said, “we left the dummies where they were for quite a while. Every time I was down there, I felt them staring at me, inspecting everything I did, but not lifting a hand to help—eerie.

“During those initial days, there was a real adaptation to zero gravity that had to take place. When launched, we were literally thrust into a whole new environment. When I looked in the mirror, a pumpkin looked back, a round red head with bright red eyeballs. No longer countered by gravity, my heart and arteries continued to ram blood up towards my head. It felt like I was lying down back here on Earth with my feet a little over my head. But after a few days, I lost about three pounds ofwater as did Jerry and Bill. Jerry and I then felt pretty good, but Bill continued to suffer.

“After working hard to become efficient, it all started to seem so easy, so effortless—from a physical standpoint. That’s because one of the real prob­lems with the stresses of spaceflight is that there were none. With no grav­ity to work against, our muscles weakened if we didn’t exercise enough, and our bones slowly lost calcium and also weakened, just like bedridden patients down here.

“But we had learned what exercises to do from the previous crews, and we lengthened our workout durations 50 percent above those of Skylab 11. We wanted to not only walk out of the Command Module at the end of our flight under our own power, we wanted to be in better condition than the previous crew, even though we would be in zero gravity over 40 percent lon­ger. We dedicated ourselves to that goal and continued to aggressively pur­sue it through strenuous workouts throughout the full duration of the mis­sion. And we succeeded.”

Between the missions on Skylab, ground control had dumped the pres­sure in the station down to a quarter of a psi. They had then repressurized it to provide pure, clean atmosphere. “I recollect that when I first entered Skylab,” said Pogue, “my first impression was, ‘Boy, it’s cold in here.’ But it felt really good, especially after having the nausea event the day before. Of course I also knew it was going to be big, but after entering, I felt, ‘This real­ly is big!’ Our immediate problem on entry into Skylab was trying to find all the right books and other things that we had to use. We worked till about 10:30 p. m. Houston time that first day just trying to get caught up.”

The enormity of Skylab created a situation never encountered before on a space mission. “Skylab was so large that they actually lost me one morn­ing,” said Gibson. “Skylab had many different compartments, and I was in the Orbital Workshop trying to find some of the old procedures that the pre­vious crew had left. I was buried deep down behind the freezers where they had stowed most of the previous mission data. When Jerry and Bill start­ed looking for me, they just glanced in the workshop and didn’t see a soul. Then they looked outside and said, ‘Hey, the Command Module’s still here. The hatch is not open. Guess he hasn’t left. So then, where is he?’ When I finally floated into view they said, ‘Where the heck have you been?’ So, it was possible to get lost in Skylab.”

Also the use of the same spacecraft by different crews created problems. Items got misplaced or totally lost, making it harder for each successive crew to operate.

“Skylab gave our nation its first experience with long-duration spaceflights in large spacecraft,” said Bill Pogue. “It had an internal volume of 12,500 cubic feet, the volume of a three-bedroom house. The huge forward com­partment was twenty-one feet in diameter and over twenty-five feet high. This spacious volume, numerous stowage lockers, and our longer missions led to some problems we had not encountered before. Some were amusing, but others were downright aggravating.

“Floating through the forward hatch of the forward compartment I saw Ed floating a few feet off the grid floor twenty-five feet below and obvious­ly out of reach of any handholds or other structure. I lunged toward him, gave him a shove, and, like two billiard balls, we went flying off in different directions toward the walls where we could grab something. We were both laughing as we went back to work.

“In other instances, the multiplicity of lockers and stowage locations led to frustrating problems and delays. One evening my flight activity message for the next day directed me to recharge the fluid level in a water loop used to cool an electronics package. The job looked simple: get a couple of tools, a flashlight to observe the accumulator, and a long hose that stretched from our water tanks to the work site, and then follow the procedure and restow everything. A piece of cake? Well, not quite.

“The hose wasn’t where it was supposed to be. No problem! I’ll just call ground and get some help, but it would be another twenty minutes before I could call Houston (no relay satellites back in ’73). I started looking in lock­ers adjacent to the one designated in the procedure and anywhere else that seemed like a logical place to stash it, but it was all to no avail.

“At the next aos, I explained the problem and asked if they could get in touch with Jack Lousma to see if he could remember where he put it after the last use. Jack is a highly disciplined individual, and I was confident he could tell me right where to find it. Jack was busy mowing the lawn at his home in Friendswood a few miles from jsc when he got a call from Mis­sion Control. He wiped the some of his sweat off and said he did remember using it, but if it wasn’t in the designated stowage location, he didn’t have the foggiest notion of where it might be.

“When I learned that Jack couldn’t help, I really felt defeated. Howev­er, Capcom had an alternative approach and told me where I could get two shorter hoses to connect together that would span the distance. I did, it worked, and I was able to finish the servicing task, exceeding allotted time by only a factor of five. Incidentally, I never found the hose. We had a stow­age book, which was generously cross-referenced, but the book only told us where an item was supposed to be.

“We had other cases of mysterious disappearances. Once a set of calibra­tion weights just vanished, and I spent four hours on my day off looking for them. They never did turn up. A systems checklist apparently floated away and was missing for weeks until Jerry flushed it out from its hiding place with thruster blasts from the maneuvering unit [the Manned Maneuvering Unit prototype tested inside Skylab].

“We lost other items, some of which eventually did turn up. One day when I whirled around to get a camera to take a picture of Hawaii, my eyeglasses flew off. I heard them bouncing around through the experiment compart­ment as I was taking the picture, but when I went to get them, they were gone. Three days later, Ed found them floating near the ceiling in his sleep compartment.

“Frequently our tableware, usually a knife, would get knocked off the mag­netized surface on our food trays and get caught in the airflow, which gently wafted it to the intake screen of the air duct system. It would hover there on the surface until retrieved. The screen became our lost and found depart­ment and the first place we looked whenever something was missing.

“Fortunately, today there is technology that can solve the problem. Tags placed on stowed items respond to an interrogation device and reveal their location using rf energy from the locator. It’s just what we need. Let’s hope it’s implemented on [the International Space Station], which ultimately will have more volume and surface area than Skylab. Otherwise, it’s back to the Skylab mode of operation: If it isn’t there, then happy hunting.”

The large volume also provided some interesting opportunities. Ed Gib­son said, “One night I could not resist the temptation of Skylab’s large open volume, and I tried sleeping out there floating completely free. It was the ulti­mate in relaxation—no pressures on your body whatsoever. Once I relaxed, my knees would bend slightly and my arms would float out straight, just like the position I had assumed floating in water many times on Earth. After a few

minutes, I would drift off into a nice. . . relaxing . . . quiet. . . whack!

“I had drifted into a wall that jarred me awake. During all subsequent tries, I remained poised just wondering when, where, and what I would hit again. It just didn’t work. Once I even ended up on the air intake screen in the ows, our lost and found department that usually rounded up consider­ably smaller objects. Eventually, I discovered that all I had to do was to slip an arm or leg under a bungee cord, and I could drift right off to sleep.

“Sleeping turned out not to be difficult at all without gravity in our sacks, especially early in the flight when we all were exhausted. If we did have trou­ble turning off because we worked right up to the time we floated into our sacks, reading was usually a good sleep aid. This situation was about the only time we did pull out a book. Time in space was too valuable to use for things we could do on the ground, a sentiment previously stated by Owen on Skylab 11.

“The fifteen sunrises and sunsets a day that we experienced could pres­ent a problem when trying to turn off and go to sleep. If you made the mis­take of sneaking out of the sack to look out the window, you might see Chi­na at high noon, and you then had the difficult task of convincing your mind and body that it really was time to sleep. Also early in the mission if you were clumsy in your sneaking, the guys watching Skylab’s rate gyros on the ground could tell you were up and might just call up and ask you to do ‘just one more thing.’ Later in the mission those ‘one more things’ got ruled out.”

With Pogue still suffering somewhat from space sickness, the crew tried to compensate for the reduced manpower available. “Bill and I decided to change jobs because my job was a little more sedentary than his,” Carr said. “So we swapped checklists and went on. Bill was able to stay quiet and get my work done while I did his. It worked out well. For the next couple of days, when Bill got to feeling a little funny, we would swap jobs. But for the most part, Bill was able to pick up and carry his load without any trou­ble at all.”

Despite their best effort, however, the crew began to run into what would become the second major problem of their stay on Skylab. “The schedule caught up with us,” Jerry Carr said, “We found that we had allowed our­selves to be scheduled on a daily schedule that was extremely dense. If you missed something, if you made a mistake and had to go back and do it again,

or if you were slow in doing something, you’d end up racing the clock and making more mistakes, screwing up more on an experiment and in gener­al just digging a deeper hole for yourself.

“The schedule was very tight, and we were hustling each and every min­ute just trying to meet it. That went on for many, many days. It was hard on morale. We were rushed and not able to get things done and experi­ments completed. We knew, we were just sure, that the experimenters on the ground were grinding their teeth when we had to report, ‘Well, I didn’t get your experiment done because, in my rush, I put the wrong filter in, or I made another error.’ We found that it was almost to the point where you had to schedule time to go the bathroom.

“Then we discovered that we had been scheduled at nearly the same rate that the second crew had achieved at the end of their flight! That explained why we were having so much trouble keeping up. But by the time that was finally recognized, we had achieved a skill level that was adequate to get the work done.

“After the first few days, we realized that eating three meals together was not an efficient use of time. However, we did have dinner together so that we would make sure we were functioning as a cohesive crew, and we each also needed that bit of social contact. It turned out to be a great decision. But after dinner, we’d go right back to the experiments and work till prob­ably nine o’clock at night when it would be time to wind down and go to bed. So at ten o’clock, when we were supposed to be in bed, none of us were ready to go to sleep because we still had things to pick up and put away and other things to do. Our minds were still moving too fast to rest. So, we just weren’t getting the right kind of rest and the right kind of leisure time that would allow us to do things right.

“Finally we began to get a little bit testy. In order to make up time on some of the experiments, to account for some of our fluffs, they had to redouble efforts to tighten the schedule even more. They were juggling our exercise around, and we ended up in several cases having to exercise right after a meal. That’s no time to be exercising, particularly up there where you couldn’t belch because with your food floating around inside you, you were liable to get it back with your belch.

“So we started grousing at them about that, they were working hard try­ing to keep us up with the schedule, we were giving them a hard time, and they were giving us a hard time. Finally we reached a point in the mission when we just had to take a day off. We had set up a ten-day week with the tenth day as a day off when we could do what we wanted. That was also to be the day when we could take a shower in our makeshift shower. But we gave back our first two or three days off. We said, ‘Go ahead and schedule us, and we’ll do some makeup work.’ Well, we got to the point where our morale was low, we were feeling lousy, and we were really getting drained. So we said ‘Let’s take our day off and get a good day’s rest. It’ll get us back in good shape again, and we can begin to maintain the pace.’

“So we took our day off and did what we wanted to do. We each took a shower. Bill and I did some reading, looking out the window, Earth obser­vations, photography, and other things. Ed worked his own schedule at the atm panel, did some relatively simple experiments, and made some ad lib observations. We had a good day.”

“Though we didn’t understand it at the time,” Ed Gibson said, “we and Mission Control were about to learn some valuable lessons for the future—les­sons that had to be learned sometime, and each of us, playing our respective roles, were the unsuspecting students.

“We found it disheartening to be in a situation where you could never catch up; it’s only a question of how far you are behind. We just pushed the buttons as fast as we could and moved on to the next. We were not used to working in that mode, and we didn’t plan on it being that way. An image of my high-school track coach flashed into my mind. With a wide grin he gave me a tip, ‘If you want to win the quarter-mile race, sprint the first hun­dred yards then just gradually increase your pace.’ ‘Thanks for that bit of wisdom, Coach.’ And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do here.

“Early in the mission we used our time at night and other open times to work to catch up. Later on I used these times to perform ad hoc experi­ments, such as the study of fluids in zero gravity, or when several open hours appeared, I’d go to my favorite spot, the atm control panel, where there was no end to challenges and opportunities to learn and contribute. I remember these open times the most, times when I had a chance to use some creativi­ty; the rush to continually catch up is remembered as just a blur.

“Of course our rushed pace caused mistakes, and I still chuckle about one of them: the televising of an experiment or other event. The switch to turn on the video tape recorder was not controlled by the camera but located in the mda, which was usually far from the subject that we were televising. More than once and always in a rush, I got the subject all nicely prepped, the mike and camera turned on, and started to record, or so I thought. Eventually when I’d realize that the video recorder wasn’t on, I’d drop every thing and streak into the mda muttering some rather creative profanities as I went. All too late I also realized the voice recording was on. ‘Oops, sorry ground.’

“The situation was compounded a bit because people had not yet ful­ly come to grips with the fact that Skylab was a different animal than all the relatively short missions to date. As in ascent, reentry, eva, or hazard­ous aircraft operations, which preceded spaceflight, it is absolutely essen­tial that nominal and malfunction procedures be spelled out in detail, sim­ulated with fidelity, then followed precisely. It’s a mindset that keeps people alive. However, once the hazardous operations give way to a normal day-to­day type of operations, like we usually experience here on Earth, it’s time to back off the rigid specification of every action, set goals and objectives, and let the people on the spot use their intelligence to perform to the best of their abilities.

“Because of everybody’s heritage and life-long conditioning, it was a tough mindset to break. As we began to get behind early in our flight, Mission Control, God love ’em, tried to help us as best they could in the only way they knew how: plan to the hilt and specify the procedures in detail. One morning we got a teleprinter message enumerating that day’s activities that stretched from the Command Module down to the Trash Airlock, a dis­tance of sixty-five feet!

“We wanted to be given some latitude in how we applied the brush strokes to the canvas; Mission Control, in their sincere efforts to help us, wanted us to continue painting by the numbers and in areas of ever decreasing size.

“I believe another contributing factor was that we lacked adequate inte­grated training with the Mission Control team. This team and ourselves never really understood what the other was thinking and planning before launch. Usually integrated training is done as much to train Mission Con­trol as the crew, but they’d been through it all with the first two missions and weren’t eager to revisit that ‘demanding boredom’ more than absolute­ly necessary. So when they came to us with a set of procedures, we simply said, ‘You’ve been through it all before, and we haven’t. So, we’ll just do it.’ But that didn’t allow us to develop much interaction, communication, and real rapport with the Mission Control team before we reached Skylab. This lack of flight experience and the time crunch led us to just accept almost all suggestions presented to us without question or resistance even when it really would have been appropriate.

“Lastly, the situation was further compounded by lack of open commu­nication after liftoff. You couldn’t just call down and say, ‘Hey, guys, let’s talk this out,’ because everything had to be open for the whole world to hear including the sensationalism-seeking press. So we thought, ‘Okay, we’ll just work through it.’ But that stoic approach didn’t work.”

As with the previous two crews, one form of open conversation was rel­ished by the crew of Skylab ill. “Every third day we had a link to the real world when we each got to talk with our families for ten to fifteen minutes,” Gibson said. “We really looked forward to those talks. Once I was describ­ing the awesome beauty of fires that I could see all along the African coast­line, a result of the farmers’ policy of slash burning. I pictured my family hanging with breathless anticipation on every word. Then I heard Julie, my youngest daughter, say, ‘Mommy, can I go out and play?’”

“We each really looked forward to talking with our families,” said Pogue. “However, the news wasn’t what we wanted to hear. Before our mission, I went by the office that handled government employees’ life insurance at jsc and asked if I could pay three months ahead to cover the time I would be on Skylab. I was told that a prepayment wasn’t possible but that the policy would be held effective until I returned. The bureaucracy didn’t coordinate too well within itself (or maybe it knew something that we didn’t) because my wife told me that we had just gotten a letter informing us that my poli­cy had lapsed and was about to be canceled.”

“One day in the midst of all our efforts to get back on schedule,” said Gib­son, “we were each working hard and lost in our individual worlds when we heard ‘bang! . . . bang! bang!’ The attitude control system thrusters, for the first time on our flight, had fired to help the Control Moment Gyros counteract the gradient of gravity trying to torque Skylab off target. As we worked inside the huge ows tank, it sounded like someone was outside work­ing over the tank with an equally huge sledgehammer. Now I know what it would be like to live inside a drum.”

While the crew bore the burden of getting back on schedule, they should not have borne the blame for being behind. According to lead flight director

Neil Hutchinson, “If you’ve read anything on the third manned flight, you know ‘we,’ the ground, and I who was right in the middle of it, were on the wrong side of the work scheduling issue. It was clearly a mistake on my and the control center’s part. We expected those three guys to pick right up where the Skylab II guys left off. We did not give them one ounce of zero-G time to get used to it; that is, to do the task a few times and then schedule it tight­er. When they got up there, Bill wasn’t feeling very good, which is another thing we’ve now come to accept as well. Yes, it happens, so what. But it was still kind of spooky back then when these guys were getting sick, which was not the fighter pilot image. Oh, what were we going to do?

“Once the guys got up there, I went through the activation, they did a terrific job. Then on the third day we sent a flight plan up that was like the day after the last flight plan of Skylab II, which we didn’t get done when the last flight crew returned. Of course we had practiced some with them on the ground before they launched. We had simulated between the umanned missions with each upcoming crew while we were unmanned for a while. Still it was a serious mistake on the part of the control center because we just expected Bill, Ed, and Jerry to just jump right on the bandwagon and take off.

“On their side of the equation, there was not enough communication ear­ly on to let us know that we were getting them in trouble. They were pretty quiet about it. Again it was the fighter-pilot mentality. ‘I’ll be damned if I’m going to cry “uncle.” I’m going to just keep trying to get this done. If they keep sending me a flight plan I can’t get done, I’m just going to try again.’

“Of course as we continued to press them, more mistakes begin to be made, more than we had seen with the other crews. And then you began to wonder, ‘Hmmm, what’s going on here?’ I think it might have been even a year or two later that I sat back, looked at that whole thing, and said, ‘You know, we really did something stupid. They didn’t cry “uncle” soon enough even though they had an absolutely valid reason for doing so. The control center had fouled up, and we just kept fouling up until we got them all fouled up too.’

“In the end of course they turned out to be every bit as good as the oth­er guys. They really turned out the stuff. You wouldn’t have believed that they were up there for nearly three months.

“It’s funny, one of those guys, Ed Gibson, has since become a very good friend of mine, and he and I have chatted about this off and on. He knows a lot about what went on there. It was clearly a case of the control center not recognizing that people needed some zero-G adjustment time before they could really be productive. There was just no point in pushing them early on, because they weren’t going to get the job done. We don’t do that these days on the Shuttle. We let them get really organized first.”

Public relations were also impacted by air-ground communications: “In an effort to increase our efficiency,” said Gibson, “we occasionally would have only one of us listening to the voice traffic from the ground and respond­ing to it while the other two of us turned off our radios and worked with­out interruption. We each signed up for an orbit as the radio-response guy. Well one day we made a mistake and for a whole orbit we all had our radi­os off!”

“When we came up to aos over one of the sites,” said Carr, “the ground called us, and we didn’t answer them for a whole orbit. Regrettably that caused a lot of concern down on the ground. And of course the press just thought that was wonderful. They said, ‘Look at that. These testy, crabby old astronauts up there won’t even answer the radio now. They’ve turned it off and won’t listen to the ground anymore.’ We’ve had to live under that stigma they falsely created ever since.”

“Problems that surfaced early in our mission were created by competent, well-intentioned people,” said Gibson. “The exceptions were the dramatic stories fabricated by the media and later repeated and exaggerated in a book on Skylab and a Harvard Business School study. There was no ‘strike in space’ by any stretch of the imagination. What could we threaten to do, go live on the moon? If any of these writers had gotten their information from just one of us, the crew or other people directly involved, responsible reporting and validity would have prevailed over expediency and sensationalism.”

While finally taking a day off gave the crew a much-needed break and helped relieve some of the stress they were under, it didn’t really change the situation. “Right after our real day off,” Jerry Carr said, “we got right back onto the treadmill, and things weren’t getting any better. Finally after sev­eral weeks into the mission, it all came to a head. After dinner we always had a medical conference with the flight surgeon where we would tell him how we were doing physically, and we give him the readings for the food that we’d eaten and the water we’d drunk and all other data that they need­ed for their metabolic analysis. I said, ‘You know, I think we need to have

a seance here.’ I told him about our situation, that we weren’t too terribly happy and that we were quite sure the ground wasn’t happy either. ‘It’s time for us to have a discussion, a frank discussion. We can do it on this chan­nel if they want.’

“That request went down to the doctors, they passed the word, and, when the press got a hold of it, they raised Cain. So Mission Control came back and said, ‘We’re going to have to do it on the open circuit.’ I said, ‘That’s fine.’

“So one evening we started talking with ground as we came up over Gold – stone [California]. We had the whole U. S. pass, essentially, for me to tell them all the things that were bothering us. ‘We need more time to rest. We need a schedule that’s not quite so packed. We don’t want to exercise after a meal. We need to get the pace of things under control.’ Then we said, ‘Okay, now, next pass over the U. S., you guys please tell us what your problems are.’

“So during the next U. S. pass, they bent our ear with all of the things that we were doing, including our rigidity that made it difficult for them to have the flexibility to schedule us how they needed to. We came back with, ‘Let’s think about it overnight and try to come up with a solution by the morning.’

“The next morning they sent a teletype message in which they recom­mended quite a few things. The most important one was to take all of the menial, routine housekeeping chores out of the schedule and put them on what we called a shopping list. They were things that needed to be done that day but not at any particular time. Of course, they still had to hard schedule those activities that were required at a specific time or location in orbit. By opening up the schedule that way, they really took the pressure off. We were no longer racing the clock to get things done. It solved the problem.

“They also said, ‘We’re not going to hassle you anymore during meals or give you any major assignments after dinner. After dinner is relaxation time for you. Do a few things like some student experiments, but we’re not going to have any major experiments after dinner.’

“We said ‘That sounds great. Let’s go with it!’ And it worked beautiful­ly. It’s a testimony to the human condition. Henry Ford probably learned it on his assembly line. The line can only go so fast before you start mak­ing mistakes.

“We also felt that the extra time was needed to do some creative think­ing. As a result of having all that extra time, we were all able to gin up some experiments that we had wanted to do and put on TV. Some of the results are being used today in schools such as short physics experiments and experi­ments with water in zero gravity. The loosening of the schedule really solved the problem. We got the more important experiments done immediately or at a required time, and everything else got done when we could. That flexi­bility gave us some control, put us in positive frame of mind, and increased our productivity. Everybody won!”

“After the crew came back and we had gotten through the debriefing pro­cess,” Neil Hutchinson recalled, “it was pretty obvious that we had had some real scheduling and performance problems at the beginning of the flight. There have been a couple of books written that stated that there was a strike in space even though that was clearly not the case. There is even a Harvard Business School case about it. If you get an MBA at Stanford or somewhere, you’re likely to get the Harvard Business School case about Skylab ill. They talk about people’s expectations and miscommunication as part of a man­agement process. I don’t know if it’s a good example or not.

“I just look on it as a time when we just weren’t thinking straight. We should have seen it even though it was very insidious because the mistakes were little at first. Just every once in a while you kind of caught in some­body’s tone of voice that he was irritated. It was not a good scene, but yes, good lessons were learned.”

Ed Gibson noted that, long before Skylab ill, he had experienced slow starts: “As a little kid, I was slow, a lethargic dreamer. One of my earliest memories is that of lying on the living room floor, drawing pictures of the solar system, and dreaming. I sensed a fascinating and never-ending world in the night sky and inherently knew that, somehow, I had to become part of it.

“However, at an early age, I had contracted osteomyelitis, a bone infec­tion in my leg; and amputation, the standard treatment, was contemplated. That would have really slowed me up. But first, my doctor thought a newly developed drug called ‘penicillin’ was worth a try. It worked.

“Then I encountered another roadblock: me. Dreamers make poor stu­dents, and the kindest thing I can say about my early academic career is that I was president of my first-grade class — two years in a row! Fortunately fail­ure was not in my dad’s makeup, and he was determined it wouldn’t be in mine either. My performance in high school rocketed up to mediocre. At

the University of Rochester, the only school that would accept me, I decid­ed it was then or never, and I got to work.

“The world of high-performance aircraft and rockets, steps towards the stars, fascinated me, but because I once had osteomyelitis, I could never pass a military flight physical. I had to accept my destiny as a ‘ground pounder’ and developed the skills to design what I couldn’t fly. It was a slower paced life than I wanted. That’s when my wife read me the article in the L. A. Times that ultimately led to my presence on Skylab. Julie has always been my most ardent supporter and constructive critic. Anything I’ve been priv­ileged to do would never have been possible without her support at every step along the way.

“I guess slow starts are in my blood.”

Others on the ground reflected on the situation. Skylab II commander Alan Bean said that the failure of NASA to shift gears after his mission was a major factor: “I think Mission Control should have gone back to how they started with us. I believe that they started them out near where we ended, rather than maybe io to 15 percent less. Kraft called Pete and me over to talk with him and his managers. I told them, ‘Mission Control plans to lighten up on these guys, but they don’t ever do it. They have to lighten up and let these guys catch their breath.’ Then finally Jerry Carr said ‘We’re not going to do this anymore, because we can’t.’ And he was right. They couldn’t. We couldn’t do it on Day 1—or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5—either.”

Bob Crippen, crewmember of smeat and Capcom for all three Skylab missions said: “I can see how the situation developed over the course of the three missions. On Conrad’s crew, most of that time was spent repairing Skylab so that it would function, and we didn’t really work that hard on the experiments. Then Bean and his crew went up, started off at a slow rate, and then kind of built up speed and got more efficient, and we accelerated after them. At the end of that mission, we on the ground were used to oper­ating at about that pace. And then here comes the new crew, Jerry Carr and his guys, and we started scheduling things at about the same rate that the last guys had ended up with.

“Part of what my job as Capcom was to try to sense what was going on, and truthfully, they were having some problems here and there, and we tried to scale back a little bit while we were doing scheduling at night. It was not until Jerry finally requested the conference to work things out that

Mission Control really understood what was happening. It took that to hit us on the head.

“But that’s also the job of the crew because when you’re sitting on the ground and trying to communicate only over the radio, it is hard to put your­self in their position in orbit. That’s one of the responsibilities of the com­mander —to come back and say, ‘Hey, this doesn’t work and that doesn’t work.’ They have to let us know what’s really going on.

“The ground controllers, my flight director [Don Puddy], and I were upset because we had not seen the problem coming on as big as it did and had not appreciated the extent that it was actually affecting the crew. They just kept trying to make things work without telling us about their difficulties.

“Even though we all initially got off on the wrong foot, Jerry, Bill, and Ed did super once we got things back on track. And no, there was no rebel­lion. I think the rest of the flight directors and the Capcoms would certain­ly say the same thing.”

With the scheduling problems worked out, the contrast was sharp. No longer held back by these difficulties, the crew’s performance accelerated rapidly. The slow start was behind them. “As it turned out, when the mission was over, we had completed every one of the experiments that we needed to do, plus a lot of extra ones that we dreamed up,” Carr said. And although it was not obvious to everyone at the time, valuable progress had been made in moving America’s space operations experience forward.

“As our mission progressed, Mission Control and we learned together how best to achieve the highest performance,” said Gibson. “They were hard – won lessons, and because of past history and philosophy of operations, they were inevitable lessons that had to be learned either right there on our mis­sion or ultimately on early space station missions.”

Throughout the whole mission, atm (solar observations) was an area that received considerable attention. “When we studied the sun,” Ed Gibson said, “we used the atm panel to monitor and control seven different instru­ments that ‘looked’ at the sun in visible light rays all the way down to x-rays. Even though I helped design the panel, it was a still a highly demanding and sometimes humbling task. Choices had to be continually made in space, time, and wavelength, sometimes within seconds, for experiment observa­tions and then translated into panel switch actuations. The Joint Observing

Programs helped quite a bit, but the real value of having a human at the con­trols was when targets of opportunity arose and we’d have to put the sheet music away and play more by ear.

“I had a background in plasma physics from Caltech (the sun is one big ball of hot plasma), and I also had studied solar physics ever since I knew I had a chance to fly Skylab. I used the writing of a textbook as a way to focus my efforts and gain more credibility to help put my body into one of the three front-row seats on launch day. I still found the atm a major challenge and empathized with other crewmen whose expertise lay elsewhere. How­ever, after being an operator of Skylab and the atm for eighty-four days, I feel strongly that mental challenges of this magnitude are essential to main­tain sanity on future long-duration missions.

“The most demanding task was trying to capture the birth of a flare, which lasts only a minute or two. Understanding a flare’s triggering mech­anism is essential if we are ever going to be able to predict when and where flares will occur. The difficulty came in because almost all instruments used film to record their data, a limited supply of film that could be rapidly consumed during the high data acquisition rates required by flare observa­tions. We had only so much film onboard and [a limited number of} evas to replace it. Thus, we were in a Catch-22. How do you know when to go into flare observations until a flare is well underway; that is, past its birth and well into its teenage years? It took a while to get the hang of it, and the extreme ultraviolet light monitor was indispensable.

“It was in the xuv monitor that one could see an active region start to simmer. It was almost like watching a pot of water getting ready to boil. When were the releases of points of xuv radiation (like the formation of little bubbles on the bottom of a pan) rapid and intense enough to predict the eruption of a flare (like large bubbles exploding upward to bring cha­os to the water)?

“Late in the mission I intently stood guard over the atm panel during my scheduled times of atm operation or any of my free time. After many hours of concentration and a few cases of infant mortality, I did catch a flare very early in its life (maybe even still just a toddler). It was much earlier than we’d been able to get data up to that time!

“I’m confident that given high resolution displays of the high energy emis­sions from the sun (xuv and x-rays) and the time to really study them, the true birth of a flare could be observed. Of course, these days the problem can be brute forced by continuous acquisition of electronic data on active regions at ultra high rates.”

A NASA press release at the time explained, “A solar flare recorded on Jan­uary 21, 1974 by the Skylab sl-iii mission has created considerable excitement within the worldwide solar physics community. The flare was not large by comparison with those recorded on previous Skylab flights. Ground observ­ers classified it as a medium sized flare. The excitement stems from the news that for the first time in the history of the Skylab missions, a solar flare has been recorded from its beginning through its expiration.”

“Also on our mission,” Ed Gibson said, “the liftoff of a huge prominence on the limb was observed by the coronagraph instrument. The resulting data yielded one of the classic pictures resulting from all of the atm mis­sions. The solar observatory in Hawaii saw the prominence start to liftoff and notified atm scientists in Houston. It was night for us so all three of us were fast asleep. Fortunately, the coronagraph was one instrument that could be operated remotely by the ground.

“Like on previous missions, we also observed the sun hurl out massive amounts of material called coronal mass ejections or cmes. The light from the corona is usually very faint. In contrast, cmes are seen as tight, ragged – edged knots of very intense light that explode outward at tremendous speeds. If conditions are right, some of the cme material can impact our upper atmo­sphere, our magnetosphere, and play havoc with our communications and electrical power grids on Earth. These events are commonly called solar storms.

“Although lunar geologists and space doctors would give me an argu­ment, I maintain that the atm was the best application of a human’s scien­tific knowledge and judgment in space ever accomplished.

“On the previous mission, atm operations also set a precedent when prin­cipal investigators were allowed to talk directly to the crew. The first time out of the box it was a pressure packed event but Bob MacQueen, an atm experimenter, did an excellent job. On our mission we also had a few dis­cussions with those who were ultimately responsible for the scientific return from several experiments, but we would have liked more.

“Several years after our flight, I talked to a cosmonaut who had flown much longer than we did on Skylab ill. They had a somewhat looser opera­tion. After gaining some familiarity with an experiment before flight, they

39- Ed Gibson at the atm console.

would have a private one-on-one discussion with the investigator the night before it was to be performed. No end-to-end rigorous detailed procedures and timelines were usually created or desired. I believe that a middle ground, the Goldilocks solution, will achieve the highest scientific return.”

With the crew performing at high efficiency and rapidly catching up with and surpassing the tasks that had been planned preflight, they found time to laugh at themselves. “About half way through the mission,” Gibson recalled, “we all noticed water collecting on one on the panels in the Lower Equip­ment Bay of the Command Module. We thought it would be a bad situation if that water ever seeped into a compartment full of the electronics.

“Jerry took the initiative to get some cloth towels and soak up the water. He did a very neat job. Not wishing to waste the towels, he hung them out to dry in the ows. We all slapped our foreheads when the water evaporat­ed from the towels and went straight back to the coldest spot in the sta­tion — the Lower Equipment Bay—from where it had just come! We’d just found another way to keep a Skylab crewman busy.”

“Ed and Bill dreamed up more experiments than you could shake a stick at,” Carr said. “I think one of the funniest pieces of footage I’ve ever seen is

from one of Bill’s experiments. He wanted to demonstrate that, although air is a fluid, a medium just like water, it’s a lot harder to kick, paddle, or swim to get somewhere. He made some big cardboard fins for his hands and feet and put on a crash helmet with big bubble eyes, which made him look like a huge bug. When he drifted out to the center of the workshop and start­ed flapping his paddles, he actually started moving, although very slow­ly, demonstrating that air is a medium just like water in zero gravity, and you can move around in it—if you the have the right kind of tools and the patience. While Bill was really putting out the energy flapping around, Ed and I got a good laugh.”

The crew was also hitting their stride in terms of the experiments they were performing. They all became much more proficient at Earth observa­tions as the mission continued not only because of the time on orbit but also because of the extra training and emphasis they had put on it.

Ed Gibson recalled, “When we first got up there, we would say, ‘I guess we’re over Africa because it looks like the coastal outline ofAfrica. But after a while we could just look at a little patch of our planet and say, ‘There’s a red windswept desert. We must be over north Africa.’ or, ‘There’s an ocean current, and we can tell by its color and the way it’s meandering that it’s the Falkland current right off the east coast of South America,’ or, ‘There’s a lit­tle round patch of clear ocean surrounded by a ring of clouds. That’s where cold water is welling up and quenching cloud formation. Fishing must be good down there.’

“Whenever I had the chance, I would study and photograph my home­town of Buffalo. In December and January, it displayed its standard winter color: white. No matter which way the wind blew in from Canada, it picked up moisture over Lake Erie or Lake Ontario, then, when it hit the cold land, it all dumped out as snow onto Buffalo. However, the sight of it still warmed my heart. The people are great and ultimately responsible for what I’d done in life including flying over them 270 miles up (go bills!).”

“The diametrically opposite corner of the United States, southern Cali­fornia, received considerable attention from all three of us primarily because of the interest of Lee Silver at Caltech in the multitude of crisscrossing fault zones there,” said Pogue. “From our data he discovered a fault that propa­gated through the airfield at Palmdale, which was the construction site of the Space Shuttles. Fortunately, it has remained inactive. The San Andreas fault and others of less prominence could clearly be seen by eye.”

“On the other side of the Pacific plate,” said Gibson, “the Alpine fault looked like someone had scribed a long, deep, straight line from head to toe on South Island, New Zealand. It was boldly visible, especially at low sun angles.”

“I found weather observations equally interesting,” said Gibson. “One night I watched an extensive series of thunderstorms over the Andes. It was clear that the flashes came in groups as if one flash set off others perhaps through electromagnetic triggers transmitted through the ionosphere. A charge would build up, then ripple fire across the total system, not just at one location. At the time it all seemed so obvious and natural. It was enjoy­able to see and acquire an instinctive feel for some of the natural forces on the Earth. However, since then the results have been difficult to reproduce with instrument observations.”

With the longer duration of the third Skylab mission came more oppor­tunities for its crew to venture outside. When the Skylab design was in the requirements phase, the only way an eva capability could be justified was by the film installation and retrieval to service the atm experiments. It became a classic case—in space—of “If you build it, they will come.” The first of the mission’s four evas took place on Mission Day 7, better known on Earth as Thanksgiving Day. On this eva, as well as all the remaining ones, consid­erably less than 50 percent of the crew’s time was spent on the installation and retrieval of film. The rest of the time was spent on repairs and deploy­ment of other experiments.

Pogue was feeling much better after his initial bout of space sickness by the time he performed the first eva with Gibson. They installed atm film, repaired the microwave antenna, placed an experiment on the atm truss, and took pictures during the six-and-a-half hour eva.

evas were savored by each one of the Skylab crewmen.

“evas were good hard work that always left a feeling of accomplishment,” Ed Gibson said, “as well as some stimulating and lasting visual images. Our training at the neutral-buoyancy tank at Marshall was excellent. Working in the water was always a bit more difficult because of the water resistance and the fact that you could never get weighted out perfectly, which left forc­es and torques on your body that didn’t exist in space. If you could do it in the tank, you could do it in space.

“Over the years I spent a lot of time at Marshall, not only in training but also in the development of procedures and hardware. In fact the first time

40. The third crew performed a total of four spacewalks during their eighty-four-day stay on Skylab.

Bill and I went out the airlock hatch, part of me expected to see the eyes of safety divers magnified behind their masks ready to assist and big bubbles streaming past my helmet then breaking up, flattening into mushrooms, and turning to white spray at the surface. Instead, it was all clear, no div­ers, no bubbles. Nothing was outside the hatch but our space station and the Earth 270 miles below.

“Three times I went out that hatch into the ‘truly great outdoors.’ When I was out there, it was a silent world, except for the whispers of my own breath. Sometimes I felt totally alone, like the world below didn’t even know I was there. But then I thought of the many people on consoles in Mission Con­trol who monitored everything on the station, including my every breath, word, and heartbeat, and I realized that I was being fully supported in the most extensive way possible.”

Jerry Carr described the spacewalk: “On the first eva, Bill and Ed went out and did a lot of repair work. We had a microwave antenna on the side of the spacecraft that faced the Earth that needed some diagnostics and repair. Unfortunately there were no handrails or foot restraints on that side; so when we trained for it in the neutral-buoyancy tank, we had to figure out how we were going to get it done.

“Basically, we found a place on a truss where we could fasten foot restraints. Bill got into these restraints and held on to Ed’s feet while he reached up and made the fix to the microwave antenna. It was ad hoc, very difficult, but it worked.”

Ed Gibson said, “Removing the cover from the microwave antenna elec­tronics box turned out to be exceptionally difficult. On one side of the box, four screws had to be removed. On the ground it was easy. But in flight because the real box had a metal lip that closely overhung the screws, it was anything but easy. The small screwdriver that fit the small screws had to be inserted into the slots from the side of the screw heads rather from than the top, which was extremely difficult in our large bulky eva gloves.

“Bill and I both gave it a shot. I remember thinking on my last try, ‘Our success here is limited only by something physical. We’re just not going back in until this little hummer is fixed!’ After the better part of an hour, we got the top removed and the work done. It felt good to achieve something diffi­cult, even though most of my fingernails had turned purple from the intense and prolonged squeezing of the screwdriver.

“To get to the antenna electronics box, many layers of aluminized Mylar insulation had to be cut away with a scissors. Most of these highly reflective pieces floated free and were blown away from Skylab by the gases venting from our suits. It happened at sunset so that the red light of the setting sun reflected off these tumbling reflectors in the distance. We commented on the cloud of red flashing lights that appeared to be following us. One of the tabloids picked up on what we saw and of course did not give the real expla­nation. Clearly, we were not chased by flashing red UFOs guided by extra­terrestrial intelligence.”

The new holiday eva tradition continued on Christmas Day. It was the first time a NASA astronaut had been in space on that day since the Apollo 8 crew was on their way back from the moon five years earlier. (Just a week earlier, another first had been marked—the 18 December launch of Soyuz 13 meant that for the first time, U. S. astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts were in space at the same time.) Among the tasks Carr and Pogue performed during the second eva was to take pictures of Comet Kohoutek.

“evas were spectacular,” Carr said. “The second eva was on Christmas Day, and Bill and I were out for seven hours. I was amazed when I got back in because I expected that I’d have to go to the bathroom something fierce,

but I didn’t. Apparently, I had gotten rid of a lot of fluids in the form of sweat through my pores. When I got back in, I was really sweaty, but I real­ly didn’t have to urinate. I was just amazed that, after seven hours, I wasn’t pretty interested in streaking to the urinal.”

“On Christmas of 1973,” Bill Pogue said, “Jerry and I were suited up for an eva to do routine servicing of the solar observatory (removing and replac­ing film magazines). I was to also set up a camera to take imagery of Com­et Kohoutek, and Jerry was to repair one of the solar telescopes using proce­dures developed by ground personnel. Jerry and I got into the Skylab airlock surrounded by two seventy-five-pound film magazines, a special camera for taking pictures of the comet, and tools for Jerry’s repair job.

“We closed the airlock hatches that sealed us off from the rest of Skylab and dumped the pressure from the airlock. When the pressure dropped our suits began to inflate and stiffen just as we expected. At this point I was curi­ous to see how our inflated suits and all the hardware were going to fit in the confined space of the airlock. It turned out to be no problem.

“When the airlock pressure dropped to a vacuum, we opened the hatch and began the first task. Jerry went hand over hand out to the end of the solar observatory while I got the replacement film magazines ready. I operat­ed an extendable boom to transfer the first film canister to Jerry; he removed it and loaded the exposed canister to the boom; I retracted the boom while Jerry loaded the fresh canister to replace the one he had just removed, and when he gave me the ок, I sent the second canister out, we repeated the pro­cedure and were finished in record time.

“I went into the airlock, grabbed the comet camera, and left the airlock as Jerry was returning for his tools. Everything was going like clockwork. I mounted the comet camera on a round Skylab strut and positioned it so that one of the solar arrays just blocked the sun. I couldn’t see the comet but ground had sent me a diagram by teleprinter. The instructions were clear, and it was a fairly easy job. I turned on the camera, and I was finished.

“Because this was my last eva, I decided to make the most of it. I crawled all over the accessible parts of Skylab. It reminded me of when I was a kid doing a mud crawl in a four-foot-deep stock tank used for watering cows and horses. The animals didn’t appreciate it, but very few people had swim­ming pools at that time, and the stock tank was one way to get cool during hot Oklahoma summers.

“My adventurous foray over Skylab ended with me at the sun end of the solar observatory. I was positioned where Jerry had been earlier and the view was breathtaking. When I leaned my head way back I could see the Earth below with no intervening structure in my line of sight. As others had described to me, I had the feeling I was doing a slow swan dive through space. My euphoria was suddenly dashed by comments from Ed who was holding down the fort inside. After I listened to Ed describe the problem that now occupied Mission Control, he asked where I was. I said, ‘The sun end of the atm.’ I quickly deduced that I had stayed too long at that loca­tion and got moving.

“On Skylab we had three large gyroscopes to maintain attitude control. It was obviously important to keep the telescopes pointed toward the sun during solar observations, and the gyros did a great job. Unfortunately one gyro had failed while Ed and I were out on our first eva (Thanksgiving of :i973). Theoretically the remaining two gyros were supposed to be adequate, but in fact we frequently had to perform a special procedure to keep them working properly.

“I was really embarrassed. I had unintentionally caused the current prob­lem, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Our suits were fed oxygen from inside Skylab, and there was no recycling of the air. It auto­matically fed in near the back of my head, flowed down across my face, and then escaped out the front of the suit near my waist. The outward airflow had acted like a small thruster, like letting the air out of a balloon. Although the force from the escaping air was small, my position at the sun end of the atm magnified the thrusting effect because I was about thirty feet from the centerline of Skylab. In other words this lever arm was giving the force of the escaping air a lot of leverage. The airflow from my suit was rotating a one-hundred-ton space station!

“Jerry called asking for help, and I was more than happy to accommodate him. He couldn’t reach a critical location, so I got into his work position and held his legs under my arms to extend his reach. It took a while but Jerry finally finished, we tidied up everything, I retrieved the comet camera, and we ended the eva. When we got back inside, Capcom informed us that we had set a new eva record of just over seven hours. What a blast!”

“That evening after the eva,” said Carr, “we did a TV presentation for the people on the ground. The three of us observed what it was like to be up there, what we saw on the ground, and how we felt about it. We had built a Christmas tree out of a bunch of food can liners from our kitchen and

fashioned them into what looked like a little aluminum cedar tree. Then we had taken several kinds of decals, orange and red and green decals, and stuck them on the tree for decoration. Lastly in honor of Comet Kohoutek, we made a silver foil star with a tail and put it on the top. That was our Christmas tree.”

Four days later Carr and Gibson each made their second eva, taking more comet pictures. They also obtained a sample of the Airlock Module’s micro­meteoroid cover, which was to be studied to learn more about the effects of space exposure.

“In terms of brilliance, Comet Kohoutek was a disappointment,” Carr said. “We and everybody on the ground thought that it was going to be a beautiful, brilliant comet. It turned out to be beautiful all right, but it was so faint that we really had to work to find it. Once we did find it, we observed a gorgeous thing: small, faint, but gorgeous! Although we took as many pictures as we could, I don’t think our film was sensitive enough to really record good data. I believe the only decent picture taken was with the cor- onagraph on the atm. The people on the ground got better pictures of the comet than we did.”

Though the pictures were disappointing, their observations weren’t a complete waste. “In order to best describe what we saw, we made draw­ings,” Carr said. “Ed was the point man on that. With Bill and I looking over his shoulder, he made the drawings and then did a TV report showing the drawings and describing the colors that we saw. There was a little beak on the front end of the comet, which he described as well as [giving] its sig­nificance. These pictures are now in the Smithsonian Air and Space Muse­um in Washington DC. The comet’s low brightness was a disappointment, but it was exciting to look for and find it. We also set up experiments out­side to try to capture it after we went back inside. We then brought them in on a subsequent eva.”

The crew’s fourth and final eva, on 3 February 1973, was once more per­formed by Carr and Gibson. It was the last to take place on Skylab and its purpose reflected that finality. They were to gather everything outside that was going to go back to Earth, including the last of the atm film and also try out a much simpler equipment transfer device than the extendable boom used on all other Skylab evas.

“On our last eva,” Ed Gibson recalled, “Jerry and I tried out the clothes­line that had been proposed as another way to send the large atm film packs

4i. To supplement the disappointing atm imagery of Kohoutek, the crew made sketches from their own observations.

back and forth between the airlock and the sun end of the atm. An image sprang to mind of the clothesline [being] outside the station holding the wet towels that we had employed unsuccessfully to clean up the water in the [Lower Equipment Bay] of the Command Module, an image of ‘wash day on Skylab’ that we quickly censored and got back to work.”

“The clothesline could not have been more simple: a closed loop of rope sliding over two polished cylinders attached to hooks on each end of the line and two hooks about two feet apart clipped to the rope. Aside from some oscillations of the objects being transported, which we easily controlled, it functioned well.

“However, after the clothesline had served its purpose, it was left up and led to some congestion in the workstation at the airlock, which caused me a

problem. In subsequent work there, the rope got entangled with the umbil­ical connection to my suit and actually disconnected it. I could not feel it happening because the suit, once inflated, is a good insulator from all sub­tle contacts with the outside world. My secondary oxygen pack had picked up the task of keeping my suit inflated, but the fluid line leading to my liq­uid cooled garment was hosing out a water-glycol solution into the vacuum where it immediately turned to yellow ice. Once alerted by the ice foun­tain in front of me, I immediately remade the connection and everything returned to normal, except for the heart rate of the controller in Houston monitoring my suit.”

Skylab ill served as a bridge between two eras of evas. Not only did the crew perform the last eva of the Apollo era and the last using a Gemini hatch, they also paved the way for future evas of the Shuttle era. Though it was not used outside, the third crew, like the second, tested an early version of what would become the Manned Maneuvering Unit (mmu). In 1984 the backpack would allow astronauts to perform evas floating untethered in space, essentially its users became self-contained human satellites orbiting the Earth.

“The mmu was a lot of fun,” Bill Pogue recalled. “We flew it both shirt­sleeved and suited. Towards the end of our flight, we were running low on nitrogen gas that was used as the propellant, which meant that this had to be our last run. It got a little tense and exciting on Jerry’s last suited run. I was observing and taking pictures. We didn’t have any kind of remote radios or other types of communication with each other. But I could see the gauge on Jerry’s oxygen bottle on his right leg, and it was running low. I kept point­ing to it, and he kept gesturing that he wanted to finish.

“He kept going, finally got real close to finishing, but was getting red in the face. I slammed him down, pulled the release on his helmet, and popped it off. He was really sucking air but determined that he was going to finish, which I think he probably did. I was sweating bullets too because it looked like he was in C02 saturation. Actually, it was no big problem because at any time I could pop his helmet. I was just mother-henning him to death while he was sweating and puffing.”

Medical experiments and observations took an increasing priority for the crew that would set a new world space endurance record.

“The bicycle ergometer was a great exercise tool as well as a good experi­ment,” Ed Gibson said. “Especially early in the mission, it was a relief to have

42. Carr pilots the maneuvering unit inside Skylab.

the blood pulled down into our legs to support our exercise, which relieved some of the fullness in our heads caused by the zero gravity and resulting upward fluid shift.

“Once I got pretty cranked up and developed a good sweat, a consider­able amount of water clung to my back in a sheet and oscillated like Jello as I peddled. If a towel was not available, the shake-like-a-dog procedure usu­ally worked. In zero gravity we couldn’t use the seat on the bike, the straps to hold us in place caused too much chafing, and my arms got tired of holding me stable at high workloads for forty-five minutes. Instead I used my head. I taped a folded towel on the ceiling and put the top of my head against it to stabilize my body while I peddled. It worked!

“We also had something onboard that the previous crews did not, a device called ‘Thornton’s Revenge,’ named in honor of Bill Thornton, the astro­naut-physician who had a knack of doing highly beneficial things in clever and simple ways. Previous crews reported that they could have used some form of exercise that maintained the strength in their leg muscles that they used for walking and running upon return to Earth.

“Bill again came to the rescue with a poor man’s treadmill. It consist­ed of a thin sheet of Teflon about a foot wide and three feet long and bun­gee cords that went over our shoulders to hold us down against the Teflon with a force equal to approximately our own weight. With only stocking feet against the Teflon, we could simulate walking or running by forcing our feet to slide over the Teflon one after the other, or we could just bounce up and down.

“Use of this exercise equipment was one of the few times I ever worried about what and when I ate before exercise. Eating some fire-hot chili before exercise is bad enough on Earth, but in zero gravity it’s doubly bad, a real kill­er. That’s because without gravity it bounces against the top of your stom­ach as well. Mixing chili and a treadmill aside, it was enjoyable exercise and definitely helped maintain leg strength. Thanks, Bill!

“Because of the extra requirements placed on the food system by the min­eral balance experiment, this system was as much of a medical experiment as it was a crew habitability system. Despite having to do double duty, we found the food to be great. Many people picture tough astronauts in space surviv­ing on food from squeeze tubes. That’s the wrong image. Try the image of filet mignon, lobster Newburg, and strawberry sundaes.”

“Our crew also broke new ground in the annals of spaceflight with the first full set of condiments in space,” said Bill Pogue. “Rita Rapp developed them for the second crew after Pete had really railed about the ‘yucky’ bland taste of their food. Imagine, they had no condiments! The second crew took up only regular salt and pepper. But we had deluxe treatment: liquid salt, liquid pepper, hot sauce, horseradish, and garlic! Life couldn’t get any bet­ter than that.”

Between luxuriously seasoned meals, work continued. Ed Gibson recalled: “We also performed an experiment to nail down previous crews’ observa­tions. Light flashes had been observed by dark-adapted crewpersons when outside the van Allen radiation belts [lunar flights] and in Earth orbit when going through the South Atlantic Anomaly (saa) where the inner radia­tion belt dips down lower than at all other locations around the globe. Even though a rough correspondence between the occurrence of the light flashes and presence in the saa was observed on the two previous Skylab missions, no exact correlation had been made. Bill Pogue was selected and enthusias­tically performed this arduous experiment.

“His task was to float in his sleep compartment wearing a blindfold and speak into a tape recorder every time he observed a flash. When the frequen­cy of flashes was plotted against Skylab’s position in orbit, a well-defined bell shaped curve resulted that was centered exactly over the saa. Jerry and I praised Bill for his Herculean effort in the name of science.

“After a few weeks into the mission, something happened that made me think Skylab had a heart. I was looking out the wardroom window watch­ing the spider web of lights blanketing the U. S. slide underneath while I held onto a handhold with the fingertips of one hand. Then I felt it—the station had a pulse, a heartbeat. I felt a beat just as real as a pulse in any­one’s wrist!

“Of course I understood the absurdity of my observation, but it took me a few seconds to realize that I was really feeling the surges of blood through my own arteries and the accompanying deflection of my arm and fingers. Normally, on Earth these forces are unnoticeable because they are swamped by gravity forces. We really did live in a world of fingertip forces.

“By the time the third mission rolled around, Goddard Space Flight Cen­ter had gotten pretty accurate at pointing lasers at Skylab. Using lasers of only a few watts, they provided a point light source of various colors that we could track by eye from right over gsfc to almost one thousand miles out to sea. We thought it amazing at the time, and we still do.”

Especially on the last of Skylab’s three missions, cleanliness became a big­ger challenge than ever. “As on Earth,” Bill Pogue said, “a lot of trash accu­mulated during the day including food packaging, tissues, wet wipes, dirty towels, and washcloths. Most of this trash was immediately shoved through a push-through slot into a waste container. However, bits of skin, finger­nails, hair, food crumbs, odd pieces of paper, and the like tended to drift around and eventually were sucked up against the air filter screens—our lost and found department. We used vacuum cleaners to clean off these screens, which took care of most of the problem.

“The worst mess was in the area where we ate. Small drops of liquid from our drinks and crumbs from our food would float around until they stuck on the wall or in the open grid ceiling above our food table. This grid and the area above it became quite dirty after three missions. Although we could see into this ceiling area, we couldn’t get our hands in to wipe it clean, so it became progressively worse throughout the missions. Near the end of the flight, it began to look like the bottom of a birdcage. I just stopped look­ing at it.

“Every two weeks we wiped down the walls and surfaces of the toilet with a biocide [disinfectant] to prevent a buildup of microorganisms such as germs or mold. Periodic cleaning of this type will be required for the Internation­al Space Station to prevent a gradual buildup of biologically active contam­ination. It will be a time-consuming procedure but essential to preserve a healthy environment for the crew.”

Like the other crews, Skylab ill crew used the shower onboard. “Although we found that a washcloth, soap, and water followed up with a towel were perfectly good for maintaining satisfactory hygiene in zero gravity, we also tried out the shower that Bill Schneider, our Skylab program director, had worked so hard to get onboard,” Gibson recalled. “He and others deserved that we each give it a fair try and evaluation.

“Granted it took a lot of time to set up and tear down, but I found it both interesting and refreshing. Because of its limited hot-water supply, it was like taking a shower with a Windex bottle. A smidgen of hot water was used to get wet and soaped up; the remaining smidgen was used to try to rinse off. The little hand vacuum, which was supposed to be used to remove the liquid, was awkward and difficult to use to reach all body parts. So I tried shaking like a dog, which sprayed most of the liquid to the inside surface of the shower enclosure, and then using the vacuum to clean it all up.

“I concluded that the whole procedure had to be made simpler and fast­er, analogous to passing through a car wash in two or three minutes if we are to have a shower on future stations. Nonetheless, we were appreciative that it was onboard and we had a chance to use it.”

Several challenges to the crew grew progressively more severe as the last of the three missions progressed because of the gradual decline in the station’s condition. Maintenance and repairs had been a part of the crew’s duties even before the first crew ever docked, and there were always concerns about the potential effects of further failures.

“Below the hydrogen tank in the third stage of our Saturn v, our pressur­ized habitable volume,” Bill Pogue said, “was the liquid oxygen tank or lox tank, which was about the volume of a one-car garage [2,500 cubic feet] and served as the Skylab trash dump site or dumpster. Without it life onboard Skylab would have been altogether different, just as life in our homes on Earth would be different if we had to keep our trash inside, had no garage, and our trash pickup stopped. There was the constant threat that we would lose access to our dumpster, and our habitable volume would gradually fill up with our trash, which included biodegradable garbage and waste [food residue and urine bags].

“Our access to our dumpster was through an airlock, the Trash Airlock. We compacted our garbage as much as possible, placed it in a special bag, put it into the TAL, closed the lid, opened the TAL to the vacuum of the lox tank, shoved the bag out and into the tank, and then repressurized the TAL to the pressure of our habitable volume for the next use.

“The lid on the TAL began to cause difficulties on the second mission. The hatch became more and more difficult to latch in the closed position. On our mission, the problem became more severe, and we were desperate to keep the tal working.

“We finally worked out a system whereby J erry would load the trash bag in the bin of the Trash Airlock, and I would float above holding onto the ceiling. As he pulled the lever to lock the hatch closed, I would push myself down sharply and stomp on the hatch lid while Jerry closed the locking lever.

“Voila!

“Was it a barnyard procedure? You bet, but it worked!”

Throughout their eighty-four days without gravity, the crew observed and thought about their reactions to this new mode of living. “Do we sense—or even need—up or down without gravity?” Ed Gibson recalled. “Early in our mission, our new world of zero gravity became familiar, then just plain comfortable. From many hours in a water tank, viewing films of previ­ous crews, and actual zero gravity experienced for short times in aircraft, I came to picture a large switch on my forehead with two positions: one-G and zero-G. It got automatically thrown at booster engine cutoff from the first to the second position.

“Of course there was a lot to learn about the techniques of working with­out gravity, but zero gravity seemed familiar even on the first day. The hard­er we worked, the more efficient and confident we became. We soon real­ized at the gut level that space and its zero gravity is not foreign, not hostile. Rather it became just as friendly as gravity on Earth once we adapted. I do not know why I adapted so quickly and relatively painlessly. I was just lucky. I have always been able to visualize and think in three dimensions. Thus, as soon as we entered Skylab, I felt that my life had taken on another dimen­sion, literally. No longer was there an up or down, except for visual referenc­es on panels or faces, but all dimensions became equal. Every motion was across, regardless of its direction inside or outside of Skylab.

“Yet my physiological responses did not forget gravity entirely. Some engi­neers came up with an ‘experiment’ for us to try out at our leisure. It was the ‘Dynamical Acceleration Reference Trajectory Studies (darts).’ When we tried out these Velcro-tipped darts, we were in for a surprise. Without concentration, a thrown dart would fly twenty to forty degrees up relative to the thrower, and far off the intended target. We lob things down here when we throw them to counteract gravity. Up there lobbing is not use­ful. Only by ‘pushing’ the dart out and away from my body was I able to achieve some accuracy. I tried to imagine what it would be like if I grew up in zero gravity, then came down to Earth and tried to gently throw some­thing. In this case, gravity would be viewed as the exception, not the rule, and a real inconvenience.

“A related series of observations were made by the Skylab II guys who experimented with fish. Normally they swam with their bellies towards a surface or their backs toward a light. But when they were excited, they swam in what aviators call outside loops. However, when their offspring were born, they considered three dimensions natural and didn’t favor one over anoth­er; that is, no up or down was recognized or needed. I felt a bit like them. But will it really be so easy to shed millions of years of human evolution by stepping down one generation that has never experienced gravity?

“Pete’s and Al’s guys made the most of the third dimension when it became available to them especially when they set up their own version of the Indy 500, streaking around the dome lockers. But by the time we got up to Sky­lab, the Control Moment Gyros were showing signs of real wear. Eventual­ly one died and a second one was pulling back the covers on its deathbed.

Thus, running around the dome lockers was verboten because of the stress it put on the cmgs.

“We had to find other ways to enjoy zero gravity. I found that if I lay on my back on the grid floor of the ows and used my wrists only to put some rotation and just a little translation into my body, I could go into a tuck posi­tion and spin exceptionally long times before I clanged into a wall. After reviewing the video, I asked Jannet, my oldest daughter, who was a diver at the time, if she could match one of my feats—it turned out to be a ten and one-half gainer in tuck position followed by a two and one-half forward in pike position.

“This tumbling exercise and the many others carried out by all Skylab crewmen illustrate the insensitivity to gross stimulation of the body’s ves­tibular apparatus (semicircular canals) that developed in zero gravity. In my tumbles, I would develop severe nystagmus, or twitching of the eyes, as my eyes tried to catch up with the fluid racing through my semicircular canals, but none of it ever coupled into the gut to create nausea. I just passively spun and then watched the world flicker by for ten to twenty seconds.”

The sensation of height proved to be inconsistent and elusive to Gibson: “There were a few exceptions in my ability to think of everything as just ‘across.’ One day after looking out a window in the mda for almost fifteen minutes to watch the new and interesting features that never stopped com­ing over the horizon, I glanced back inside. The local vertical on Earth had become aligned with the long open direction from the mda to the bottom of the ows. An instantaneous reaction surfaced: I’m going to fall! After I clutched a handhold, I laughed at myself and realized I hadn’t forgotten gravity completely.

“For several years after our return, every time I looked out a round port­hole in the galley of a commercial airliner, part of me felt I was floating back in Skylab looking out a round porthole in the mda except that from the airliner the horizon was flat and my vision covered half a city, not half a continent.

“Another but stronger feeling of height crept up on me during our space­walks. I have found it difficult to step out the door of an airplane when sky­diving. It was considerably easier to step out of the airlock even though we were 270 miles up. As long as I was close to structure, I still felt a part of it. But it felt different when I moved out and away.

“I have equated it in my mind to going to the top of a tall building and looking out. It’s pleasant, relaxing. But now, what happens if I open the window and walk out to the end of a long springboard where a steel-fisted Hulk Hogan holds me by my ankles—head down. ‘Intellectually,’ I know I’ll never fall. And even though I’m at the same height as I was inside, I’d have to admit. . . it feels a bit different.

“On an eva I had that same feeling, just more of it. Head down, I’d glide over Earth at a very serene five miles a second. And the laws of Sir Isaac Newton gave me full intellectual confidence that I was up there to stay. But when I moved away from the main body of Skylab, like hanging off the sun end of the atm, and looked straight down at Earth 270 miles below, I felt or saw nothing else around me. That’s when that same little guy from lift­off whispered again from nowhere, ‘Suppose that Newton guy was just a little bit wrong?’”

Though the possibility of an extended mission was already being explored well before their launch, officially, the target duration had remained at fif­ty-six days, as it had been for the second crew. By the time that duration was reached, the crew had a “Go” to stay. However, extensions were approved for a week at a time as the ground carefully monitored the status of the space­craft, the crew, and the supplies.

NASA press releases issued at the time give the official view:

Release No.: 74-20

“In April of 1982 I was lucky enough to be assigned the job of NASA senior science representative to Australia — ‘nasa Rep,’ the Aussies called it,” Joe Kerwin said. “So I got on the plane in Houston, and some twenty-two hours and three stops later dragged my weary body into the Canberra air­port terminal.

“My new secretary met me in the official Ford, and we decided to drive to the office before she deposited me at the motel. ‘This is your desk, mate.’ she said—and the phone rang. ‘Hello,’ I yawned, ‘nasa representative.’

“’G’day, mate,’ said a voice. ‘I’ve got a bit of Skylab here and was curi­ous; were you still buying them back?’ Incredible! Not in the country two hours, and Skylab, my triumph and embarrassment, had followed me there like the bottle imp.

“By the way, the chap, from a small town near Perth, didn’t have a bit of Skylab. He had a great chunk of it, an intact oxygen tank about eight feet long and well-charred. We informally certified it for him, but NASA had enough samples and didn’t want this one. As far as I know, it’s still adorning the entrance to his pub. Skylab had returned to Earth, sure enough.”

Although the Skylab program had officially been designed to include only three manned missions, there had been discussions of other possibilities, from reboosting the station to launching the second Skylab workshop. Even NASA’s space-race rivals were intrigued by the possibilities the facility offered. If representatives of the Soviet space program had had their way, a much larger-scale version of what eventually became the Apollo-Soyuz Test Proj­ect would have involved both nations’ space station programs as well.

Marshall’s George Hardy recalled that before the launch of Skylab, James Fletcher, the NASA administrator, met with the head of the Soviet space agen­cy to discuss the possibility of cooperation in the event of an emergency in

spaceflight, among other topics. “So we got an invitation to go to Russia in 1969, and Bob Gilruth was selected to head that delegation, and then my name was on there,” Hardy said. “I got selected to go because nobody really knew what the Russians wanted to talk about, and there was some possibil­ity that maybe they wanted to talk a little about Skylab, although our man­agement was not terribly interested in talking about Skylab.”

The meeting was cordial but unproductive, so it was agreed that a Soviet delegation would come back to the United States the next year for a meet­ing at msc to further discuss rescue mission cooperation. “The discussion had been very general about rescue capability—what would we need: com­mon docking systems and things like that and rendezvous capabilities and all that sort of thing,” he said. “And it was very generic discussion.

“About the third or fourth day, they came in and the head of their dele­gation opened that meeting that day and said, ‘We’d like to make a propos­al,’” Hardy said. “And he just laid out flat a proposal where there’d be two missions: one where Soyuz would come to the Skylab, and one where the Command and Service Module would go to the Salyut.”

Under the plan, the Soviets offered to host the first mission on Salyut, and then their mission would be flown to Skylab, which at that point NASA believed was about a year from launch. While the delegations were in the next session, Gilruth called headquarters, and NASA deputy administrator George Low flew to Houston. “Basically the bottom line was that we didn’t want to have a mission with them with Skylab,” Hardy said. “We didn’t want to complicate Skylab to that extent. We thought it would delay Sky – lab. Turns out Skylab was delayed anyway.”

The NASA delegation returned to the meeting with the Soviets and explained that they didn’t believe it would work out to add such a major new element to the Skylab program. There were already obligations, they explained, to principal investigators that wouldn’t allow for such a substantial change to the program timetable. The Soviet delegation agreed that was understand­able and suggested that the joint mission could be flown the with second Skylab station, which they knew had been constructed. The NASA delega­tion explained that there were neither plans nor funding for the launch of the second Skylab.

Savvy to the U. S. system of allocating budget funds on a year-to-year basis, the Soviet delegation said that they understood that the Congress hadn’t appropriated the Skylab-в funds and that they could wait until that happened. “They were told no, that wouldn’t happen,” Hardy said. No mat­ter how the NASA delegation tried to explain it, he said, the Soviets wouldn’t believe that a space agency would build an entire space station with no intent to fly it.

“They couldn’t believe it,” he said. “And it was almost like—they didn’t say this—but you kind of got the impression they were feeling like, ‘These fellows just don’t want a space station with us.’ There has to be another rea­son, and that’s the reason they would assume.”

With a trip to Skylab off the table, the talks of any sort of joint space sta­tion operation fell apart. “It just wasn’t the time for it. And once that didn’t happen, then the trip to Salyut didn’t happen either, and that’s how we end­ed up with astp,” Hardy said. “We didn’t want to go to a Russian quote, ‘space station,’ and the Russians didn’t want us to come to theirs if they couldn’t come to ours.” Though the talks about the joint space station oper­ation ultimately proved unsuccessful, Hardy said he has many vivid mem­ories of the process.

“My introduction to that, I can remember it well,” George Hardy said, “I got a call from [Marshall deputy director Eberhard] Rees. I was here doing my job, and this was one morning at ten o’ clock or something. He said, ‘Can you be in Dr. Gilruth’s office this afternoon, by three o’clock?’ I said, ‘I guess so, I’ll see. What am I going for?’ He said, ‘Well, they’ll tell you when you get there.’ That was strange. So anyway, I did; I caught a plane. I got down there; I walked in that office and introduced myself, and [the secretary] said, ‘Oh yes, Dr. Gilruth’s expecting you soon. Have you got your tickets for Moscow yet?’ And that was the first time I knew I was going to Moscow.

“I really had a good time with [Gilruth]. We were coming back from that trip over there in ’69. The State Department had briefed us, and things were pretty contentious back in those days between the two countries. One of the things they told us was typical I guess—they told everybody that went over there, don’t lock your suitcase, ’cause they’re going to open it up anyway. Don’t lock it; they’ll break the lock on it. We all tried to adhere to that, but Gilruth evidently forgot it or something. They broke in, bust­ed the lock on it.

“Here we were coming back through Heathrow Airport, and Bob Gilruth had on his cowboy boots and that ten-gallon hat. He was carrying a suit­case that was tied up with a rope around it, and he had a big bag under his arm; he’d bought a fur or something for his wife over there. It looked like Texas walking down through there.

“When they came over here there must have been twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty of them. I know they had a whole wing at the Holiday Inn down there. And they had buses to take them to the Galleria, shopping. They loved to go to the Galleria. They’d buy flashlights and flashlight batteries; that was their favorite thing to take home.”

Hardy said that he has often wondered since then what would have hap­pened if things had worked out differently. “I don’t know what that would have cost,” Hardy said of the Skylab-Salyut proposal. “I don’t know how complicated that would have been. I don’t know what the political payoff of something like that would have been, or the scientific payoff, but that would have been a real joint mission, a real joint mission.”

In fact, he said, depending on how interested the Soviets had been in the program, it might have been possible to work out an arrangement that would have allowed the second Skylab to be flown. Funding issues aside, one of the biggest issues facing a second Skylab program was the limited number of U. S. Saturn launch vehicles and Apollo spacecraft remaining. Supplement­ing those with Soyuz rockets and capsules in a cooperative program, Har­dy noted, could have opened up new possibilities. “For example, you could have used Soyuz preferentially—four of theirs to our last two Command Modules, all sorts of options,” he said, adding, “They just seemed amazed that we built an entire vehicle and wouldn’t fly it.”

Scientist astronaut Phil Chapman was a member of a committee started after Apollo 14 to study space station possibilities. He was part of a group that advocated launching the Skylab-в workshop after modifying it to make it refurbishable. “The modifications to the workshop mostly involved pro­visions for replacing consumables,” Chapman recalled. “I think the most costly change was mounting the cmgs in palettes so they could be replaced when necessary. As I recall the additional cost was about $50 million in 1970 dollars. We could have had a permanent space station in 1975 with more real utility than the iss for a total cost twenty times less. Once that was up and running, our proposal was to build a reusable crew transfer vehicle, launched initially by a Saturn IB, and then to work on a reusable flyback booster.”

Chapman said that the possibilities posed by the Space Shuttle were seen by those in charge as making this proposal unnecessary. He said that NASA’s decision to pursue the Space Shuttle was one of the principal reasons he left the astronaut corps in 1972 rather than waiting for a chance to fly.

Plans for the future utilization of the Skylab hardware were not to be. When the Skylab ill crew closed the hatch as they left, it was to be the end of the operational program. On 9 February 1974, just one day after the return of Jerry Carr’s crew, Mission Control did some final systems testing, maneu­vered Skylab to a gravity gradient attitude (perpendicular to Earth, small end up and workshop end down, an orientation in which it would wobble but remain pretty stable without the need for electrical power or propel­lants) and turned off the power.

Experts at Marshall forecast that Skylab would descend from its end-of – mission altitude (about 235 nautical miles) only very gradually. If nothing were done, drag from the very thin atmosphere at that altitude would inex­orably pull it down, and it was estimated that reentry and burn-up would occur around March 1983. This estimate was based on the average density of the atmosphere at various levels of solar activity. It was known that between 1974 and 1980 solar activity would be increasing, approaching solar maxi­mum —a time when sunspots, flares, and the ejection of solar particles to and beyond the Earth would be more frequent. Increased solar activity heats the upper atmosphere, causing it to expand. The slight increase in density at Skylab’s altitude would increase drag, causing it to descend more quick­ly. All of this was factored in.

But the rise in solar activity during the 1970s was far from average. It was the most active solar cycle ever recorded with modern instruments. And through the years from 1974 to 1978, NASA and noaa differed in their fore­casts. noaa was forecasting higher drag than NASA.

NASA’s plan when Skylab was deactivated was to visit it again when the Space Shuttle was operational, and the first flight had been scheduled for early 1979—plenty of time. A remotely operated system would remove a propulsion module from the orbiter and place it in Skylab’s docking hatch, either to boost it to a high, safe altitude while plans were made to somehow activate it or to deorbit it safely to a remote ocean. Neither component was yet being built because of NASA’s very tight budget.

But as the sun gradually began to move Skylab’s demise earlier, the Shuttle schedule began to move later. An early 1979 launch began to look risky. Sky – lab would have to be visited earlier than the fifth flight, during the so-called test phase of the program, and Shuttle management didn’t want to risk that. Could anything be done to keep Skylab aloft longer? Maybe something could. In February 1977 a team of eight engineers—four from Marshall and four from Johnson—went to Bermuda to try to wake Skylab up. Bermuda was the only NASA ground station that still had command capability using the “old-fashioned” uhf radio band.

As Bill Chubb, at that time leader of the Support Team for Attitude Con­trol at Marshall, explained, “Four years had passed, and we had no idea of the condition of any of the systems nor did we even know if they were com – mandable from the Skylab ground station network. It was critical that we establish communications, interrogate, and activate these systems to facil­itate a controlled reentry.

“In order to evaluate what options were available to us, the state of the onboard systems had to be determined. Ground tracking told us when Sky­lab would be within communication range. Onboard batteries of the power system were most likely fully discharged. Power would be available on the vehicle only when the solar panels were pointing toward the sun. There was no way of knowing if its attitude would be such that the solar panels would be pointed toward the sun during the passes over Bermuda, making pow­er available to the onboard telemetry system. Even with power available we did not know whether it was operable. On March 6, 1978, as Skylab passed within range of the Bermuda Ground Tracking Station, the onboard Sky­lab Airlock Module command and telemetry system was commanded ‘on.’ Numerous ‘on’ commands were sent until at last data from Skylab came into the Bermuda Station. It was a moment none of us would forget!”

Charlie Harlan was appointed by Chris Kraft, director of Johnson, in 1977 to create and head up the Skylab Reentry Flight Control Team. He recalled: “We’d send a command to charge the batteries, but there had to be juice on the bus for it to be received. So those guys just sat out there, sending com­mand after command after command. Eventually one would get through.” With persistence the remaining good batteries were finally recharged, and Skylab was ready to be commanded out of its passive gravity-gradient atti­tude into one that would enable control of drag. What attitudes could the aging control system sustain?

Now that control of Skylab attitude had been reestablished, what was the desired direction in space? The lowest drag would make the station travel like an arrow (end-on) and provide the longest lifetime. But to best control the point of reentry and final destruction, a higher drag and shorter lifetime would be better. During this control period, Associated Press space report­er Howard Benedict (later the executive director of the Astronaut Scholar­ship Foundation for many years) noted that “Jack Lousma, a member of the (second) crew to live aboard the station for fifty-nine days, came by the Con­trol Center and asked if the station could be inhabited again. Chubb said ‘Yes,’ there was enough oxygen and nitrogen for perhaps a ninety-day mis­sion. Lousma noted that there probably was still plenty of asparagus aboard, too—left by past crews.” It was one of their least favorite dishes!

One of the three Control Moment Gyros used to control Skylab’s atti­tude had failed during the third crew’s mission, and another had developed increased bearing temperatures—a possible sign of impending failure. There was very little nitrogen left in the cold gas backup attitude control system. Two cmgs had to be enough to control Skylab and possibly even one. Was this possible?

Charlie Harlan again: “There were some heroes in this story, and maybe the biggest ones were Hans Kennel and his colleague John Glaese at msfc. They came up with what many of us thought was impossible—new control laws for the cmgs to control Skylab even if two of them failed, and new atti­tudes we could use to control drag. They brought in four guys from IBM who had done the original control system. They completely rewrote the software in Skylab’s IBM computer. They wrote over all the code that wasn’t needed like crew displays and controls. We turned their stuff into commands and sent it up. I remember one day we tumbled Skylab doing that. They’d sent us a matrix, and somehow the rows and columns got transposed and we sent up a bunch of garbage. But they caught it right away and we corrected it.”

Since the goal at that time was to stretch Skylab’s lifetime, drag had to be minimized. The attitude invented for that purpose was called “end-on velocity vector (eovv).”

Hans Kennel recalled: “To reduce the orbital decay the attitude control of the Skylab had to be regained and the drag had to be reduced by point­ing the long vehicle axis along the orbital velocity vector. Leading up to reinstatement of active control of Skylab and activation of eovv was the discussion about the health of one of the two remaining functional Con­trol Moment Gyros. It had shown signs toward the end of the original Sky – lab mission similar to the one that failed, and many thought failure of this second cmg was imminent.

“That would have left one cmg remaining, whereas Skylab needed two good cmgs for control. We were told the reactivation mission was ‘off’ unless we could come up with a single cmg backup for eovv. Along with the oth­er things described, we had to develop such a thing and we did. It would have been a ‘hairy’ operation, but it looked like it would work. On the basis of that, the go-ahead was given, and we even adapted the same momentum management methodology developed for single cmg control for use with the two functional cmgs.

“As a side note it was learned after the reactivation phase that the ailing cmg worked better if it was exposed to the sun and not in shadow for extend­ed periods and so we developed maneuver plans for flipping the vehicle from orbital workshop and habitation module forward to Apollo Telescope Mount forward, depending on which end was more favorable for heating the ail­ing cmg. From that point on it never again showed signs of problems and worked all throughout the remainder of eovv and tea [Torque Equilibri­um Attitude]. We developed the necessary control methods, built a simu­lation to verify the operation, including what kind of data the ground con­trollers would see, and with the help of IBM the necessary algorithms were implemented on the onboard computer.

“All this was done in record time (we were made aware of the problem on 20 March 1978, IBM got the necessary equations for the onboard com­puter on 26 April 1978, and eovv attitude was successfully entered 11 June 1978). And it worked very well reducing the orbital decay. This fast response was only possible because we were fluent in apl (a high level computer lan­guage); we had all the necessary simulation components due to previous experience; practically all red tape was cut; and the official documentation was done much later.”

The low drag attitude was expected to increase Skylab’s lifetime by about five months, into 1980. But early in 1978, the risk of a Skylab reentry was abrupt­ly dramatized by the Soviet space program. A Soviet spacecraft, Cosmos 954, entered the atmosphere and broke up over northern Canada, spreading nearly a hundred pounds of nuclear fuel over a broad swath of forest. Crit­ics began to question NASA’s plans. NASA assured the public that Skylab con­tained no radioactive material.

There was talk of extending Skylab’s life by moving it into a higher orbit. Engineers looked at the possibility of launching a booster that could be attached to Skylab. The Space Shuttle, it appeared, was the best answer. Launch on an unmanned rocket would mean figuring out how to auto­mate the reboosting. With the Shuttle, the crews could carry the booster to Skylab and attach it.

However, the same program that offered hope for Skylab’s salvation also brought that hope to an end. The first spaceworthy orbiter, Columbia, was plagued during testing with the loss of insulating ceramic tiles as well as trouble with its engines. A better system for applying the tiles was needed, and the first launch attempt slipped to 1981. Skylab was going to reenter.

The control team now knew what it had to do and prepared a plan for review by NASA headquarters. First they looked at how Skylab’s orbit varied as it moved around the Earth. Some orbits passed over many densely popu­lated land areas; others spent most of the time over water and desert. Using a population-density map prepared by the Department of Defense, they esti­mated the population under Skylab’s path for each orbit.

The next step was to forecast how Skylab might break up, how much of its bulk would survive reentry and hit Earth’s surface, and over what area. An analysis had been prepared by NASA before Skylab’s launch and was used. The end-of-mission Skylab weighed about 173,000 pounds, and about 50,000 pounds of that was expected to survive reentry.

Putting the two analyses together, NASA estimated that there was an aver­age chance of one in 152 that someone might be struck by debris. But on the very best orbits, it was much less than a tenth of that. These were the orbits that passed over southern Canada, then swept southeast over the Atlantic, skimmed just south of the tip of Africa, up the Pacific and Indian oceans to cross Australia, then across the Coral Sea and Pacific Ocean until reach­ing North America again. If reentry could be contrived to happen east of North America and west of Australia on one of these orbits, Skylab could be safely disposed of.

So the plan was to put Skylab back into its old standard solar inertial, high-

drag attitude, then carefully track what effect that drag was having on its altitude and reentry point. As altitude decreased and drag increased, it would be impossible to maintain solar inertial; asymmetric drag would twist Sky – lab out of control. No problem; the unflappable Hans Kennel and his team had invented torque equilibrium altitude, a variation that perfectly balanced all the forces. Nominally the point of no return would be reached at seven­ty-five miles altitude. At that altitude, controllers would command Skylab to turn off its cmgs; it would immediately tumble. The known, lower drag of the tumbling configuration would result in a known entry location. And by varying the altitude at tumble time, the team believed it could stretch or shorten reentry to place it on one of the five “good” orbits for that day.

Charlie Harlan recalled, “Another hero was Richard Brown, a Rockwell contractor engineer. He figured out how much power we’d need to per­form each maneuver and what attitudes would achieve it. Since our pow­er margins were very small, we’d call Richard in whenever we were plan­ning an attitude change.” Headquarters agonized over the plan. There was a faction that didn’t want to give the public the impression that NASA was in full control; if the scheme backfired, there would be much blame. “This was the ‘God’ faction—they basically didn’t want to do anything,” Harlan said, “so they could blame it on God. But I’m a Deist. I believe God put us on Earth with certain capabilities, and expects us to do our best. My team and I were ready, and pretty optimistic.”

Finally, the call came from headquarters. John Yardley, acting as liaison between Johnson and the administrator, approved the plan. Harlan recalled telling Chris Kraft this and Chris saying, “Charlie, you got your answer. Hang up the phone and don’t answer it again.”

Headquarters had insisted on using predictions of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (norad) regarding reentry rather than nasa’s, “so that there would be one official source.” The NASA team was pretty sure their prediction was better, because they had a better knowledge of vehicle configuration and drag. And in June the NASA prediction was running about two days earlier than the norad one. “We knew the predictions would con­verge as we got close,” Harlan said. “But the media really wanted to be here for the big event, so we told them unofficially, ‘If you don’t want to miss it, get set up a couple of days early.’”

But before the final demise of Skylab, the general public had lots of advice

for NASA. Headlines in the 5 June 1979 edition of the Huntsville Times reported that “nasa Chief [Robert Frosch] Is Chided for Skylab’s Fall.” When asked where he would be at the time of Skylab’s return, Frosch said that “if not at NASA Headquarters, he would probably be at a bbq in his backyard.” Congressman Robert Walker, R, Pennsylvania, was “somewhat incredu­lous” that nobody had given any thought at all to tell the public what to do. NASA general counsel Neil Hosenball said, “Our people are the last in the world to know what to say or how to do it [alert the public].”

Other more specific advice came from the public: “Fill a robot plane with TNT and crash into it.” Or “shoot a missile at it.” All these many letters were sent to William O’Donnell, nasa’s director of public information, who said they were all answered. One of those giving him “most pause to compose” suggested having “the astronauts attach balloons (filled with helium) so it will float into outer space.”

A New York restaurant invited people to partake of Skylab cocktails — “two of these and you won’t know what hit you.” A large baseball mitt was erect­ed at Cape Canaveral to catch the station. Another radio station (kmbz, in Kansas) offered $9,800 for a piece of the station. Beanie hats with propel­lers and T-shirts were sold in San Francisco with a large “x” imprinted say­ing, “Hit me.” (There were jokes that shirts like this would keep the wear­er safe—there was no way the government could actually hit anything it aimed for.)

A psychic from California somehow got Harlan’s home phone number. “She called me several times with predictions. I’d say, ‘How do you know that?’ And she’d say, ‘Numerology.’ But she predicted impact on Dover, Del­aware, and she never called back afterwards.”

Meanwhile the press was having a field day. Some people in Washing­ton DC, had started a Chicken Little Society. There were bumper stickers (“Chicken Little was Right!” “Good to the Last Drop”), T-shirts, slogans, and contests—a kind of gallows humor. The New York Times chided NASA soberly. Officials in England offered advice: “Being inside a house would protect you from small pieces. . . .”

Garriott recalled: “I was greatly amused and annoyed by what I consid­ered to be a gross overreaction by the press and criticism of NASA. I had an interview request from one of the Houston press about it. I noted that I/we didn’t invite him to drive down into our community. And since he did, he was exposing our children to a greater risk of being hit by his car than we at NASA were exposing his family to by Skylab reentry. That was not too well received and didn’t make it to print. The statistics were simple and required some estimation, but I believe they were true.”

On 9 July headquarters opened the Skylab Coordination Center to keep everyone informed. On the tenth the forecast was made that entry would occur the next day between 7:00 a. m. and 5:00 p. m., Eastern daylight time. On the other side of the world in Australia, headlines warned of the impend­ing reentry. Sydney’s Sun newspaper ran a front-page headline, three lines deep in bold letters two inches tall, “skylab on aust crash course.”

“Skylab is on a crash course that could bring debris down on south­western Australia, American authorities said today,” the article, dated 10 July, read. “But it could still re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on any of 12 final orbits—including some over Sydney. The Western Australia State Emer­gency Service went on full alert this morning. ‘All we’ve heard is rumours,’ ses director Mr D. L. Hill said today.”

Another Sydney paper, the Daily Mirror, announced the same day “sky – lab zero hour near.” Stacked below it was the headline for another arti­cle, informing readers, “But here’s some down-to-Earth good news — $10 a week tax cut plan.”

Harlan and his team stood by to make their last decision. At midnight it appeared that Skylab would reenter on the very best orbit. But the predicted debris “footprint” was immense—nearly four thousand miles long by one hundred wide because the heavier pieces would be less affected by drag and would travel a lot farther. And it looked like the western edge of that foot­print might just overlap the U. S. east coast. So the tumbling command was given early, with Skylab just under eighty miles high, and the impact foot­print moved east as predicted.

But things rarely go exactly as predicted. Skylab’s breakup altitude had been calculated from its design structural strength requirements. The actu­al vehicle was stronger than the specs required. It held together longer than was calculated, breaking up over the Indian Ocean. Most of the debris fell harmlessly into the water, but some chunks fell in western Australia along a line from south to northeast of Perth. (Nine days later, Perth hosted the Miss Universe pageant, and a piece of the fallen spacecraft was on display during the event.) “Thank God—and Charlie’s team—no one was hurt,” Kerwin said.

47- Johnson Space Center officials and flight controllers monitor the reentry of Skylab.

A ground track of Skylab in its last hour or so of existence on 11 July starts from mid-Canada and moves easterly out into the North Atlantic. It then moves southeast into the South Atlantic, just as planned. It passes south of the Cape of Good Hope and turns northeast across the Indian Ocean toward Australia, beginning to seriously break apart and the lighter pieces to burn up. Some smaller pieces scattered down on tin roofs in Esperance and other nearby cities, but a few of the larger chunks (such as the film vault and the oxygen and nitrogen tanks) presumably carried on overhead into the Outback. Some are doubtless still there, awaiting some adventuresome explorer to find them.

The raining of debris on Australia prompted legal action—the town of Esperance fined the U. S. State Department four hundred dollars for litter­ing. Kerwin recalled that his primary emotion at seeing the end of his one­time home was simply relief that nobody was hurt. “I think we’d seen it com­ing for long enough not to be surprised or regretful,” he said.

In Australia the reentering spacecraft put on a show for those who saw it. The Skylab control center actually got a phone call from the captain of a commercial aircraft flying along Australia’s west coast. It was night, and he excitedly described the multiple streaks of flame blazing through the sky.

That was the clue for the team to turn off their consoles and go home. Air­line pilot Bill Anderson gave an even more useful visual report when he not­ed that he and his passengers saw separate fireballs change from a “bright blue into an orangey-red” as the debris broke up and descended into the lower atmosphere.

A woman in the town of Esperance in southwest Australia was among those on the ground who saw Skylab fall. It seemed like “a shower of spar­kling lights—like a rocket—passed overhead with no sound, until about a half a minute or so, [then] there was this loud boom,” she said.

Once more, giant bold letters graced Sydney’s Sun. Above the headline “skylab hits wa station,” was followed by a distinctly local angle to the story: “The world stood in awe today as Skylab tore itself apart in a spectac­ular display and spattered the Earth of a remote West Australia sheep sta­tion,” the 12 July article begins. “But Noondinia Station manager John Seil­er’s only complaint was: ‘It scared my horses.’”

When Skylab fell, Stan Thornton was a seventeen-year-old truck driver’s assistant living in Esperance, a remote coastal town set in the Bay of Isles, some 440 miles southeast of the capital Perth. He calls his resort hometown “a real paradise.”

That momentous evening in a region known for incredibly clear night skies, Stan traveled with his sister and some friends to a local lookout and watched in fascination as a profusion of bright, colorful man-made mete­ors ripped across the starry heavens, indicating the end of Skylab. The fol­lowing morning his mother Elsie “went out to [their] backyard, which had only been mowed and cleaned the previous day, and found charcoal piec­es spread all over the grass.” After Elsie had told her son about the burnt chunks of debris, he gathered up a few sizeable pieces and went to the local State Emergency Services (ses) office with his friend Ray Rose.

Local ses manager Phil Arlidge contacted a Perth radio station at 6:00 p. m., as he’d heard about a reward on offer for the first person to deliver an authenticated piece of Skylab to a newspaper office in San Francisco with­in seventy-two hours. The radio station was up to the challenge Arlidge’s call presented and confirmed with him that the San Francisco Examiner was indeed prepared to pay a ten-thousand-dollar reward—on the provi­so it reached their office in America within three days. Stan Thornton was about to be involved in the race of a lifetime.

48. Owen Garriott with an oxygen tank, one of the largest pieces of Skylab debris to be recovered, at the U. S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville al.

Things began to happen in a hurry, according to Stan. “The radio peo­ple were in Esperance with the help of a Swan Brewery Lear Jet within two hours. They had already contacted Qantas to arrange my ticket and pass­port, and the next day I flew out of Perth for the United States. In San Fran­cisco I was greeted at the airport by Qantas manager Gil Whelan, who had arranged a limousine, and I was taken straight to the downtown Examin­er office.”

Stan had delivered the pieces with twenty-four hours to spare and was pre­sented with his bounty. The newspaper’s reporters wanted to know every­thing about him and how he had found the Skylab debris. “There was a press conference at the Examiner office, and after this they locked the piec­es into a briefcase to be sent to NASA,” he recalled. He suddenly found him­self an instant celebrity and will never forget the experience. “For someone who had not been out of Esperance, it was pretty over the top,” he recently reflected. Within a couple of days, Ray Rose and Stan’s family had joined him in San Francisco to celebrate his good fortune. NASA examined the

charred fragments and Stan said they later told him the pieces were “some type of balsa wood from the insulation.”

Recently moving to a new home just south of Perth with his partner Ker­ry and their two children, his famous “dash for cash” still brings back vivid memories for the truck driver/laborer, and despite the passage of time Stan said he still has a degree of friendly notoriety among his family and friends. “The only part of my life that really changed over here,” he reflects with a shy smile, “was the word ‘Skylab’ was placed in front of my name. Even today I am actually still greeted as ‘Skylab.’”

People said a lot of nice things about Harlan and his team after it was over—including a headline in the Toronto Star, “How Charlie saved Cana­da from Skylab!” But the kudos he remembers most fondly came in a splash­down party skit put on by his neighbors. It featured a song called, “A Salute to Charles: He Couldn’t Keep It Up.” An excerpt (to the tune of “The Eyes of Texas Are upon You”):

The parts ofSkylab are upon you

All the live long day

The parts ofSkylab are upon you,

We hope they will decay;

Did you hear the Skylab coming,

Was it a big surprise?

Little ladies in Australia Are saying, “Damn your eyes! ”

Joe Kerwin recalled: “Here’s the story about my first brush with Skylab: One day in January 1966, Al Shepard said, ‘Kerwin and Michel, I want you to go out to the Douglas plant in California. Marshall’s working on an idea of using the inside of an s-ivb fuel tank as an experimental space station.’ So we called out to Ellington for a T-38 jet and flew to Huntington Beach. At the plant they made us put on bunny suits and slippers, then showed us to the end hatch of a freshly manufactured s-ivb lying on its side. The hatch had been removed, leaving an opening about forty inches in diame­ter into the fuel tank.

“We noted that the hatch was secured with seventy-two large bolts. ‘How will the astronauts remove it in flight?’ we asked. ‘We’ll give you a wrench,’ they replied. We climbed into the tank. It was big enough, all right—about thirty feet long and twenty feet in diameter. It was empty except for a long metal tube along one side—the ‘propellant utilization probe’—and a cou­ple of basketball-sized helium tanks. There was a faint chemical smell com­ing from the fiberglass, which covered the interior. It felt like standing in the bare shell of what was going to be a home someday after the builders had finished with it.

“‘What would we do in here,’ we asked. ‘You can fly around in your suits.’ Perhaps you’ll test a rocket backpack. (That was prophetic.) And Marshall was even considering a plan to pressurize the tank with oxygen, so we could remove our spacesuits. That was a start!

“Curt had a conversation with the project rep about what experiments could and would be performed. After our return to Houston, he wrote Al a memo which likened the experiment selection process to ‘filtering sand through chicken wire.’ We were both inexperienced, glad to have some­thing to do, and skeptical. I did not dream that seven years later I’d spend a month inside that tank, in space.”

8. Joe Kerwin tests the vestibular-function experiment during Skylab preparations.

From a crew perspective, the development of the Skylab space station and the training of the astronauts who would live there are in many ways the same story. Usability is a primary concern in developing new space hard­ware. To ensure usability engineers would turn to the people who would be using that hardware. Throughout the development of Skylab, crewmem­bers would be brought in to give input on hardware as it was being designed and tested. So in many cases, they learned to use the equipment by helping its designers make it usable. Crew involvement began early in the develop­ment with the first Apollo Applications Program assignments being made in the astronaut office years before the first moon landing.

“Of course, those were early days for Skylab, and we’d looked at a tiny sample of ‘bottom-up’ planning, while the ‘top-down’ planning was tak­ing place elsewhere and would answer a lot of our questions,” Kerwin said. “ ‘Elsewhere’ was largely at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Not long after our trip to Huntington Beach, I was invited to observe a meeting between a visiting delegation from Marshall and msc managers. The Marshall peo­ple gave a briefing on their plans for the ‘Apollo Applications Program,’ as it was then called. They sketched several missions on an ambitious sched­ule and asked for operations and training participation. The msc managers

basically said, ‘That’s great, but we’re busy going to the moon.’ So the team from Marshall left, saying over their shoulders, ‘This is going to happen!’ And so it did. It was still seven years from launch, but activity got started, and astronauts began to participate. We all had various assignments then, supporting Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab, and they changed fairly often, but Skylab began to take more and more of my time and attention.”

Kerwin recalls standing around with a group of colleagues one evening in 1967 in the mockup building at msfc. Someone had drawn with chalk a big circle on the floor, twenty feet in diameter, representing a cross section of the s-ivb tank. In the circle the astronauts worked with Marshall engi­neers on deciding how best to arrange the sleeping, eating, bathroom, and experiment quarters. “Al Bean was our leader at that time, and Paul Weitz, Owen Garriott, Ed Gibson, and a few other astronauts were there too, with several engineers,” Kerwin said. “We had a great time and began to devel­op a friendly relationship with that s-ivb fuel tank.”

In the earliest days of the Apollo Applications Program, the astronauts working with the program were a loosely defined group, with members rotat­ing in and out as they began and completed projects for other programs. While the official flight crew rosters were not announced to the public until 18 January 1972, the group from which the assignments were made had been assembled about two years earlier.

“Pete Conrad had just come off his Apollo 12 flight, which was Novem­ber ’69, so this had to be around January or February of 1970 when Slayton came into a pilots’ meeting on a Monday morning,” Kerwin said in a NASA oral history interview. “He had a sheet of paper in his hand. He said, ‘The following people are now formally assigned to crew training and mission development for the Skylab program.’ He read the names of fifteen people. He didn’t say who was prime, who was backup, who was what mission or anything else. All he said was that Conrad was going to be ‘Sky King’; he was in charge, and he would tell us all what he wanted us to do.”

The list included not only the nine astronauts that would make up the Skylab prime crews—Conrad, Kerwin, Weitz, Bean, Garriott, Lousma, Carr, Gibson, and Pogue—but also the six astronauts who would form the back­up crews. “We had no idea what that list meant,” Kerwin said. “There was a lot of speculation going on about who was going to be on what mission. There were fifteen of us, which meant that there were three prime crews, but only two backup crews. So somebody was going to have double duty as a backup crew it looked like unless the first prime was going to be the last backup. Deke didn’t say. Deke was not a man of many words. He didn’t say more than he thought was necessary at the time. It turned out, again in ret­rospect, that the way he had read that list was first prime, first backup, sec­ond prime, second backup, third prime, exactly in order.”

In April 1971, “Sky King” Pete Conrad sent a memo to all of his “Skytroops” specifying who would be responsible for what. He made the assignments based on experience and on equalizing both the training and the in-flight workload.

The commander (cdr) would have overall responsibility for the flight plan and training; he’d also be responsible for the Apollo space­craft systems and spacewalks. Estimated training hours: 1,411.

The science pilot (spt) would be responsible for medical and atm hardware and experiments and would be the second spacewalk crewman (in the end all three crewmen trained to make space­walks). Estimated training hours: 1,500.

The pilot (plt) would be responsible for airlock, mda (Multiple Dock­ing Adapter), and workshop systems and for the Earth Resources Experiment Package (erep) hardware and experiments. Esti­mated training hours: 1,420.

Each of the fifteen men on the prime, backup, and support crews was also assigned specific experiments and hardware. This was as much for the benefit of the rest of the training, engineering, and flight operations world as for the astronauts themselves; it meant other organizations knew which astronaut to call to get an office position on a procedure or a hardware change. To keep those calls from becoming too much of a burden, train­ing managers were assigned to the crews to help organize their schedules. “Bob Kohler was our crew training manager, an energetic but calm man able to steer us through the months of competition for our precious time,” Kerwin recalls. “I think we burned him out; he left NASA after Skylab and became an optometrist.”

The activity planning guide Kohler put together for the first crew for April and May of 1973 was typically busy. “We’d already done our multiple-day on-orbit simulations and were now concentrating on launch, rendezvous, and entry integrated sims (‘integrated’ meant the simulations included full Mission Control participation),” Kerwin said. “Saturdays were full, but we had most Sundays for family, unless we were traveling. There were more and more medical entries: exams, blood drawing, and final preflight data runs of the various experiments. Saturday, April 24 was listed as ‘Crew Por­trait Day—flight gear?—check with Conrad.’ It was all a blur. Sometimes things happened on schedule, but often not. I have a handwritten sheet of paper from March of 1972 that says the following:

3/6/72: Joe—miff Interface Test has slipped to Saturday, per Dick Truly. Bob Kohler.

Joe— it slipped back to Friday—keep checking! Richard.

Friday it is—as of 3/7/72. Kohler.

Would you believe Monday the 13th—Kohler—3/8.

3/10: cancelled until further notice. ”

After the first crew launched, Kohler put together the sl-2 Crew Train­ing Summary, showing exactly how many hours each of the three astro­nauts had actually spent in trainers and simulators during the two years of “official” crew training. Conrad had the least, at 2,151 hours, but he’d been on three spaceflights already. Kerwin was next with 2,437 hours, and Weitz had the most at 2,506 hours. Those times don’t count the many hours they spent flying, in meetings, reviewing the checklists, and trying to memo­rize all the switch locations and functions—the “homework” that had to be done to prepare for the simulator work. (“This would explain why none of your children recognized you after the flight,” joked Kerwin’s daughter, Sharon.)

Another of the activities on the busy astronauts’ schedule was space­craft checkout. “In early June of 1972, we strapped into our T-38s and hus­tled to St. Louis, to the McDonnell Aircraft plant, where the flight Dock­ing Adapter had been mated to the flight Airlock Module and was waiting for final checkout [McDonnell had merged with Douglas Aircraft in April of 1967],” Kerwin said. “The next morning, June 6, we briefed, put on our bunny suits and slippers, and entered the flight unit. Outside was a large team of McDonnell engineers led by the test director. Every switch throw

was in the test plan, and its effects would be watched and measured.

“The test was scheduled for twelve hours, but we accomplished it in half that time, flying from panel to panel and reporting over the intercom, ‘Rog­er. . . in work. . . complete.’ The spacecraft was clean, beautiful, and com­pletely functional. We felt that industry had finally learned how to build them and test them, and we partied that night at the motel with our con­tractor teammates.”

There seemed to be no limit to the tasks requiring the crews’ attention during the period of the station’s development and their training, every­thing from the overseeing the functional requirements for the triangle shoes to fighting with the Public Affairs Office over television shows on Skylab. (The astronauts weren’t opposed to doing them, but they’d had no training and there was no time in the flight plan for them.) And of course an astro­naut wouldn’t want to find himself heading out for a spacewalk if, while on the ground, he hadn’t customized the fit and comfort of his ucta—the urine collection and transfer assembly worn under the spacesuits. One could change the location of the Velcro, add a snap, wear a suitably perforated ath­letic supporter, and wear the ucta over or under the liquid cooling garment. Then there was the task of designing, and redesigning, the crew clothing to be worn in-flight.

“Testing and modifying the clothing was fun, although it dragged out a bit because clothing was a matter of both requirements and personal tastes,” Kerwin said. The following excerpts from a series of internal memos exem­plify this:

To: cb/All Skylab Astronauts From: cb /Alan Bean Subject: Skylab Clothing

a) Would it not be better to remove the knitted cuffs completely from our Skylab flight suits, since it looks like the temperature will be warmer most of the time than we would desire? [That was a prescient guess by AH]

b) There seems to be a difference in philosophy as to what constitutes proper uni­form for the “cool Beta Angle" and the “warm Beta Angle" on the Skylab mis­sion. [Beta Angle was essentially the angle between Skylab s orbit and the sun; it varied with the season and determined how much ofeach orbit was spent in sun­light.] For the warm case our only option is to take off some of the cool weather garments. Taking off the jacket is all right because we end up with a cool polo shirt. However, if we wanted to take offour pants, we end up standing around in our underwear. I don’t personally have anything against running around in my underwear, I do it all the time at home; but it would be better to at least have something more military in appearance planned for the warm case.. ..

To: cb/Skylab Astronauts

From: cb /Joe Kerwin

Subject: Al Bean’s Clothing Memo

a) The knit cuffs are there to retain the sleeves and trouser legs under zero-g. They can be snipped offby a crewman at his option. Recommend they be retained, as a better military appearance will result.

b) The “warm weather uniform" question was a good one. . . . Unfortunately, all the clothing will be up there before we know the answer. We looked, briefly, at bermuda shorts last fall, and nobody thought they were needed…. Alterna­tively, we can ask Crew Systems Division to engineer the longiesfor easy cutting off. Pete, you decide. (Incidentally, AdmiralZumwaltsays we can wear frayed pants in the wardroom now.)

c) Lip buttons will be providedfor complainers.

To: cb /Skylab Astronauts From: GeraldP. Carr

Subject: Skylab Clothing (Another shot across Medinaut’s bow) (that’s Kerwin)

a) Agree that the cuffs make the suit a bit too warm, but Joe’s answer is fine. We can snip them out if they get too warm.

b) . . . I have no objection to making my own Bermuda shorts out of a “cold case" set ofclothing

c) Disagree with Joe’s proposal for lip buttons. Zippers or Velcro are much more appropriate in the space biz.

Eventually, the Skylab astronauts all agreed on a clothing set. It con­tained cotton T-shirts for warm-weather wear and provisioned a change of underwear every two days and of outerwear once a week. The outerwear was made of a fireproof cloth, polybenzemidazole (called pbi; “We couldn’t pronounce it either,” quipped Kerwin) that only came in a golden brown. But it was comfortable. Rejected were the proposed small-bore fiberglass (called “beta cloth”) items, which itched.

On the lighter side, the crewmembers all got to pick the music for tape cas­settes they would carry with them on the mission. Each would have a small tape player, with Velcro on it to attach to a handy wall so that they could accompany their various experiment chores with music. For example, on the first crew, Conrad was a huge fan of country; his cassettes featured the Statler Brothers, Lynn Anderson, and other favorites. Kerwin liked classical; some of his favorites were Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. He also snuck in a few folk songs recorded by his brother, Ed. Weitz’s selections proved popular with his entire crew— Richard Rodgers’s Victory at Sea, the Mills Brothers, Glen Campbell, Andy Williams, and the Ink Spots. Selecting the music was one of those last-minute chores like completing the guest list for our launch,” Kerwin said. “It felt good; we were getting close.”

Of course, not all Skylab training took place in the relatively comfort­able confines of NASA centers and contractor locations. For example, as with Apollo, the Skylab crews went through training to prepare them for the contingency of an “off-nominal” reentry that could return them to Earth far from where they were supposed to land. “Although they never had to be used, the water egress, and desert and jungle training were lots of fun,” sec­ond crew science pilot Owen Garriott said.

The jungle training took place in Panama under the guidance of local Choco Indians. “They were expert trackers and, of course, knew the jungle as their own backyard,” Garriott said. “We were given an hour or so head start and told to evade capture and meet some twenty-four to forty-eight hours later on the beach some distance away.

“We all took off in groups of three—I was with Tony England and Karl Henize—at a fast trot, trying to get as far away as possible before darkness descended. The Chocos would set out after us and try to ‘grab our hats,’ equivalent to a capture.

“We succeeded almost too well,” Garriott said. “We didn’t get ‘captured,’ but we ran for so long that it got dark before we had properly made camp. We hurriedly gathered sticks to try to make a lean-to to be covered with a nylon sheet and to make a fire from small pieces of wood, but the every-day rains made a fire impossible. But darkness and more showers arrived before we had anything like a dry shelter. That night has been long remembered as the most uncomfortable, mosquito-plagued night of my life.

“Of course, we had to have a graduation celebration (after we were all finally recovered) on the banks of the Panama Canal,” he continued. “Scien­tist astronaut Story Musgrave, always the adventuresome explorer, thought it would be fun to swim across the canal—in pitch darkness. So he stripped down and paddled off into the night, with numerous warnings about avoid­ing the alligators. In an hour or so, back he came, none the worse for any animal encounters.”

Ed Gibson also had a memorable experience during his survival train­ing. Despite all the challenges of living in the wild, Gibson decided the big­gest threat to his own survival was one of his own teammates. “People ask me what is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done in the space program,” Gibson said. “Well, we went on a jungle survival trip, and I was out in the forest with Jack [Lousma] and Vance Brand. And after a couple of days or so, Jack was getting pretty hungry, and he kind of came up and started feel­ing my flesh. And I realized my objective for that whole time was to find enough food to feed him so I wouldn’t get eaten.”

We kidded about, we may have a dry workshop on orbit, but you’re going to
go through a wet workshop in training, that being underwater.

Jim Splawn

Joe Kerwin recalled: “From, I’d guess, 1968 onward, we traveled ever more frequently to Huntsville—for engineering tests and design reviews, but more and more to do eva training in the new, bigger, and better water tank. I remember going there with Paul Weitz. We’d fly up together in a T-38. You’d take off from Ellington, point the nose to a heading of just a lit­tle north of east, climb to 17,500 feet, and go direct. We could make it in an hour if all went well. When we landed at Redstone Arsenal [the Army base in Huntsville on which Marshall is located], there’d be a rental car wait­ing, and we’d hustle off to the Tourway Motel; $7.50 with black and white TV, $ 8.50 with color.

“Bright and early the next morning we’d go to the neutral-buoyancy tank. That was always a professionally run organization and always a pleas­ant experience. We’d suit up in the dressing room, brief the test, and make our way up to ‘poolside’ and into quite a crowd—with divers, suit techni­cians, mockup engineers, and test personnel. Hook up the suit to commu­nications, air, and cooling water. Down the steps into the water. Then float passively while the divers ‘weighted us out.’ They did this by placing lead weights into various pockets to counteract the buoyancy of the air-filled spacesuit, until we were neither floating to the surface nor sinking to the bottom. I recall gazing idly up through the bubble-filled water to the bright lights above and imagining that I was a medieval knight, being hoisted on to my charger before the tournament.

“Then the two of us, each accompanied by a safety diver (ready to assist us instantly in case we lost air or developed a leak) would move over to the Skylab mockup, laid out full size in the forty-foot-deep water and practice film retrieval from the atm. We’d evaluate handrails and footholds, open­ing mechanisms and locks, how to manage the umbilicals, which trailed out behind us as we worked. After two or three hours we’d quit, return to the locker room, and debrief. It was wonderful training. By the time we launched, each of us could don and zip his own suit unassisted and move around in it with the same familiarity as a football player in his helmet and pads.”

The idea of neutral-buoyancy simulation of the microgravity environ­ment had arisen at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston before it was developed at Marshall, though neither center would implement the concept until the mid-1960s. Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter had proposed using a water tank for astronaut training early in the space program, but manage­ment did not pursue the idea at the time.

A water tank was constructed for astronaut training at msc, but not ini­tially for neutral-buoyancy work. Rather it was used to prepare astronauts for the end of their missions. Since Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo flights all con­cluded with water landings, the msc tank was used to rehearse the procedures that would be performed in recovery of the astronaut and spacecraft.

When Ed White made the first U. S. spacewalk in 1965 on the Gemini 4 mis­sion, his experience seemed to belie the need for intense training; for White, the worst part of the spacewalk was that it had to end. When Gene Cernan made the second American spacewalk the following year, however, his expe­rience was quite different. He found it difficult to maneuver, his faceplate

9- Astronauts practice for spacewalks in the neutral-buoyancy tank.

fogged up, his pulse rate soared, and he got overheated. It was obvious that changes were needed in spacewalking technology and procedures, and that included training. The idea of neutral-buoyancy training was revisited and implemented in time to prepare Buzz Aldrin for his Gemini 12 spacewalk, five months after Cernan’s. With the changes that had been made and the intervening experience, things went far more smoothly for Aldrin’s attempt on the final Gemini flight. Underwater training continued during the Apol­lo program; spacesuits weighted past the point of neutral buoyancy allowed astronauts to simulate the one-sixth gravity of the lunar surface.

At Marshall neutral buoyancy development came about from a grass­roots initiative, at first as almost a hobby among some of the center’s young engineers in the mid-1960s. “Some of us young guys got to talking about, we really are going to be in space, and if you’re in space, you’re going to need to do work,” said Jim Splawn, who was the manager of space simulation at the Process Engineering Laboratory at Marshall. “And if you do work, how do you keep up with your tools? How do you train? So that started the discussion about how are you going to practice. How are you going to simulate the weightlessness of space? And we talked and talked for weeks, I guess, about that.

“And so one guy said, ‘Hey, have you ever watched your wife in the swim­ming pool?’ And we all giggled and said, ‘Yeah, you bet, we watch our wives and other wives too.’

“But he said, ‘No, no I’m serious. Have you ever looked at her hair while she’s underwater, how it floats?’ And that started a whole ’nother discussion, and so we said, ‘Well, why does it do that? It’s sort of neutrally buoyant—it doesn’t sink; it doesn’t necessarily float to the surface.’ So then we started talking about how we could do that. We started coming up with the idea then of going underwater. That was the first concept that we had, the first discussion about going underwater.”

The group thought the idea had potential and decided to use some of their free time to pursue it, and Marshall’s first neutral-buoyancy simula­tor was born. Of course official facilities and equipment require funding, so the first phases of their research relied on using whatever they had available. The first exercises were done in an abandoned explosive-forming pit. The pit had been used to create the rounded ends of Saturn I fuel tanks and was about six feet in diameter and about six feet deep. Initial dives were done in swimsuits until the group felt like they needed more duration underwater, at which point they began using scuba gear.

Their experiment was showing promise, and they were ready to graduate out of the six-foot-diameter tank. Once again, though, their almost non­existent budget forced them to make use of what was on hand, which was once again leftover Saturn hardware. The tank was based around an inter­stage for a Saturn rocket, the short, hollow cylinder that connects two boost­er stages together. “It was like a ring, probably twelve-feet vertical dimen­sion,” Splawn said. “So we had a backhoe, and dug a hole in the ground, and positioned the interstage and backfilled the dirt around it. And, guess what, we had a swimming pool now made out of excess Saturn hardware to become our next simulator for underwater work.”

The extra volume meant that they could take the next step in their under­water evaluation. Just as they had moved from swim trunks to scuba gear in the first tank, the second allowed them to move on to pressure suits, simu­lating the gear that astronauts would be wearing in orbital spacewalks.

“We had to go to Houston to try and get pressure suits,” Jim Splawn said. “Pressure suits in the mid – to late – 60s were few in number and of great demand and expensive and were very, very well protected by the Houston suit techs. So we took an alternate route; we contacted the Navy, and a cou­ple of us went to San Diego one Friday, worked with the Navy on Saturday, and they put us in high-altitude flying suits, and then they had huge over­size suitcases that they put these high-altitude pressure suits in, complete with gloves, helmet, everything, there. They trained us in a large swimming pool that they had; in fact, we had to jump off of diving boards into the water, and we took the helmets off, and we had to learn how to take a hoo­kah [breathing apparatus] for underwater diving, so they taught us how to get the helmet off and take the hookah and still survive. So anyway, they taught us how to do that, so then we flew home on Sunday afternoon; we brought back four pressure suits, just on commercial air. So that’s where we got our first pressure suits.”

The “hookah” is a rubber full-head covering that is used underwater, similar to scuba. Instead of coming from a tank, air is pumped down from the surface by a hose to maintain a certain airflow into the rubber “helmet,” regardless of the depth of the diver. It is particularly useful in tanks like Mar­shall’s neutral-buoyancy trainer because it allows voice communications to the surface. However, one must be careful to not turn upside down, as air goes out and water comes in.

Up until this point, Splawn said, Marshall and msc had not had any dis­cussions about the work each was doing on neutral buoyancy. “We had abso­lutely no interaction at all,” Splawn said. “We knew nothing at all about Houston and the type of simulations or training or anything else that they were doing. I really don’t know the timing between what Houston did and what we did. I just don’t have any data point there at all. Once it became known what we had and what we had done, there was competition, and some pretty heated discussions between Houston and us. But we ended up doing the crew training for Skylab.”

In fact the first astronauts came to check out the work when the team was still using the second tank. Alan Bean, at the time an unflown rookie, was one of the first astronauts to perform a pressure-suited dive in the interstage tank. It was also during the experimentation with the second tank that the team decided they could let the Marshall powers that be in on their work. Von Braun himself made a dive in a pressure suit to evaluate the potential of neutral-buoyancy simulation.

Bob Schwinghamer, who was the head of the Marshall materials lab,

recalled a nerve-wracking incident that occurred during one of Bean’s ear­ly visits. “I was safety diving, and I was floating around in front of him. He was in there unscrewing those bolts off of that hatch cover. And all at once, it said, ‘poof,’ and a big bubble came out from under his right arm, a stream of bubbles. I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to drown this astro­naut.’” Schwinghamer said he attempted to cover the hole in Bean’s suit, but he could see the suit collapsing—first near Bean’s feet, then up to his knees, then his thighs. Since he didn’t have a communications system at that time, Schwinghamer left Bean and surfaced, and told the operators to give him more air.

“He never lost his cool,” Schwinghamer recalled. “By then, he wasn’t neu­trally buoyant anymore; he was about sixty pounds too heavy. So he walked across [the tank], and he just climbed up the ladder and got out. That’s all there was. And I said, ‘Oh my goodness, what if we had drowned an astro­naut?’ But he was just cool.”

Working with pressure suits complicated the situation. The pressure suits, representing spacesuits, were basically balloons containing divers. That meant the air caused the suits to tend to float. In order to make the suits neutral­ly buoyant, weight had to be added to balance out the effect of the air. This had to be done very carefully. Putting too much weight in one area would cause that area to sink more than the rest of the body, invalidating the sim­ulation of weightlessness.

“After many, many stop-and-go kind of activities, we settled in on a low – profile harness of small pockets of lead strips, so that we could move the lead about depending on the mass of the human body that’s inside the suit and consequently what kind of volume of air you had inside that suit,” Splawn said. “We could move the lead weights around until we could put the test subject or flight crewman into any position underwater and turn him loose, and he would stay there.

“We started offjust in a room, so in order to get some data points, we put the guy in the pressure suit and then lay him flat on the floor and tried to get him to lift his arms—Is the weight distributed?—and lift his legs—Is the weight sort of distributed correctly?” Splawn said. “And so we said, ‘ok, get up,’ and he couldn’t get up, he had so much weight on him. That was in the very early days.” Typically, he said, about seventy to eighty pounds of lead weights were needed to achieve neutral buoyancy. To make sure the weighted,

pressured-suited divers didn’t encounter any problems, each one was accom­panied by two safety divers who could help out in an emergency.

Once the team had enough experience in the interstage tank, they were confident that neutral buoyancy could be used for weightlessness simula­tion. They were ready to move on to the next step. “From that we gradu­ated to what we called the big tank,” Splawn said. “The big tank is seven­ty-five feet diameter; it’s forty feet deep; 1.3 million gallons of water as best I remember. It was complete with underwater lighting, underwater audio system, umbilicals that would be very much like the flight crew would use to do an eva on orbit.”

This tank, Marshall’s Neutral Buoyancy Simulator, was designed to take the work to the next level. Unlike previous facilities, which were experiments designed to evaluate the efficacy of neutral buoyancy as a microgravity ana­log, the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator was a working facility. The theory had been proven and now was being put into practice. The facility was designed to be large enough to submerge mock-ups of spacecraft in order to test how easily they could be operated in a weightless environment.

“We sort of had the vision of building a facility large enough to accom­modate some pretty large mock-ups of hardware, and it really proved out to be very, very beneficial,” Splawn said. “Because once we had the difficulty at the launch of the Skylab itself headed towards orbit, it really proved its worth because of all the hardware we had to assemble underwater.”

The origin of the “big tank” was rather unconventional. In order to has­ten the process of building the tank, Marshall leadership found a way to circumvent the bureaucratic requirements of creating a new facility. “The facility was not a ‘c of F,’ or construction of facilities type project,” Splawn explained. “There is a small tool tag that is on the side of the tank, and it has a number stamped on that tag, and so that designates the seventy-five – foot diameter tank as a portable tool. There were a lot of eyebrows raised at that.” While the tank was not technically secured into place, saying it was portable was somewhat of a stretch.

“I don’t really remember how that happened,” Splawn said. “I know there was great interest in having a facility, and we thought we had the right idea of how to simulate weightlessness and how to train. We needed a facility, and the schedule of when we needed it just could not be supported through the official construction of facilities kind of red tape that you had to go through to get a facility approved, and then all of that kind of business that occurs to acquire a facility. So that’s why we went this alternate route.”

As a result of the way the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator was built, many people elsewhere in the agency did not know what Marshall was doing until it had been done (as was the case with associate administrator George Muel­ler, who was not aware of the tank until his “wet workshop” dive).

“The tank was built in-house,” Splawn said. “We used the construction crew out of a test lab because they were equipped and they were accustomed to doing construction work. So the steel segments of the tank, of course, were rolled steel. They were shipped in, and then the government employ­ees welded the tanks together, and we installed all the systems, electronic, mechanical, filtration, all of that was worked internally.”

The tank attracted some unusual visitors, Splawn recalled: “It was very interesting to have some of the caliber people come through our area that came through. Of course, starting with von Braun—back when we had just first started the thinking and the dream of going underwater to do evaluations in a weightless environment, we found out that von Braun was a scuba diver. So once we had been through the early stages and thought we could sort of reveal our thoughts a little bit, we contacted his secretary, Bonnie, and told her we’d like to have Dr. von Braun come and see what we were doing.

“I guess the first time he ever knew anything about it, we were on the twenty-foot tank. He didn’t know about it up until about then. Because us bunch of young guys, what we would do is work our regular kind of work through the day, and then we would go out in the late evenings and play, and I say ‘play’ in quotes. But we would try to figure out just exactly what we were trying to do. We didn’t know if we had a cat in the bag or not. But we finally revealed the cat to Dr. von Braun and got him to come down, and he thought it was wonderful. He said, ‘Ja, ja, keep going, keep going.’

“I remember one day that von Braun had been to the Cape for a launch, and we got a call from his secretary again. Bonnie said, ‘Dr. von Braun has just called me from the Cape, and he is bringing a guest on the NASA air­craft back with him from the Cape to Huntsville, and they want to go to the neutral-buoyancy facility this afternoon, and this guy’s name is Jacques Cousteau, and can you accommodate him?’ And I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, we sure can.’

“So von Braun dressed out in swim trunks, and Jacques Cousteau dressed

out in swim trunks, and they went for a dive in scuba gear, and von Braun showed Jacques Cousteau some of the things that we were doing underwater, put him through a few paces with some of the hardware that we had mount­ed in the tank at that point in time. So it was sort of interesting.”

As an additional safety precaution, the Marshall facility also included a decompression chamber, which could be used if a diver surfaced too quick­ly. The medical term is “dysbarism”—Greek for “pressure sickness” — but to divers it’s simply the “bends.” Bends has affected divers since humans began to dive for pearls centuries ago. It doesn’t just happen underwater; workers building the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge a hundred feet beneath the surface of the East River developed the strange pains and dis­orientation of “caisson disease.” The doctor hired by the company to look into the problem noted with interest that the pains often went away when the men went back down to the diggings. But it was another twenty years before other doctors figured out what was happening.

When a diver descends in water, the water’s weight increases the pres­sure against the body; at thirty-three feet it’s double the pressure at the sur­face. In order to breathe, the pressure of the air the diver breathes also must increase. And that pressure drives nitrogen into the lungs, blood, and tis­sues. That’s not normally a problem; nitrogen is inert except at very high pressures, when it exerts a narcotic effect.

But if a diver ascends rapidly to the surface, the pressure suddenly dimin­ishes. Then the absorbed nitrogen reverses course and comes out of the tis­sues. The diver is able to breathe some of it out, but if the pressure was high, some of it forms bubbles in the blood and tissues, and these can have dan­gerous effects—bubbles compressing nerves in the joints cause bends, bub­bles blocking capillaries in the lungs cause chokes, bubbles in the blood ves­sels of the brain can mimic a stroke. To prevent these things, it’s essential to reduce the pressure on the body slowly enough to allow for “breathing out” the nitrogen without letting bubbles form.

The dives in Marshall’s tank never caused the astronauts to have any prob­lems. However, the recompression chamber was used once, Splawn said, for a Tennessee Valley Authority utility diver in the area who had been doing work underwater and surfaced too quickly and was rushed to Marshall. Splawn said that, while it was too late to prevent lasting harm, the cham­ber may have saved his life.

Concerns over rapid decompression did affect the crews training in the tank in one way, though. “In our dives, we never went deep enough for long enough that we couldn’t safely return to the surface of the tank in a hurry,” Kerwin said. “But climbing into the cockpit of a T-38 and flying home at reduced cabin pressure was another story. Flying after diving sets pilots up for bends. So we did a study, and came up with rules for how long a diver had to loiter on the surface before launching for home. It varied from a few hours after one dive to an overnight stay after two days’ work underwater.”

Until Skylab, crewmen had worn biomedical sensors pretty much all the time during flight. On the early Mercury and Gemini flights, when ground sta­tions in the Manned Spaceflight Network (known by the time of Skylab as the Spacecraft Tracking and Data Network) were scattered around the world, the flight surgeon attached to each station crew would study those heartbeat and respiration traces intently as the spacecraft passed overhead, looking for signs of stress. Heart rates during spacewalks were useful as they were a pret­ty good indication of crew workload and oxygen consumption.

As the NASA doctors looked at the heart rates of astronauts under the stresses of launch acceleration, weightlessness, spacewalks, and just hang­ing around, they inevitably witnessed the occasional irregularity — usually a premature beat or a run of two or three of them. They came to accept these as within the limits of normal. But the arrhythmias they saw in the Apollo 15 crew on the way back from the moon were more marked and a cause of considerable anxiety on the ground. Future Apollo flights carried medica­tions for such arrhythmias.

With this background and the greatly increased duration of the planned Skylab flights, a medical desire for as much data as possible remained, as exemplified by the following excerpts from NASA memos:

To: EA/Manager, Apollo Applications Program October 3,1968 From: CA/Director of Flight Crew Operations [Deke Slayton]

Subject: Bioinstrumentation for Apollo Applications Program (aap) Missions

The long duration, large volume and required crew mobility of AAP core missions will require different guidelines for the transmission ofbiomedical data. Contin­uous-wear instrumentation will not be feasible. Numerous medical experiments will be performed which require instrumentation, and which will give medical monitors the information needed to assess crew status.

Therefore, the following guidelines are recommended: Bioinstrumentation will be worn for launch, entry, eva and medical experiments. It will not be worn at other times unless requiredfor diagnostic purposes. . . .

To: CA/Director of Flight Crew Operations Oct 16, ip68 From: DA/Deputy Director of Medical Research and Operations Subject: Bioinstrumentation Requirements in the Apollo Applications Program

. . . I feel it is inappropriate for you to propose guidelines for the acquisition of biomedical data without full coordination of these guidelines with our Direc­torate. The following comments regarding your memorandum are offered in a constructive vein in the hope that you may be persuaded to address future rec­ommendations to this Directorate….

It is our present hope that the principles enunciated in your two proposed guide­lines can be fully satisfied but we do not have sufficient technical or operation­al information to accept these guidelines as program constraints at the present time.

The doctors had a point; it was pretty early in the program. Deke withdrew the memo, and the problems were worked out amicably. Not without a glitch or two along the way, however.

To: cb/Pete Conrad From: CB /Joe Kerwin

Subject: Medical Operations Requirements

DA memo of5-15-70 (on file) presents instrumentation requirements and guide­lines for Skylab…. Wearing of bio-harness during sleep is a new requirement, is not feasible or useful, and should be discouraged!

At about this time, the question of dental treatment on Skylab surfaced. The astronauts’ dentist, Dr. Bill Frome, recommended putting a dental kit onboard and training two men on each crew to use it, in light of his experience with astronaut patients. He argued that palliative treatment, even up to extracting an abscessed and painful tooth, was preferable to terminating a mission. Deke asked Kerwin to review it.

A one percent chance ofa serious dental problem on a 28-day mission is not sur­prising. That’s (28x 3 =) 84 man-days, which is onepercent of 8,400 man-days or 23 man-years. If we have 46 astronauts, one ofthem will need emergency den­tal care every six months — which matches Dr. Frome’s experience.

I have asked Dr. Frome to set up his proposed 1.5-day training program and run me through it as a guinea pig….

I believe that the right thing to do is to let them put the hardware on board, agree to train one of three crewmen (which cuts the risk but does not eliminate it) and reevaluate after the first mission.

“Management decided to go ahead and train two members of each crew, and we had a ball,” Kerwin said. “We traveled with Dr. Frome to San Anto­nio, to the U. S. Air Force Dental Clinic at Brooks afb. Bill and the den­tal staff had recruited a number of volunteers who needed to have a tooth extracted. (One of the first lessons was that you didn’t pull teeth, you extract­ed them.) So there we were, six of us, wielding syringes filled with xylocaine and wicked-looking dental forceps (and much more nervous than the patients were), getting those jaws numb and those molars out under the watchful eye of our dentist instructors.

“Paul Weitz drew a retired Air Force general. My patient’s molar broke in two during the procedure and had to come out in pieces. We were very glad when it was over. But I believe we could have done the deed in flight had we needed to. (We didn’t, and no dental emergencies arose during any mission.)

The dental kit became part of a medical kit for taking care of illness and injury aboard the Skylab space station. It was called the In-Flight Medical Support System. In retrospect, it looks like supplies for a pretty modest doc­tor’s office, but at the time it was quite a leap forward. It contained minor surgical instruments, a laryngoscope and tracheostomy kit, intravenous fluids, and lots of medications including injectables. Diagnostic equipment included equipment to make and examine blood smears and do cultures and antibiotic sensitivity tests on various body fluids. Kerwin, the doctor of the group who was quite familiar with the tools, was very much in favor of car­rying the equipment to Skylab. Some of the others, familiar with medical equipment primarily from being on the receiving end, were less so.

To: CA/Donald K. Slayton

From: CB/Joseph P. Kerwin

Subject: In-Flight Medical Support System (imss)

It’s clear from glancing through the list that this is mostly a doctor’s bag, not a first-aid kit. The document doesn’t say that, and it even proposes to train pilots to use all the equipment, which I find unrealistic. (Medschool was easy, but not that easy!) It’s also apparent that to justify the more elaborate equipment opera­tionally —from the standpoint of mission success— is darn near impossible. Major medical catastrophes just aren’t that much more likely to happen in eight weeks than they were in two. Minor illnesses are, but not heart attacks, etc… .

But that’s not the only point of view. Let me give, from my point of view, some reasons for carrying a doctor’s bag:

1. Up to now, the medical program has been unbalanced in the direction of pure research instead of treating illness and injury in space. This is a capa­bility we don’t need today, but we certainly will need it in space station times —for economic reasons at the least. It seems prudent to start using Skylab to develop equipment andprocedures to meet this need, just as we used Gemini to develop a rendezvous capability.

2. It’s true that a doctor isn’t mandatory on any Skylab flight. But if you do happen to have one along, you ought to allow him to do a little goodfor the program in his spare time by providing him with some of the tools of his trade. He could do an occasional physical exam on his buddies, and try out the simple laboratory tests on himself, by way of proving that they work. It would sure beat looking out the window.

In retrospect Kerwin found that last statement to be really dumb — noth­ing in Skylab beat looking out the window. But the In-Flight Medical Sup­port System was approved, and the same two crewmen who wielded the dental forceps were taught to use an otoscope and an ophthalmoscope, pal­pate and percuss, and report their findings to a doctor in Mission Control. “It was a wild experience for the pilots and a valuable refresher for me,” Ker­win said. “We were even taken to the trauma unit at Ben Taub Hospital in

Houston on a Friday night, where under the skilled tutelage of Dr. Pedro Rubio, the chief resident, we watched one of the best emergency medicine teams in America deal with life-threatening trauma and illness.”

Trauma training at Ben Taub Hospital proved a memorable experience for the astronauts. It was always scheduled on a Friday or Saturday evening when the probability of gunshot or knife wounds was apparently the high­est. Sure enough the crew saw their share but usually kept their distance from the emergency team engaged in what was a life-or-death procedure for some incoming patients. More relevant to their Skylab situation, they also had personal discussion and training with the experts in ear, nose, and throat; gastrointestinal tract; and eye and other specialties about how to handle in-flight emergencies. Even in these early days, they could expect to have experts in prompt voice contact and even with TV downlink to pro­vide images to the ground. So they ended up with reasonable confidence that most emergencies could be handled if they should arise.

The astronauts were also introduced to a fine team of consultants from the Houston medical community—specialists who would be on call dur­ing all the Skylab missions to advise the NASA flight surgeons should trou­ble arise in flight. Drs. Page Nelson, Hiram Warshaw, Everett Price, Kamal Sheena, and Jules Borger gave freely of their time and talent. Knowing they were there provided the crew with a feeling of security.

One of the best things to come out of the In-Flight Medical Support System, Kerwin said, was the checklist. Stimulated by the need to explain medical equipment and procedures to a bunch of pilots, the medical team linked up with the training team to produce a fine, very graphic, and explic­it manual showing with simple line drawings what everything looked like and what to do.

“We had one more treat in store,” Kerwin said. “Drunk with enthusiasm by the opportunity to experiment in space, the medical research team pushed for one final capability—to take and return blood samples. Not a big deal, you say; but it was, first because it had never been done before and second because it posed some hardware challenges in weightlessness.”

It was done. The crews agreed to give blood weekly; one member of each crew was trained to be the “vampire”; and an assortment of air-evacuat­ed tubes, a centrifuge to separate cells from plasma, and arrangements to freeze and return the samples were designed and flown. It all worked quite well. “I drew my own blood, not wanting to put Pete or Paul to the trouble of learning (and perhaps forgetting) how,” Kerwin said. “Pete hated being stuck and on the ground tended to become light-headed. But the blood couldn’t rush from your head in zero-G, so Pete was fine. He just looked away from the needle.”

The first crew, by benefit of being first and of having the physician of the group among its number, bore much of the hard work in planning for crew participation in the medical experiments (with a lot of help from Bill Thorn­ton, also a medical doctor and a Skylab guinea pig himself during simula­tions) . Therefore the training activity for the second and third crews fol­lowed much the same protocol as developed for the first flight team.

“Of course there were always some personal differences in practice,” Gar – riott said. “Whereas the first mission would have a doctor on board who knew the medical objectives and protocol in detail, as he had helped devise them, plus the fact that some of his other crewmembers were apparently not too enthusiastic about some of the procedures (e. g., blood draws), the sec­ond flight team all started substantially at the same level in terms of med­ical experience.”

Garriott described his crew with respect to the medical procedures as being all novices but with a keen interest in the protocol and personal results. No deference was provided to the scientist astronaut in this area, he said; everyone wanted to know about and participate in all that they could. They were all trained to draw blood and planned to do it in flight. They started with practice puncturing the skins of oranges or grapefruit with a hypoder­mic needle to simulate that of a human arm. Next came human volunteers, usually from life-science workers in the msc laboratories. As it turns out, there were more female than male volunteers (“Perhaps tougher constitu­tion, or more highly motivated?” Garriott remarked), and this often made the task more difficult—perhaps having less visible and accessible veins to attack. But all three of the crewmen successfully accomplished the blood draws a number of times, finally even drawing their fellow crewmen’s blood at least once. “It was good practice and we actually enjoyed the training,” Garriott said.

During flight all three crewmembers put their training into practice. Gar­riott routinely drew the blood of Bean and Lousma, while one or the oth­er would draw his blood on the desired schedule, every week or so. On one occasion in the middle of the crew’s two-month stay, the ground asked to have a video of the actual procedure. Lousma was scheduled to draw Gar – riott’s blood.

“We got all the cameras placed properly and the video recorder running for later dump to the ground,” Garriott said. “With all the paraphernalia in place, I bared my left arm, got the tourniquet tight, Jack made an excellent ‘stick,’ and the blood flowed freely just as desired. When finished, we with­drew the needle and blood promptly squirted all over the place! I had for­gotten to remove the tourniquet first and all the blood pressure trapped in the lower part of the arm took the path of least resistance into space. So we cleaned up the mess I had made, rewound the tape recorder and did it all over again using my right arm. The physicians on the ground seemed hap­py with the demonstration.”

The book that follows is a riveting, insightful account of the Skylab mis­sions flown by the United States in 1973 and 1974. It is also simply a great yarn. Skylab began as an underdog, was nearly knocked out several times, staggered back to its feet, and fought on against overwhelming odds until it became a champion. In a lot of ways, it was the Rocky of space, and just like the story in that great film, it is an inspiration for all who know it. The difference is the remarkable saga of Skylab is all true.

For those of us who are old hands at NASA and in the space business, it is sometimes easy to forget what a great adventure it was and still is. Ulti­mately when all the layered explanations of why we go into space are peeled away, adventure remains at its core. But adventure aside, there are many quite practical reasons to go off our home planet. For one, the solar system is awash in energy resources such as microwaves and solar energy, and even the helium-3 isotopes that cover our moon seem perfect for futuristic fusion reactors. For another, the absence of gravity might ultimately produce won­derful new products, even life-saving medicines. And where else but space can we go to get above our light and radio-wave-polluted Earth and gain unobstructed views of our sun, the solar system, and the universe? Space is a scientific gold mine, and I believe some day it will be an economic one as well. But to be successful in the cosmos, we have to first figure out how to get there and stay. In other words, we have to learn to homestead space. This book tells how we first began to understand how to do that, through the program known as Skylab. Although often neglected by spaceflight historians, Skylab provided the key to all human space activities that fol­lowed. Quite simply, it was the series of flights that proved to the world that humans could live and work for long periods in space.

I grew up in the golden era of science fiction where all the spacemen (and spacewomen, though often scantily clad) were stalwart and brave. They were sort of ingenious, techno-savvy Davy and Polly Crocketts conquer­ing the wild frontier while riding rockets. The robots in those tales were usually built only to help their humans through some difficulty (“Danger, Will Robinson!”), and the mightiest computer was the one every human had between his ears. If people were to explore space, they’d just have to go there themselves and have a look around. There was no other way. Not many of my favorite old-time writers guessed that by the time we were actu­ally able to go into space, there would be a revolution in robotics combined with minimizing the size and maximizing the capabilities of computers. The reality of early spaceflight (and that’s where we are now—very, very early) is that it is far easier, cheaper, and faster to send a robot than a human into space to explore and send back information on anything we please. But does that satisfy us? No indeed, and it shouldn’t. For instance, we are also perfectly capable of purchasing a video travelogue of Paris. From the com­fort of our living rooms, we can see the traffic passing beneath the Arc de Triomphe and the strollers along the Champs Elysees. But can we experi­ence Paris with a video? No. We can only get a sense of what it is like. We can’t look around a corner to see where some interesting alley might lead, or sit on a park bench and smell the aroma of fresh bread, or discover a new artist in the Louvre. It is the same for space. Ultimately to experience it, to gain from it all the riches it holds, the old sci-fi writers were correct. We humans must climb into pressurized containers and boldly rocket into the cosmic vacuum and there wrest from it with our own two hands all that it holds. In other words we still need spacefaring Meriwether Lewises and William Clarks off on bold adventures while accomplishing important sci­entific and economic work for the nation. The men and women who built and operated Skylab understood this and were determined to make such space accomplishments possible.

Skylab was designed to gain scientific knowledge in Earth orbit by utiliz­ing equipment originally designed to carry men to the moon and back. It could be fairly said that Skylab was built from the spare parts of the Apollo program. Accordingly it was often neglected while the moon shots got all the energy and money, but eventually its time in the sun came, and what a grand time it was! Looking back now it’s astonishing what we learned

from it. During its three crewed missions, a trove of scientific knowledge was harvested that is yet unmatched by any other space facility, including the International Space Station. Skylab’s huge volume, its well-constructed and considered scientific packages, its ability to generate more than ade­quate electrical power (after some emergency repairs!), and its focused crews made it, in my opinion, the finest comprehensive science and technological platform any country has ever sent into space. But I have to confess what I really, really like about Skylab is this: When it got into trouble, spacemen armed with wrenches, screwdrivers, and tin snips were sent up to fix it. No robots, no computers, no remotely controlled manipulating arms, just guys in suits carrying tools. The old sci-fi writers would have loved it!

Of course, with any space mission there is far more to the story than the spacecraft itself, or the crews. There must first be the visionaries who conceive the mission, then the politicians who must back it, followed by the armies of engineers, managers, accountants, and myriad other profes­sionals who make it all work on the ground before the first rocket engine is lit on the pad. As this book informs us, one of Skylab’s visionaries was a favorite of mine, none other than Dr. Wernher von Braun. In my mem­oir, Rocket Boys/October Sky, I told how when I was a teenager, more than anything in the world, I wanted to work for Dr. von Braun. In fact his bril­liance was the distant, flickering flame for all the rocket boys and girls of that era and the reason a lot of us became engineers and scientists. Part of the fun of this book is reading how Dr. von Braun just went ahead and did things, including building the giant Neutral Buoyancy Simulator (nbs) at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The nbs was a big tank of water that allowed astronauts and engineers to simulate the weight­less conditions of space. I am very appreciative that Dr. von Braun cut a few bureaucratic corners and built the nbs. Not only did his tank ultimately save Skylab, it also saved me when I suffered a bout of decompression sick­ness and had to be treated in its chamber. It was a great facility, although now sadly abandoned and fallen into disrepair. People ask me these days if I miss working for NASA. I do, sometimes, but mostly because I can’t dive in the grand old nbs.

Although Skylab was accomplished before I became a NASA engineer, I did work on similar space missions, including training astronauts to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. That was an intricate, difficult mission but we

knew we could do it because we had the example of Skylab’s repair. I also worked on Spacelab, which was a science laboratory carried in the Space Shuttle’s cargo bay. The Spacelab program, which proved to be a wonderful set of science missions, was profoundly affected by Skylab. Many times while working on a Spacelab situation, I heard, “Well, when I worked on Skylab, something like this happened and we. . .” Invariably the information given solved the problem we were working. One might suspect we Spacelabbers resented help from the old Skylab hands but not so. When there’s work to be done in the space business, listening to veterans who’ve already done it is a smart thing to do. I’m proud to say that’s what we did, at least on Spacelab and the Hubble Space Telescope repair missions.

I count as a good friend one of the authors of this book, astronaut Owen Garriott. With our friends and family, he and I have explored the Galapa­gos Islands and also hunted in Montana for dinosaur bones. It is fascinat­ing to read this book and see a somewhat younger Owen aboard Skylab. Actually, from this account, he hasn’t changed much. He’s still a detailed observer of his surroundings and an amazing fount of scientific knowledge. He is also quite competitive and intensely focused. In other words he’s chal­lenging to be around and, therefore, the kind of friend we should all culti­vate. Over the years I’ve also met all the other astronauts who flew on Sky­lab, plus backup Rusty Schweickart and Capcom (and future first Shuttle pilot) Bob Crippen. When October Sky the movie came out, I invited Pete Conrad to attend. I was gratified when he showed up for the premiere, and it didn’t take long before we were deep in conversation, mostly about Sky – lab and our mutual experiences in the nbs. While my agent kept tugging at my elbow (“Homer, Steven Spielberg wants to say hello!”), I kept fending him off. Finally, I turned and barked, “Look, don’t you understand? I’m talking to Pete Conrad!" My agent slunk off, and Pete and I finished our talk, one I still savor. I also once had Dr. Joe Kerwin turn up in one of my book-signing lines. I was astonished, though supremely pleased to see him there. I knew then I’d written a pretty good book.

The scientific and technological brilliance and love of adventure of all the Skylab astronauts were remarkable. This was also true of nearly all the people who worked on Skylab, such as Chuck Lewis, my former (and great, not to mention indulgent) boss at NASA, and Bob Schwinghamer who let me work in the nbs. Perhaps it was luck, or good fortune, but somehow the program got the people it needed and deserved. As a result, nearly every American-crewed mission since Skylab has been profoundly affected by the experiences gained by its nine crewmembers and the thousands of men and women who conceived, promoted, designed, constructed, rescued, and then made operational that magnificent facility. Just as the title of this book indi­cates, Skylab ultimately taught us how to make space our home. For a facil­ity partially built from spare parts, I think that’s prodigious!

The astronauts assigned to the flight crews were not the only ones having to train for the mission. In February 1972, over a year before the launch of the Skylab station, the Mission Control Center team began running their first simulations for the missions.

The long-duration aspect of the Skylab program presented new chal­lenges for the mcc team that would require advance preparation. On the ground every moment that the crews were in space, a team of people would be supporting them around the clock in Mission Control. In fact the control team would be operating Skylab even when the astronauts were not aboard it. And for the Mission Control team as much as for the astronauts, Skylab was a new spacecraft, completely unlike anything flown before, with its own unique parameters and requirements. In addition, the work the crews would be doing on Skylab would be unlike anything done in space before, so new procedures would have to be learned in order to support them.

According to Phil Shaffer, the lead flight director, operations control for Skylab was a mixture of old and new for the flight directors, with some elements being very similar to those in Apollo, and others being different from anything flown before. “The part that is similar to prior programs is that there was a trajectory function and there were the systems functions,” Shaffer said. “There was an electrical guy, a communications guy, there was an environmental guy, you know, each with their support staff and in that sense was all very similar. The manning level or the expertise requirement was the same as if we were doing a lunar mission.

“The teams, if you stood away a little ways, looked like Apollo teams or Gemini teams in the way they were structured because there was a flight director who literally was responsible for everything, there was a capsule communicator for air-to-ground voice, there was a surgeon, and there was a networks guy,” Shaffer said. “And all of those positions, you know some of them had slightly different names. Like gnc [guidance, navigation, and con­trol] for the csm was called gns [guidance navigation system] for the Sky – lab to distinguish different positions. Different names were required when both the csm and Skylab were up and active at the same time. There was a limited on-orbit team for when the csm was powered down. There were five on-orbit teams that did planning, preparation, and support execution for the experiments, evas, maintenance and repair, or whatever else was going on. These teams were led by [Phil] Shaffer, Don Puddy, Neil Hutchinson, Chuck Lewis, and Milt Windler. There was also a trajectory team led by Shaffer that was decidedly different from the on-orbit teams. It supported launch and rendezvous, and deorbit and entry, and maintaining orbital life­time by raising the vehicle orbital altitude. They did all those calculations. So, there were six teams: five on-orbit teams and one trajectory team, basi­cally, for the year of the program.”

Differences began with the launch. The crews flew into space on one space­craft that was essentially a taxi carrying them to another spacecraft where they would spend the bulk of their mission. “Another thing that was dif­ferent was having two very dissimilar vehicles, with some of the time both being active, so that you had two com guys and two environmental guys and two electrical guys on occasion,” Shaffer said. “Certainly until you got the Skylab powered-down for leaving or the Command Service Module pow­ered-down for the habitation period. The situation on Apollo was similar during the lunar-landing sequence with the Lunar Module and csm being involved. It was a bit of a zoo keeping all of that business straight.”

The attitude control systems for the massive Skylab space station were also very different from both a conceptual and an operational standpoint than any of their predecessors. “The new for Skylab was not new in name but new in type and that was an attitude control system with Control Moment Gyros [cmgs] ,” he said. “That was a whole new business in place of small rock­ets, reaction control thrusters, to control the attitude. You had these giant cmgs that were wonderful. The cmg system was assisted by a cold gas sys­tem called TACS [Thruster Attitude Control System].”

Attitude control—which basically amounts to which way the spacecraft is pointing—on Apollo was pretty straightforward, a basic application of Newton’s law that states for every action there is an equal and opposite reac­tion. That law is what allows rockets to travel through space, even though there is nothing there to push against. A rocket engine burns fuel to gener­ate thrust, and the action of the engine spewing flame backwards leads to the opposite reaction of the rocket moving forward. The same principle that pushes a large rocket through space also, on a much smaller scale, allowed the Apollo spacecraft to control its attitude. Rocket engines burned fuel, and the spacecraft turned in the opposite direction. The Skylab Thruster Attitude Control System took that simple concept and applied it in an even simpler way. Rather than burning fuel, the TACS simply vented cold gas into space. The action of the gas being vented produced the opposite reaction needed to control attitude.

The cmgs worked on a more arcane principle of physics—angular momen­tum. Tilting the spinning rotor of a Control Moment Gyroscope resulted in a torque that would rotate the entire station. Attitude control via cmg had the additional benefit for a long-duration mission of requiring no fuel, rely­ing instead on the power produced by Skylab’s solar panels.

In addition to the new attitude-control techniques, Shaffer said, new Mis­sion Control responsibilities were added to provide support for the science operations on Skylab. “And then there were the experiments,” he said. “We had a control function for Earth sensing. We had a control function for the celestial viewing. One looked up, the other one looked down. We had a con­trol function—a control position—for all the biomedical activity, a control function for materials science.”

While Mission Control had been involved in science support before, nota­bly during the lunar research during Apollo, Shaffer said that the support needed to coordinate the Skylab research was substantially more complex. For example, both Skylab and Apollo missions included making surface observations from orbit. Skylab had its Earth resources observation pack­age and Apollo carried equipment in the Service Module’s sim [Scientific Instrument Module] Bay that imaged the lunar surface. Although there was a general similarity in function, they were very different in operation. “The

Earth resources guy [in Mission Control], for instance, had a huge coordi­nation activity he did with the aircraft overflight, and with the ground truth people, and with the weather service going on with his planning. This was dramatically different from the equivalent function on Apollo. The guy in the Command Service Module was not running the sim Bay.”

Another change for Skylab that was worked out before flight was the real­time mission planning that would have to take place while the crews were in orbit. On prior missions extremely detailed plans were laid out ahead of time. On Skylab more activities were scheduled on a day-to-day basis dur­ing the mission. Every day the flight control teams would plan out what the crew would do the next day. “The evening shift did the detail preparation for the next workday’s activities,” Shaffer said. “The midnight shift did the overall plan for two days hence. And in part I think that was done to provide shelf life for both the support data that was going to go to the crew for the upcoming day and to give negotiation and preparation time for the struc­ture of the plan two days hence.”

That’s not to say no planning was done further ahead. Rough outlines of activities were put together for a week in advance, structured around such things as astronomical or Earth resources observations that were to be made. Since those had to take place at a very precise particular time, they were placed on the schedule first, and other activities that were more flexi­ble were filled in around them.

“All of that was all done by the time we entered the upcoming twenty – four-hour thing; then the remaining pieces were put in,” he said. “The sur­geons would have to get their requirements in. Life sciences was a really big deal, so significant effort was needed to get all of their activities in within their constraints. Vehicle maintenance had to be done, including servicing the atm and the associated eva activity. All of that got dropped into the plan. All of that happened on the evening shift. And that was new. The nearest thing to it may have been the lunar excursion planning activity while crews were on the lunar surface for two or three days. It evolved, and we all got really comfortable with it.”

There was some concern about why there had to be so many levels of advanced planning, but the system proved effective. Among its strengths was that getting a good bit of the planning done early freed up more time to react to any unexpected situations or to finish any previous scheduling that needed adjustment. “If we needed more time to get the detail flight plan support stuff ready for the crew, you had it,” Shaffer said. “There was basi­cally another whole shift available to finish up that work. And if something was wrong with your big plan for the day, then you had time to renegotiate whatever problems that created.”

Of course, no matter how much planning was done in advance, there were always times the plan had to be changed as new circumstances arose. “The classic case, to me, happened on one of my watches,” said Shaffer, “and it comes up under my title of‘surgeon’s rigidity and the bologna sandwich.’ A volcano in Central America decided serendipitously to start a major erup­tion while we were on orbit with all of our wonderful erep equipment. Of course the geologists and geophysicists were going nuts because it was an opportunity to use much of the erep sensor equipment we had to really get new and significant information about an erupting volcano that they had never had the opportunity to get before. It would be like looking ‘down the gun barrel’ right through clouds. They really wanted to do this.

“The conflict was that the orbit track that was going to go over the vol­cano happened during an already scheduled meal. The surgeon, because of his dietary scheduling requirements rigor declared that they were critical, and he couldn’t change the mealtime. That might change the digestive pro­cesses results, and there was no compromise for it. And I had a lot of sym­pathy for both parties, but here was a one-time event and we were going to be up there for many, many meals.

“Finally after much debate, I resurrected mission rule one dash whatev­er it is that says the flight director is in charge in real time. It means he can do whatever he needs to. So I decided to do it, and I told the surgeon on the loop that we are going to do the data take over the volcano, that his dietary concerns are not equal in terms of return. Plus, everybody knows ya’ll have the wrong diet. Everybody knows the best diet for in-flight work is a bolo­gna sandwich.

“The surgeon kind of imploded. I think he thought I had impugned him, and so he stopped objecting. We did the data take, and it was wonder­ful. Lunch was about a half-hour late. It was no big deal. I believed that. I believed it didn’t make any difference. We got all of that done.

“A curious thing happened the next day. When I came on shift there on my console was a bologna sandwich, which honest to goodness was a foot and a half long and six inches wide and had at least an inch of bologna in it. Nobody ever ’fessed up to where it came from. So I don’t know whether the surgeons did it or somebody who had heard the conversations. I always hoped that the surgeon did it. But it changed the dynamic. We got along better after that. Not a lot, but. . .”

During flight, this issue was greatly alleviated by the addition of another level of coordination within the science community. The initial structure in which the various disciplines each advocated their own concerns to Mis­sion Control was putting substantial strain on the flight directors, who had to weigh and balance those concerns. “So what we did was invent a tsar—a ‘science tsar,’” Shaffer explained. The first science tsar was Robert Park­er, a member of the second group of scientist astronauts. “At that point we refused to listen to all those people any more; we only listened to Robert. He brought the finished product into the planning shift, which we then imple­mented. That all worked well in the planning cycle, though it didn’t help a lot if you ran into something happening in a real-time conflict, because Robert wasn’t always available to us.”

At one point during Skylab mission preparations, Shaffer said, the ulti­mate authority of the flight director for dealing with real-time situations as they occurred was challenged by a visitor from NASA headquarters. “This is another one of those stories people don’t know anything about,” he said. “During the Skylab 2 sims [simulations], this guy showed up, badged and everything, and walked into the control center. Because I was launch flight director, I was running the sims.

“And he said, ‘Where’s my console?’” Shaffer said. “And I said, ‘Who are you?’ He said ‘I’m the mission management representative from Washing­ton.’ I said, ‘What do you do?’ And he says, ‘I am from NASA headquarters, and I have the final say in all of the decisions we’ll make in this program.’ And I said, ‘Well, I find that pretty interesting. I’ve never heard of you before, and there’s really no place in my flight control team for you to do that, par­ticularly during a dynamic phase. Frankly, you’ll be a lot more trouble than you’re worth no matter how good you are.’ And he says, ‘Be that as it may, I am here to stay.’ And I said, ‘Very well.’”

Shaffer said that he considered calling director for flight operations—and NASA’s first flight director—Chris Kraft to come deal with the situation, con­fident that the original “Flight” would back him up. However, he decided to try and handle the problem himself before resorting to calling for help. “I went back to my console and got on one of my secondary voice loops to the simulations supervisor, and said ‘I want you to give me the “Apollo tape case,”’” Shaffer said. “So Sim Sup says, ‘Why am I doing that?’ I said, ‘Because I’m asking you to.’ And he said, ‘I got it.’

“So he gave us that case and things really went to hell in a hand basket. The tape was the source for all the csm systems failure descriptions and data used for training simulations for the flight controllers and flight crews. We couldn’t tell where we were in orbit after the launch phase, communi­cation was really ratty, and there were electrical problems, computer prob­lems, etc. I unplugged and ran up to his console and said, ‘Tell me quick. . . what do I do now?’

“The guy looked at me, reached up, unplugged his communications set, got up, and walked out. We never saw him again during a dynamic flight phase.” On orbit however, his group was very active via an ad hoc organiza­tion called the Mission Management Team.

If mankind is to travel from Earth to explore our universe, we will have to learn to live without the familiar experience of weight that is almost always with us on our home planet.

In the void between worlds, explorers will experience virtually total weight­lessness. It’s a strange environment without up or down, new to the body and with hidden threats, as big a step for us as was the classic emergence of life from the oceans onto dry land. They sputtered, we threw up, but apparently it won’t take us as long to adapt. The point is that the process of really understanding “weightlessness” and really adapting to it was started by nine men in 1973. This is the story of that adventure.

Skylab was America’s first step toward making space something other than a nice place to visit. Developed in the shadow of the Apollo moon missions and using hardware originally created for Apollo, the Skylab space station took the nation’s astronauts from being space explorers to being space res­idents. The program proved that human beings can successfully live and work in space.

For many members of the public, Skylab is perhaps best known for two things—its beginning and its end. During the May 1973 launch of the Sky­lab workshop, an unanticipated problem damaged the station on its way to orbit. And of course, Skylab captured the world’s attention with its fiery re-entry over the Indian Ocean and Australia in 1979.

But between those bookends lies a fantastic story of a pivotal period in spaceflight history. Skylab’s three crews lived there for a total of six months, setting — and breaking — a series of spaceflight duration records. While pre­vious U. S. spaceflights were focused on going places, Skylab was about being somewhere, not just passing through the phenomenal space environment, but mastering it. Everything that was to come afterward in U. S. spaceflight was made possible by this foundation—from scientific research in micro­

gravity on the space shuttle to the on-orbit assembly of the International Space Station.

Even the unanticipated challenges that arose during the Skylab program turned into opportunities. The damage that crippled the spacecraft during launch became a rallying point for NASA and led to a repair effort that was unplanned and unprecedented—and perhaps still unparalleled.

This book is the story not only of the nine men who lived aboard Skylab but of all those who made the program a reality. And, like Skylab itself, this book depended on the contributions of a variety of people who shared their stories.

One of the pleasant surprises encountered in writing our story came in late 2005 when we showed Alan Bean (commander of the second manned mis­sion) our draft of the second mission chapter. We had relied on the chron­ological account from Garriott’s in-flight diary to tie together the events and to develop the story of that mission.

Much to our surprise, Alan said that he, too, had kept an in-flight diary and offered it to us for inclusion in this book! Naturally we took him up on that offer and were then absolutely amazed to find the extent of his hand­written account—more than one hundred pages of carefully written—albeit very difficult to decipher—print and script.

It covered not only events on board but also interpersonal relationships, his thinking and action to promote team spirit and optimum performance, his thoughts of home and family, and even more. We then incorporated as much of the “Bean Diary” in the story of the second mission as we thought appropriate and then added his full diary as an appendix to assure that all of Alan’s thinking will be available to others.

Alan had kept the existence of the diary to himself for over three decades. Neither of his crewmates was aware that it had even been written. We are pleased and feel fortunate to include it here where others can better under­stand the thinking of arguably the most highly personally motivated crew­man to fly in space.

Each of the eight living members of the Skylab crews has shared their stories with us, providing fresh perspectives of this unique experience. We deeply regret that the program’s “Sky King”—first crew commander Pete Conrad—was not able to participate personally in this project. But his voice lives on in this book through previously recorded material.

You will also find portions of numerous interviews with Skylab engineers, scientists, managers, flight controllers, and other astronauts. We were struck by their unanimous view that Skylab was one of the most significant events in their professional careers—if not the most significant. Perhaps more to be expected, that is also true for all of the Skylab astronauts as well.

Yet, there has been very little written about the three missions themselves. Again almost all of our interviewees were most pleased to find that some of the crew were finally undertaking to report on these events from the per­spective of those involved and, hopefully, that the contributions coming from all of the Skylab team would not be lost. Unfortunately we will cer­tainly fall short of reaching the goal of recognizing even a modest part of their enormous contribution, but we do want to acknowledge their prime role in making the Skylab program the success we believe it came to be.

We hope that the dedication of this book reflects a little of that debt owed to the thousands of team members who really made it happen.

For all three of us, this book has been a true labor of love, and it is a story that we are very proud to be able to tell.

To start with, I was out in California
in Huntington Beach. And I got this call,
and it was the good Robert Crippen who was calling.

He said, “We had a drawing, and your name was drawn to be
a crewmember on smeat.” And I said, “What the hell is smeat?”

Bo Bobko

smeat, the Skylab Medical Experiment Altitude Test, was a full-length sim­ulation of a Skylab mission. The crew selected for the test would spend fif­ty-six days in a spacecraft mock-up without the benefits of actually being in space. Selection for the mission might seem a dubious honor, but for the commander of the chosen crew, things had been much, much worse.

“June io, 1969, was probably one of the low points in my life,” remem­bered astronaut Bob Crippen. On that date the future pilot of the first Space Shuttle flight learned that the project to which he had dedicated the past three years of his life was over. The U. S. Air Force had canceled its Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, leaving Crippen and his fellow members of the Air Force’s astronaut corps uncertain as to what the future held. Begin­ning almost four years earlier, a total of seventeen astronauts had been select­ed by the Air Force from the ranks of military pilots. During that time they had completed training on the NASA-developed Gemini spacecraft, which was to have been used in the Air Force program. They had also undergone training on the tasks they were to perform on the space-based laboratory.

At the time the program was canceled, the members of the corps were excited about the prospect of spaceflight, but now the Air Force would no longer have need for astronauts. The nation’s civilian space program, on the other hand, still had an astronaut corps, but that group had become overly

crowded as well. The last class of astronauts NASA had selected, a second group of scientist astronauts brought into the corps two years earlier in 1967, had dubbed themselves the “Excess Eleven” (or, in test-pilot terminology, xs-ii) when they realized just how low their odds were of being assigned to a spaceflight anytime in the near future.

Crippen said that after the program was canceled, “We sat around, and it seems like for a month afterward, we’d go to the bar every night at prob­ably about 2 o’clock in the afternoon and have a wake. One day, I remem­ber a crew meeting, and we were trying to figure out what we were going to do, and Bo [Bobko] said, ‘Why don’t we ask NASA if they could use any of us?’ And we said, ‘Bo, that’s the dumbest damn idea I ever heard. They’re canceling Apollo flights, and they’ve got more astronauts than they know what to do with.’

“But long story short, somebody asked. In fact, in some of my talks, especially with kids, I always remember Bo asked me that question, which I thought was dumb. It doesn’t hurt to ask, even if you think you know the answer. It really doesn’t.”

And, seemingly against the odds, the answer was “Yes.” The request for the mol astronauts to be accepted into NASA’s astronaut corps made its way to Office of Manned Space Flight associate administrator George Mueller, who was near the end of his tenure with the agency. The cancellation of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory marked the end of a period during which Con­gress had essentially forced NASA and the Air Force to compete with each other. Now NASA was beginning to make plans for its next crewed space­craft, the Space Shuttle. Mueller hoped to enlist the Air Force as an ally as it lobbied to make the Space Shuttle a reality. Although NASA already had more astronauts than it needed, Mueller believed it would be in the agen­cy’s best interest to try to curry favor with the Air Force by accepting its erst­while future spacemen into the NASA corps.

Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton, however, was unwilling to accept the entire group of Air Force astronauts into his already crowded corps. He invoked NASA’s requirement at the time that only candidates under the age of thirty-six be accepted, cutting the applicant field roughly in half. Seven mol astronauts were accepted into NASA’s corps as the seventh group of astronauts on 14 August 1969: Maj. Karol “Bo” Bobko, Lt. Cdr. Robert Crippen, Maj. C. Gordon Fullerton, Maj. Henry “Hank” Hartsfield Jr., Maj. Robert Overmyer, Maj. Donald Peterson, and Lt. Cdr. Richard Truly.

Even after NASA hired them, things weren’t settled for the former Manned Orbiting Laboratory corps. “We were fired twice the first year we were here,” Bobko explained. “They came and said, ‘You guys are fired. You’re going to have to leave.’ It wasn’t any joke; they were really serious. I don’t know if they called us in all at once or one at a time, but they told us we were fired. Twice.” However, each time the astronauts’ superiors in Houston gave the orders for the Group 7 astronauts to leave, their superiors’ superiors at NASA headquarters gave the orders for them to stay.

“At the time, I think, both Deke and Al were worried about the cancel­lation of flights,” Crippen said. “In fact, Deke was honest when he finally hired us the first time before the firings. He said, ‘I don’t have any flights for you until the Space Shuttle flies, and it’s not even an approved program.’ He said that’ll probably be around 1980 at the earliest, but he added, ‘I’ve got lots of work you can do.’”

Even though they were allowed to stay, the newest members of the corps sometimes felt like they were second-class additions. “I mean, we were not particularly loved and watered,” Bobko said. “When I got here, I was the last guy to ever study the Apollo. I’d go and say, ‘Can I get some manuals?’ And they’d say, ‘Yeah, but they’re all out of date.’ ‘What about classes?’ ‘No, those have been all canceled.’ Now it wasn’t that bad, because I’d go over to the simulator, and nobody cared about the simulator. So I’d be over there myself, and they’d let me stay almost as long as I wanted.

“There was a time I felt like I was a cosine wave in a sine-wave world,” he said. “We got on board, and they canceled [flights] before we got here; but after we got here, they canceled a lot more. There was supposed to be more than one Skylab, and I don’t think it was until after we were told we were coming that they canceled the last two Apollos. And then the Shuttle was supposed to be ready a lot faster.”

The ongoing cancellations were already having an effect on the corps when the mol astronauts arrived. “People were bailing out,” Bobko said. “Every crew meeting we went to, they talked about, ‘Well, they’ve canceled anoth­er thing.’ So the first year was pretty dismal, it really was.”

If Crippen and Bobko felt underutilized during their first years at NASA, that was to change in June 1971, when they were selected for a mission—of a sort. “[Pete] Conrad called me into his office, and said ‘ok, Crip, we’ve got this test that we want to run, and we want you and Bobko and [Bill]

io. (From left) Bo Bobko, Bill Thornton, and Bob Crippen.

Thornton working with it.’ So I said, ‘I learned never to volunteer, but it sounds like the best job available.’”

The third member of the group, Bill Thornton, had been selected to the corps on ii August 1967 as part of the second group of scientist astronauts. Though his path to NASA differed from that of his two colleagues, he had much in common with them. Like Crippen and Bobko, Thornton had come to NASA from the Air Force, where he had been a flight surgeon, among other things. Also like the other two, Thornton had been involved in the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program before coming to NASA, though in a very different capacity. At the Aerospace Medical Division at Brooks Air Force Base, Thornton had been involved in research and development for projects for NASA and decided to submit an application during the second round of scientist astronaut selections.

His qualifications were very good. He didn’t have the flight time Bo and Crip had, but he had over a thousand hours of testing (including flight test­ing) war weapons and missiles (during his first hitch in the usaf as a physi­cist) and then testing instruments designed for mol as a flight surgeon. He was awarded a Legion of Merit for this work and accumulated over twen­ty patents. (Today, his total of over thirty-five patents includes everything from military weapons systems to the first real-time computer electrocar­diogram analysis.)

The Skylab missions were intended to pave the way for the sort of long – duration spaceflights that would be needed to send humans beyond the moon and onward to other planets. For a trip to Mars to be possible, NASA would need experience with mission lengths far beyond the fourteen-day record that had been set during the Gemini program. Skylab would be the bridge between the two weeks that NASA had experience with to the months or years that would be needed to go to Mars. The plan was, with the first three Skylab flights, to quadruple the previous record, doubling it once with the twenty-eight-day first manned mission and then doubling that again with a fifty-six-day second mission. The plans called for the third crew to fur­ther demonstrate that a crew could successfully complete a mission of that length, rather than increasing the duration any more. (That plan changed, however, when the first two crews demonstrated just how well astronauts could function on long-duration missions, and the better part of month was added to the third crew’s stay on Skylab.)

However, the unprecedented length of the missions would mean that unprecedented preparations would need to be made. Attention was focused in two areas of concern: whether human physiology could withstand such long-term exposure to microgravity and whether everything developed and planned would actually work as intended.

Regarding the former concern, in 1967 the President’s Science Advisory Committee recommended an expansion of the Biosatellite program, which used animals to baseline the biomedical effects of spaceflight before longer- duration human missions were undertaken. The Biosatellite ill mission was carried out in the summer of 1969, sending a monkey, Bonnie, into orbit in a small capsule for what was intended to be a thirty-day mission.

On the ninth day of the mission, controllers were forced to abort the mis­sion and deorbit the capsule because of concerns about the monkey’s health. The recovery team successfully recovered it, but Bonnie died hours later. Fortunately any negative side effects of Biosatellite ill were minimal for Sky – lab. There was plenty of evidence that the monkey’s death was not directly due to microgravity exposure.

The experiment had at least one positive result for Skylab. Due to the con­cerns about Bonnie’s body mass loss, the microgravity mass-measurement device Bill Thornton had designed while with the Air Force became a high –

priority payload for the workshop so that any body mass loss by the Skylab crews could be tracked in flight lest they suffer similar problems.

Crippen, Bobko, and Thornton were selected to participate in a more down – to-Earth and ultimately more meaningful preparation for the Skylab mis­sions: the Skylab Medical Experiment Altitude Test, or smeat.

Rather than have the flight crews break away from their busy training schedule for full-length simulations, a surrogate crew was selected to com­plete a full-duration dry run of a Skylab mission. This smeat crew would test out various elements of the Skylab equipment and procedures in a series of trials, culminating in a full-scale simulation that was set at fifty-six days, at the time the longest planned duration of the Skylab missions and the length for which the second and third missions were scheduled.

The first part of the name came from the fact that trying out the medical experiments would be a major focus of the simulation, and the “altitude” referred to the fact it was conducted at the lower atmospheric pressure that would be used on Skylab.

In addition to the qualifying of the medical experiments, many other ele­ments of the Skylab program were to be tried out during the program. The crew was to eat a diet according to the guidelines that had been planned for the Skylab astronauts. Even the interpersonal relationships of the crew sealed in the chamber for almost two months, both with one other and with those they dealt with on the outside, would be a learning tool for the upcoming orbital missions.

Thornton, in particular, was excited about the possibilities smeat present­ed to do some hands-on testing of the Skylab equipment. He had already volunteered his services to the Marshall Space Flight Center in 1967 to help with the design and testing of Skylab equipment. He was determined that it should work on orbit and had expressed dissatisfaction with several of the designs. To him smeat was an opportunity to complete development and to test the flight gear as only he could test it—as he put it, “with a forced injection of operational reality.” His largest concerns going into the test were the urine collection and measuring system, the food system, and the bicycle ergometer.

The fifty-six days spent inside the altitude chamber would be only a frac­tion of the time that the three smeat crewmembers would devote to the test.

“It was about a year from the time we first started with all the planning and the engineering, and then the training and the preflight stuff, and then the actual test itself, and the writing reports,” Bobko said.

The training for smeat was an intensive endeavor in and of itself. For example, though they were to be safely on Earth the whole time just a short distance from help, the smeat crew went through the same medical train­ing as the Skylab members. Crippen said that the dental training, during which the astronauts learned to extract teeth, was a rather memorable expe­rience. “We’d each done a tooth and done the deadening with the Novo­cain and all that kind of stuff,” he said. “And they had this one kid that had a horrible looking mouth come in, and he needed to have a tooth out. They left Bo and I in there. The doctor said, ‘You guys pull teeth.’ We said, ‘We’ve pulled one.’ He said, ‘Go.’ He left, and I think I did the deadening, and Bo did the extraction.”

Bobko said that the youth was nervous about having the extraction done and was anxious about having to have a shot before the tooth was pulled. “And so ‘bedside manner Crippen’ here whips around with this needle that’s about that long,” he said, holding his fingers several inches apart. “But we went through with it,” Crippen said, “and he told us, ‘You’re the best den­tists I’ve ever had.’”

In another memorable incident during the medical training, Crippen broke his hand learning cpr. During training at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, the smeat crewmembers were taught cpr techniques with a “Resuscitation Annie” training dummy. “Back in those days, they always had you whack the person on the chest before you started,” Crip­pen said. “So I whacked the dummy.” When he did, the trainers told him he needed to hit the patient much harder than that. “And I did, and I broke my fifth metacarpal! So don’t have a heart attack around me.”

The smeat crew also spent time before the chamber test participating in the engineering design for the simulation. They played an important role in determining how the facility would be configured for the test. Bill Thornton was a stickler for good engineering in the chamber itself. The fire detection and “deluge system” sprinklers for putting out fires were of particular con­cern to Bill, who had been at Brooks Air Force Base when a serious cham­ber fire had taken place. The deluge system was tested successfully, but he followed up by tracing the power system to its source, supposedly a bank of

specially designed, long-life, high-reliability lead-acid batteries. But these batteries were corroded, and some had been replaced by ordinary automo­bile batteries. “He raised hell, and the batteries were replaced—with other automobile batteries,” Joe Kerwin recalls. “He raised hell again, and even­tually the correct batteries were obtained.”

The tests took place in a vacuum chamber used to simulate atmospher­ic pressure at various altitudes, from ground-level value of 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi) down to a space vacuum. For the full-duration test, the pressure would be held at 5 pounds per square inch, which would replicate the atmosphere that would be present on Skylab (5 psi, with 70 percent of it oxygen). The cylindrical chamber had a twenty-foot diameter and was twen­ty feet high, which allowed for it to be configured with a Skylab-esque two floors. The chamber was outfitted with equipment to replicate the Skylab layout closely enough for a meaningful simulation, though it was far from an exact copy. Bunks in smeat, for example, obviously had to be placed par­allel to the floor rather than perpendicular as on Skylab. The chamber was outfitted with the medical experiments that were to be flown on Skylab, including the vestibular-adaptation-testing rotating chair, the lower body negative pressure device, the bicycle ergometer, and the body mass measure­ment device. The smeat crew was to use the same toilet facilities as were on Skylab (“Except ours wasn’t on the wall,” Bobko noted), and their waste output was to be measured as it would be on orbit.

“We had a second deck on the thing, and then we divided up the first deck into compartments,” Crippen said. “We had the one sleep compart­ment where Bo and I had a bunk, and another compartment for Bill, and we had a head compartment, and we had one where all the medical experi­ments were set up. It was similar but not exactly like the living deck on Sky­lab. It was comfortable living.”

The two bunk rooms were outside the main cylindrical area in a rectan­gular extension that led to the main airlock. The waste-management com­partment was an area partitioned off on the first floor of the cylindrical area. The large open volume of the main area housed the medical experi­ment equipment as well as the smeat equivalent of the Skylab wardroom, a food storage and preparation area with a table. The main room also fea­tured a small access hatch through which items could be passed to or from the outside world. This small airlock was about the only compromise made in smeat that was not available on orbit. The second level featured desks at which the three astronauts could work (an additional desk was located on the first level).

Before the full-length fifty-six-day run, the crew conducted shorter tests in the chamber to work out any problems before committing to being sealed in for the full duration. After a “paper simulation” in which the crewmem­bers went into the chamber and talked through a day’s activities, two run – throughs of two and three days were conducted. As with the full-length test, the shorter runs required that the crew go through the process of preparing to enter the lower-pressure environment in the chamber. “We ran a large number of tests where we’d only go in the chamber for a day or so and run these things to wring it out before we actually got in for the long duration,” Crippen said. “Otherwise we’d never [have been] able to do it.

“I remember one case where there was this one tech that worked in Build­ing 7,” he said. “He was normally one of their chamber guys that were trained to operate the chamber. He and I were doing one run one day. They’d always prebreathe you [require you breathe ioo percent oxygen for three hours to eliminate nitrogen from your tissues and thereby prevent the bends] before the pressure is reduced from sea level to 5 psi in the chamber. We were set­ting up in the prebreathe room, and only he and I were there, and he got up and took off his oxygen mask and made a phone call to his girlfriend. Sure enough, we got in there and he was on the bicycle, and I was oversee­ing him. And he started hurting, and they had to take him out and put him in the hyperbaric chamber, ’cause he almost ‘bent’ himself— well, he did get the bends.”

Just as the actual Skylab crews did, the smeat crew received small tattoos on their bodies to mark where sensors went for the medical tests in order to ensure the sensors were placed consistently and thus increase the accu­racy of the results. According to Bobko, “They came to me, and they said, ‘We’re going to tattoo you so you know where to put the electrodes.’ And I said, ‘OK, only after one of you guys shows us exactly how it’s gonna look.’” He acquiesced after one of the doctors had the tattoos placed on himself. “He said, ‘If I could figure out how to see [behind me], I would have put it on my ass.’” Well over thirty years later, smeat and Skylab crewmembers report that their tattoos are still visible.

As any good crew would, the smeat astronauts came up with an official crew patch for their mission. The patch, reflective of the crew’s plum assign­ment, depicts Snoopy the beagle from Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip (a favorite icon of the astronaut office) with an aviator’s cap, goggles, and scarf and a rope tied around his neck. Their original idea was to use Snoopy and “put a fishhook in his mouth.” The crew contacted Schultz to see if he would be willing to draw Snoopy for their patch. He agreed, but with one change: Crippen said, “[H]e wouldn’t put a fishhook, so he did the little noose-around-the-neck thing for us.”

Another part of the smeat simulation that began before the crew actu­ally entered the chamber for the fifty-six-day test was the premission diet. Just as the actual Skylab crews did, the smeat astronauts ate beforehand a diet similar to what they would eat during the mission in order to establish some baseline information with which the metabolic data collected during the mission would be compared. According to Bobko, the “preflight” and “postflight” diets the crew ate were not exactly the same as what they ate in the chamber during the test but were carefully selected to have the same mineral count and nutritional value. The crewmembers had two refriger­ators brought to their homes before the chamber simulation: one stocked with the premission food that was all they were allowed to eat, the second was used for storage of waste output, which would be taken back to msc for analysis. As things worked out, the astronauts got plenty of opportunity to enjoy the preflight diet; the planned twenty-one-day period during which they were supposed to eat it stretched to twenty-eight days when the start date for the test slipped by a week.

Crippen said that he’d certainly had his fill of the prescribed diet after eating the twenty-eight-day preflight diet, the fifty-six-day mission diet and then the postflight diet. “That got to be a pretty long time,” he said. “I can remember after we got out that I wanted a hamburger something awful.” (Other astronauts had similar experiences. After weeks of preflight diet and almost sixty days of Skylab meals, Owen Garriott made arrangements to have a chocolate milkshake waiting for him on the recovery aircraft carrier when he landed after his mission.)

“We used to give them a hard time about the food,” Bobko said, “Like I’d ask them, ‘What’s your analysis technique?’ and I never got an answer. We’d have a meeting, and they’d hem and haw around it, but they never gave it.” The smeat crew’s persistence in challenging the experimenters’ dietary planning was to be a vital contribution during the actual test, which led to

її. The smeat mission patch.

an important change in the Skylab flight program. Thanks to Bill Thorn­ton’s persistence, a one-size-fits-all, relatively low approach to caloric intake planning was amended. “We tried very hard,” he said. “I tried to get infor­mation from them; we’d say, ‘How are you going to do this? We’re going to be eating this three months or so; how are you going to do the analysis?’ On the first day, obviously, we have outside influence, when does that wash out? You can’t average it over the fifty-six days, that doesn’t sound reason­able, etc. etc. And I never got an answer.”

“I don’t think they had an answer,” Crippen agreed.

“There were a number of things like that we had questions on that nobody really knew,” Bobko added.

Finally, on 26 July 1972, only ten months before the first crew would launch into space, the time came to enter the vacuum chamber. And so the fifty – six-day stay began, and the astronauts were faced with what seemed at the outset like one of the mission’s biggest challenges—keeping occupied for fifty-six days. Apart from its terrestrial location, one of the main differences between smeat and Skylab was the lack of much of the science package that would make up much of the actual work in orbit. While the smeat crew conducted most of the Skylab biomedical experiments, they were obviously unable to conduct the astronomy experiments and Earth resources observa­tions, which depended on Skylab’s location in Earth orbit, or the materials science research and microgravity experimentation, which depended on its constant state of free fall. Thus, they were given the full duration of a Sky­lab mission, without all of the Skylab activities that would fill that duration in orbit. In addition they were unable to share some of the favorite free-time activities of the orbital crews — viewing the Earth and enjoying the won­ders of weightlessness.

However, despite not having those Skylab activities to fill their time, the smeat crews managed to find ways to avoid becoming bored by their extend­ed isolation. “I think we all worried about that ahead of time,” Crippen said, “because it wouldn’t be like the guys flying where you had the atm and all that to do. We worked on trying to find stuff to do. They let us take things in. We built a model, or tried to build a model. We took Russian. We found enough activities where I think we were reasonably busy.” (Notes Kerwin: “I have a memo from Crip, April 1971, to ‘Skykingdom’ [Conrad, et al] ask­ing for things to do. We suggested bridge and ping-pong.”)

“We kept up the pretense: ‘ok, this is like a spaceflight,’ and we com­municated through Capcoms, and all that,” Crippen said (Capcoms being short for “capsule communicators,” the people in Mission Control assigned to talk to the astronauts on a flight). “They said ‘We’d like to make it as much like Skylab as possible,’ and we did that. We did things like only com­municating during aos schedule.” In orbit, a spacecraft could only contact the ground when it was within range of a relay station on Earth, periods known as acquisition of signal (aos). Using that schedule for smeat meant the crew had only the same limited opportunities to talk to Mission Con­trol as the orbital Skylab crews would. A closed-circuit television was used for training classes, and each of the crewmembers was able to use it for two videoconferences with their families during the test.

As would be the case during the orbital program, the smeat crew took on some extra work to fill some of the time. Crippen set up regular debrief­ing sessions during the weekend to help organize the crew’s efforts. Just as

would be the case on Skylab, housekeeping also filled some of the crew’s time. “They [once told] us that things coming out of there were stinking,” Crippen said. “And we were very sensitive because it didn’t smell bad to us. I can remember, especially after we got the complaint about things kind of smelling that were coming out of there, we’d take Neutrogena soap and rub it down and scrub things around, so we worked hard at trying to keep the place clean.”

And then there were the phone calls. As another way to pass the time, Crippen insisted before entering the chamber to begin the test that it be out­fitted to make phone calls to anywhere in the country. Bobko recalled the line being a wonderful luxury as his wife used the time that her husband was away to take a vacation through California, and he was able to keep in touch with her as she traveled.

Crippen had a slightly different experience when friend and fellow astro­naut Dick Truly arranged a little joke to remind the confined commander just what he was missing out on in the real world. “I remember somewhere around Day 40-something, I got this call from Dick Truly,” he said. “I got on the line, and there were two young ladies on the line, and it was the biggest sexy phone call I can remember. I almost came out the door right then.”

As it worked out, the premission concern about staying occupied proved to be unfounded. Between their primary smeat tasks and the supplemen­tal activities they had scheduled for themselves, the crew not only had no problems keeping occupied but found their schedule so full that they some­times had to skip some of the supplementary activities they had planned. Work days, six days a week, began at 7:00 a. m. and continued until 9:00 p. m. with breaks for meals.

In addition to managing to keep occupied, the crew also maintained good relationships with one other despite being confined together in a lim­ited space for almost two months. Bobko, though, noted that the question of how they got along after being “shut up” together is really somewhat mis­leading. “It wasn’t something that was a shut-up thing,” he said, “because we had worked with each other for damn near a year, for probably eight or nine months or something, before we ever got in there. So any of the crew dynamic had already been worked out. My feeling was that we each had our own little peculiarities, but we understood each other, and we knew what they were, and we accepted them, and we got along.”

The same, he said, was true of all of the spaceflight crews of which he was

и. The smeat altitude chamber.

a member. By the time the beginning of the actual mission arrived, the crew had worked together in training for so long that the various personalities had already meshed into a team, and any initial problems had been overcome. “I had a woman on one of my flights, Rhea Seddon,” Bobko said. “People would say, ‘What do you think about taking a woman on your flight?’ Well, hell, we’d trained with her for six or nine months. That had all been worked out; the dynamic had been established already.”

Despite the eventual monotony that set in by the end of the “postflight” diet period after months of restricted choices, the astronauts said that the Skylab food provided during the fifty-six-day chamber run was not bad at all. “After we got the menus, I don’t remember being unhappy with the food,” Crippen said.

Bobko, who later went on to command Space Shuttle missions, said that the unique hardware specifications of Skylab were a boon to the program’s

menu options. Unlike later spacecraft, Skylab had facilities to store frozen food, and unlike previous NASA spacecraft and the Space Shuttle, Skylab did not use fuel cells for power generation.

“Compared to Shuttle, I think Skylab menus were a lot better,” Bobko said. “They had the frozen steaks; they had ice cream; they had other fro­zen things. And, unfortunately, the Apollo having fuel cells, which made water, and the Shuttle having fuel cells, which made water, has kept their food all on a narrow track; they wanted it to be dehydrated to save weight on the Shuttle.” Skylab had plenty of lift capability to launch nondehydrat­ed food.

The biggest challenge was setting up the menus in such a way as to make sure that the demanding nutritional guidelines were all met. “The food sys­tem was a bit of a problem,” Bobko said, “because they wanted us to balance our intake of proteins and minerals every day, which just made selection and consumption and everything else more difficult. That was the difficul­ty with the minerals and [calories]. Because if you took peanuts, if I remem­ber right, it excluded a whole bunch of other selections because [they] had enough other things in [them] that it really restricted your choices.”

As would be the case with Skylab, the crews set up menus for six days, and then cycled through those selections for the duration of the menu, eating the same meals every six days. “The six-day cycle, at least for me, was interest­ing,” Bobko said. “The way certain activities repeated led to some unusual associations.” For example, he said, part of his exercise schedule was on the same six-day cycle as the meals; so the same meal—spaghetti—was being prepared every time he did the exercise. “So, it’s like, if you’re exercising, you know you’re going to have the spaghetti smell in the background.”

A few of the food items developed for the program, however, were less appealing than some of the others. “I can still remember finding out that Silly Putty and the little pudding that they gave us were in cans that were exactly the same size and looked exactly the same,” Bobko said. “So we tried to feed it to one of the experimenters before the test, but he didn’t show up to the meeting.”

Despite being designed to replicate the Skylab menu as closely as possible, the smeat menu did feature one perk that the orbital version did not. Once in every six-day cycle, the smeat astronauts were allowed to imbibe a serv­ing of sherry. The original plan had been for the Skylab menus to include a wine selection in each rotation, and a tasting had even been held for the crews to select what they wanted to carry into orbit with them. Medical

objections had been overcome, but serving wine on a government “ship” was too much of a break with precedent for the political sensitivities of 1972, and it was removed from the flight diet.

Fortunately for the smeat crew, however, by the time the decision was made to remove the sherry from the Skylab menus, the smeat menus had already been made out, and it was too late to go back through the process of completely rebalancing the various nutritional factors that would have to be changed if the sherry were removed. “We had it,” Crippen said, “and we really looked forward to it.”

A more significant disagreement over the menus, however, proved to be of great importance to the Skylab program. The intense scrutiny on diets was not just to make sure that the crews stayed healthy, it was also one of the major biomedical experiments. Since the crews would be setting new spaceflight duration records, scientists wanted to learn all they could about how the microgravity exposure affected their metabolisms. Their dietary intake would be closely monitored, as would their waste output and their body mass, in order to make sure there were no unknown issues that would be a limiting factor for future long-duration spaceflight.

In order to facilitate the close scrutiny of the astronauts’ intake, the deci­sion had been made to standardize the intake for all Skylab (and smeat) crewmembers so that all crewmembers would consume the same num­ber of nutritional calories each day. One set of dietary guidelines would be established, and all of the astronauts would adhere to it, making it easier to keep up with exactly how much everyone was eating. The astronauts and the investigators had been negotiating the diet since 1969, and when smeat took place it had changed from a standard 2,400 calories apiece to a base of 2,000 calories worth of real food (containing all the protein, calcium, and phosphorous allowed) plus up to 800 additional “snack” calories.

Bill Thornton, however, no stranger to medical concerns himself, dis­agreed with the decision and took it upon himself to prove that the standard­ized diet was a bad idea before it could be implemented on orbit, where there would be no way to change it. The tall and muscular Thornton, one of the corps’ most physically imposing members, believed that setting a uniform standard for all the crewmembers would be unhealthy, that each needed a nutritional plan custom tailored for his own body type and metabolism.

Bill decided to demonstrate the inadequacy of this diet (“2,000 calories

plus sugar for a 207-pound man with less than ten-percent body fat”) by con­suming it as directed. Pretest he maintained his usual extensive exercise reg­imen. In the chamber he estimated the difference between his usual routine and his chamber activities and made up the difference with cycle ergome – try. He gorged on sugar cookies and lemon drops to stay alive.

“Bill like to drove me nuts,” Crippen said. “He didn’t think the calor­ic intake they had assigned for the flights was adequate, and he was deter­mined to try to prove that so that they would up it. Bill was exercising on the ergometer. And he exercised on the ergometer, and he exercised. It’d be in the middle of the night and he’d be in there peddling on the thing.

“He finally got to be almost like a skeleton. He got to where I was wor­ried about him. I didn’t know how much weight he lost, but it was signifi­cant. Somewhere around the thirty-day point, I finally called outside and said either he’s coming out or you’ve got to send some food in. They boost­ed up what we ended up flying, and I thought it was around 2,500 calories a day. I got irritated at Bill a few times simply because I couldn’t get him off the damn bicycle. I thought he was going to starve himself to death. He’s a bulldog; but you know, he’s a great guy, and that was the only thing that he and I had an issue on—he wouldn’t get off that damn bicycle.”

And, indeed, the diet was insufficient for Thornton to maintain his body mass. “I was under the impression that a loss of twenty-eight pounds, most of it upper-body muscle, would be enough to convince anyone,” Thornton said. As it turned out, it wasn’t enough to convince the principal investiga­tor for the mineral balance experiment. Dr. Donald Whedon thought “He overexercised,” and his coinvestigator, Dr. Leo Lutwak felt “He only lost body fat.” But a lot of discussion resulted in extra food being stowed aboard Skylab for the flight crews. Specifically, the eight hundred calories of “snack” food was now allowed to contain significant amounts of protein, which put many more food items onto the snack list.

Just as the intake monitoring had issues that had to be worked out, so too did the output monitoring. A similar problem occurred in planning the urine-collection system as had with the nutrition-standard guidelines: the designers had taken a one-size-fits-all approach that while wonderful in the­ory proved to be less wonderful in practice.

The urine system was Thornton’s biggest hardware concern. It had to collect and measure twenty-four hours of output efficiently and reliably

with very small error, in weightlessness. The contractor had designed a two – chambered bag separated by a “hydrophilic” membrane to transfer the urine into the measurement chamber under enough pressure to activate a com­plex mechanical displacement indicator. It failed as soon as urine was used to test it instead of water.

“The urine collection burst on us,” Bobko said. “They had gone, I guess, into hospitals and figured out what the urine output would be, and it was too low. So two things happened, and one is that if you got up to take a leak at night, you may fill this thing up, so halfway through your evacuation, you had to cross your legs, and you had to [change] the bag.” The other thing that happened was that the bags occasionally became overfilled and burst.

Emergency meetings were held. A centrifuge was designed whose centrifu­gal force would generate enough pressure to transfer urine into new, filterless bags. Thornton was skeptical. He campaigned hard to get the system into smeat for test and was the only one of the three crewmen who used it.

There were multiple failures. Seven times the bag broke, usually near the end of a twenty-four hour cycle when it was nearly full. Thornton recalls, “I had only my dirty discarded underwear and a very limited amount of water and soap to sop up a couple of liters of urine into discarded bags and clean up the floor. Then I had to thrust my big hands into a maze of machined parts with sharp edges to dry them, lest they corrode and seize up. My hands looked like I had taken on a bobcat.” Crip and Bo joined Bill in tell­ing management it wouldn’t fly. A meeting was scheduled, and the three of them collaborated in preparing a rather blunt demonstration of the seri­ousness of the problem.

“They had the overcans for food, the big cans,” Crippen said. “I think it was Bill that was doing this, but we were all complicit. We took one of the big food cans and took a spring out of the tissue dispensers, turned one of the small food cans over and put it down in on the spring, and then took a urine-soaked rag and put it down in there, and sent it out there. So when they opened up, it popped out, to demonstrate that we had a problem in there.” The result was a complete system redesign with Dick Truly in charge. Bill suspects to this day that the food can was never opened; Truly just believed his fellow astronauts.

In addition to urine, stool was also sent out to be measured and analyzed. According to Bo Bobko: “We didn’t freeze-dry the feces; we didn’t have the vacuum as was available in space. We put them in little cans and sent them out. We sent the urine out, but we did the sample first; I think it was thir­ty milliliters per day.

“Then there was Thornton. I can remember them going to Thornton, and saying, ‘Bill, it’s Friday noon, and you haven’t given us a fecal sam­ple, and we’d like to let all the people go home for the weekend.’ And Bill would say, ‘Just a minute.’ So he turned around, and said, ‘You were talk­ing to the wrong end.’

“I can remember them giving us these little cups. I said, ‘These little cups, you know—how about something like four times larger?’ So they gave us something that looked like a mailing tube. I said, ‘You dummies, give us something that looks like an ice cream half-gallon container or something, that we don’t have a hard time hitting.’ So they did. But there were probably a lot of little things like that flight crews never knew about or cared about.

“They were complaining to us that we weren’t sending everything out. Like, they said we weren’t sending out all the feces. We said, ‘What are we doing with it? Storing it under the boards of the floor?’ I remember that time Bill got on the phone with our surgeon, kind of an excitable guy. Bill asked for a private consultation. He got on the phone, and he was saying, ‘I’ve been noticing some strange behavior.’ The flight surgeon said, ‘Oh, oh, tell us about it.’ He said ‘Well, you know, these people seem to be paranoid. It looks like we have some paranoid things,’ and we have this and that. The flight surgeon was assuming it was us, and he was getting more and more excited. The flight surgeon finally said ‘Who is this? Who is this?’ And Bill said, ‘It’s the management.’ You don’t think of him as a funny person. But when you have things like talking to the flight surgeon about this deviant behavior, you thought about it and laughed about it for days.”

In a similar vein, the crew noticed an unanticipated side effect of the low­er atmospheric pressure in the altitude chamber: “There was a lot of flatu­lence,” Crippen noted. “We tried to think maybe it was the diet, but I think it was just strictly the 5 psi. It was significant.” Common sense supports the latter theory: At the 5 psi of the smeat chamber, any given mass of a gas would have three times the volume that it would under sea-level atmospher­ic pressure. (Skylab crewmembers confirmed that the same phenomenon occurred during orbital operations as well.) Recalls Bobko: “We had a tim­er, and we were counting. I don’t remember how many times it was in a day, but it was a significant number.”

The 5 psi atmosphere had more mundane effects as well. The lower pres­sure reduced the transmission of sound so that during the first few days the crewmembers frequently found themselves shouting, and became hoarse as a result. (On Skylab, an intercom system addressed this problem.) They also found that they were unable to whistle in the lower pressure atmosphere and that sneezes were milder.

The most important part of smeat, of course, was the work the crew did in testing out the equipment and procedures designed for Skylab, making sure that everything would function as planned by the time the first crew arrived in orbit. While the problems the smeat crew had with the urine collection system were inconvenient for them, to say the least, their incon­venience served a greater good—the consequences of the urine collection problems would have been much greater had they first been discovered in the microgravity environment of Skylab.

One of the most immediate tasks for the smeat crew was to begin tak­ing the roughly delineated guidelines that had been developed for Skylab operations and turn them into the finely detailed procedures that would be needed for the astronauts in space. The efforts to refine the checklist were an ongoing process for the smeat crew, beginning long before the chamber test and continuing through the simulation.

“We did quite a bit of development on the checklist, because a lot of that was almost nonexistent when we started,” Bobko said. “It was in bad shape. So we had to do something; we had to make it operational. A lot of this stuff just wasn’t in an operational format.” Much of the early checklist, he said, was too short and vague for use in spaceflight. “It was ‘Don’t do this.’ It was all right for training, but it wasn’t really good enough to use. So we really worked on that quite a bit. That was part of the engineering and training that took place at the beginning.”

Working with the principal investigators for the medical experiments in developing the procedures, Bobko said, had an additional beneficial side effect. The opportunity to witness the smeat crew performing the experi­ments gave the investigators some idea of what they could expect in work­ing with the Skylab crews during orbital operations.

As was the case with the urine collection system, the smeat astronauts’ use of the Skylab hardware revealed problems with equipment destined for the orbital workshop. Their discoveries meant that the problems could be

addressed before the equipment was launched into orbit, where the sort of flaws uncovered during smeat would have been devastating for the program.

Bill Thornton’s dedicated use of the wheel-less bicycle ergometer, for exam­ple, did more than just reveal problems with the dietary guidelines imposed on the crew; it also contributed to breaking—and then fixing—the bicycle. (Though that problem was corrected, the ergometer would present other challenges during its use on orbit, though fortunately all of the crews were able to deal with it in situ.)

Thornton used the ergometer primarily to maintain his normal exercise level. But because he questioned its ruggedness and thought it had not been tested thoroughly, he wanted to put it to that test. He recalled, “After a rea­sonable break-in period I planned to take it to its 300 watt rating for an hour, but starvation was taking its toll, and I was relieved when it screeched to a stop at about forty-eight minutes. The airlock was used to exchange it for an old, indestructible model. A considerable time later the bike was returned, ‘fixed’ by restricting it to thirty minutes at 300 watts, now an ordeal with my continued malnutrition. But this time it took only twenty-nine min­utes and thirty seconds to destroy the bearings. I shall never forget the look of disgust on Crip’s face.”

This time, after independent engineering analysis, a different shaft and bearings were installed. The flight unit, however, was further restricted to 250 watts. Fortunately, this proved enough for the mere mortals who flew. Bill still remembers feeling hurt by the subsequent efforts of msec man­agement to separate him from his testing role. And he insists that he nev­er actually used it when Crip and Bo were asleep — “maybe when they were watching TV, but not after lights out.”

Here are some of the hardware redesigns accomplished as a result of the smeat tests:

In the lower body negative pressure device, a seal that was necessary for depressurizing the lower extremities developed a leak and had to be redesigned. In addition, the decision was made to car­ry a spare seal during the flight program.

The equipment used for measuring blood pressure was discovered to have been miscalibrated, causing it to produce inaccurate­ly high results.

Several problems were discovered in the metabolic analyzer unit. Some

ІЗ – Bill Thornton riding the cycle ergometer.

of the measurements it took were found to be substantially high­er than they should have been, and the oxygen consumption measurement of the device was discovered to be significantly greater in the 5 psi atmosphere in the chamber than at sea-level pressure. The unit was redesigned to provide accurate and con­sistent data for Skylab.

The electrode cement used for the vectorcardiogram test was found to cause skin irritation, and action was taken to prevent the sit­uation from recurring on Skylab.

Coagulation problems in samples were discovered to result from the blood sampling techniques used in smeat, and additional anti­coagulants were added.

The centrifuge used for blood separation was found to be prone to excessive vibration and had to be redesigned prior to the flight program.

Of course, not all the problems the crew experienced were the fault of the hardware. One of the less-coveted tasks for the smeat crew was wearing the electroencephalogram (eeg) cap that monitored sleep levels. Crippen initially had agreed to be the one to wear the cap but before the beginning of the chamber test discovered that the salve or jelly that had to be applied to wear the cap caused his head to break out in welts. When Crippen real­ized that he was going to have to pass on the eeg duties, Thornton volun­teered to take it over. But he too was unable to wear the cap. The task was then passed on to Bobko, who with no one left to pass it on to was stuck with it. Though no longer the one who would be wearing the cap, Crippen was still the one trained in its operation and thus had the responsibility of changing the tapes on which the device’s data was recorded. Unfortunate­ly due to an error in changing the tape, the data wasn’t recorded. No one realized, however, that there was a problem until after the test was over, and the experimenters went back to review the data. “So Bo went through [the test], and there was no damned data,” Crippen said. “I guess we got some from the first tape.” Even that experience presented new ideas for the Sky – lab program—for the orbital operations, some of the data was sent down in real time to prevent just that sort of problem.

The smeat experiences proved to be invaluable to the Skylab orbital pro­gram, and the three men were proud of their contributions to the success of Skylab. “The first mission would have been a lot more difficult for the med­ical experiments” without the lessons of smeat, Bobko said.

Crippen agreed that the breaking-in the smeat crew put the medical experiment equipment through on the ground was a key to how well things went when the equipment was used in orbit. “If we’d flown those without running them in some sort of operational situation, I think there would have been a problem,” he said.

Thornton praised Richard Johnston, then director of Life Sciences, for initiating a daily logging and review system for medical data which result­ed in good status monitoring during the flights—and eventually in a fine document capturing Skylab’s medical achievements, “Biomedical Results of Skylab.”

Finally, though, the time came to bring the test to a close. Crippen said he was never entirely sure if the test was going to run exactly the full fifty – six days for which the second two Skylab missions were planned. First, he said, he believed that the simulation might be brought to an early close and the crew released from the chamber. But then as the test drew nearer to its conclusion, he wasn’t sure if the mission planners might not decide to extend it to continue the experiments.

Bobko said he also wondered whether the crew might have to spend addi­tional time in the chamber. “Near the end, I can remember thinking we may not get everything done, because we just have a lot to do,” he said. “Fifty- six days was the target, and they said, ‘If anything goes wrong, we can take you out.’ But there was a feeling of, we had a purpose, and we had to get to it done. I can remember having some concerns that we weren’t going to get all the results that we really wanted to get. And it all turned out; I think that we did. And like I said, I’m not sure that if anybody said, ‘You want to go for another fifty-six days,’ I would have been ready for that.”

Crippen agreed: “I know I wouldn’t have. If it were one or two more days to get some stuff done we would have been able to do that.”

The smeat crew would eventually get their chance to move up from sim­ulated space missions to the real thing. As Slayton had predicted when the mol astronauts were brought into the NASA corps, their chance to fly did not come until the Shuttle was ready to launch, twelve years after they were brought in. Even before that happened, though, after almost a decade of being on the lower rungs of the astronaut corps ladder, the mol astronauts saw their situation change in 1978 with the selection of the eighth class of candidates, chosen specifically for the Shuttle program. “We were start­ing to get into Shuttle before I felt like I wasn’t a new guy,” Crippen said. By that time, many of the veteran astronauts from the earlier groups had left the corps, and the mol class played a vital role in the early Shuttle pro­gram. Crippen said that he was told that some of the same managers who had opposed bringing in the Air Force astronauts originally went on to feel lucky to have them when the Shuttle began flying.

Ironically, and sadly, though each did get to fly and command Shut­tle missions, Crippen and Bobko’s careers as flight-status astronauts ended much as they began: waiting on a space launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base that was never to come.

The Air Force had modified Space Launch Complex 6 (slc-6, pronounced “Slick Six”) at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, once destined to serve as the launch pad for the mol program, for use with the Space Shuttle. Missions were planned for launch from the “new” Shuttle pad, and crew­members were selected for those missions, including Crippen and Bobko.

“One of the sad things was, [in mol] we were supposed to fly from Van­denberg on Slick Six, Space Launch Complex Number 6,” Crippen said. “And sure enough, I was up to command 62-A, which was going to launch out of Vandenberg out of Slick Six.”

Bobko recalled: “I can remember going out there during mol and stay­ing in the crew quarters. And then they redid the crew quarters out there to make them a command center. And then they changed it back to crew quarters. I can remember being out there the second time, same place, I don’t know how many years later, when they were getting ready to do the Shuttle flights.”

The 62-A mission that Crippen was assigned to command was to be the first Shuttle launch from the Vandenberg complex and would have been the first launch of a manned spaceflight into a polar orbit. The flight was sched­uled for mid-1986, but it was never to be. On 28 January 1986, the Space Shut­tle Challenger was lost during launch from Florida, destroying the vehicle and killing the seven members of its crew. As a result of that tragedy, the decision was made not to launch the Shuttle from Slick Six.