Category HOMESTEADING SPACE

Well before the key decision was made to launch a dry workshop space station with a Saturn v, NASA went through a series of other decisions that shaped what was to eventually become Skylab. Though there had been many dif­ferent ideas within NASA in the first half of the i960 s as to just what the space station should be like, one thing that many of those ideas had in common was the idea that a proper space station would involve the use of artificial gravity to be generated by the creation of a rotating station. By causing the facility to spin around a central axis, the centrifugal force generated would pull crewmembers toward the outside of the station, creating a sensation of some fraction of Earth gravity.

“There was quite an argument in the early stages, do you have artificial gravity or not,” said Mueller, who found himself a rare dissenter from the conventional wisdom. To make his point, Mueller decided to give others in the agency an idea of what life would be like for astronauts on such a facility. He had them join him at the Slow Rotation Room at the Naval Aerospace Medical Institute in Pensacola, Florida. The room spins around, generating

a centrifugal force pulling its occupants toward its perimeter. The experi­ence is tolerable at first, even novel as the room seems to shift as the cen­trifugal force causes the direction of gravity to seem to change. However, after time the spinning can become increasingly uncomfortable. “And I had Bob Gilruth, and Wernher, and Sam [Phillips, head of the Apollo Pro­gram Office], and I riding in one of these rooms that spin, and after about half an hour, the great desire for artificial gravity dissipated,” he said. “I was having trouble convincing Wernher and Bob of [the disadvantages], but I inherently knew it.” Mueller said that his conviction regarding artificial gravity applied to missions to Mars as well as space stations—that it would be better to use techniques to mitigate the atrophying effect of weightless­ness than to subject a Mars-bound crew to the rotation necessary to gener­ate artificial gravity.

Because the Marshall-managed s-ivb stage was to be used as the basis for the workshop, Marshall was given the responsibility for hardware develop­ment for the workshop. Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center, which had previously had the responsibility for spacecraft development, was tasked with overseeing the crew operations for the space station. “That really started the Marshall Space Flight Center into the space station business,” Mueller said. This arrangement had the additional benefit of allowing Mueller to keep many of the engineers on the Saturn team in NASA’s workforce. “Marshall was running out of work,” he said. It also, Mueller said, took the most advan­tage of the centers’ management resources. “Wernher was very enthusiastic about space stations, and Gilruth was sort of not very enthusiastic.”

Leland Belew, an engineer who had been involved in Saturn propulsion development at Marshall, was tapped to serve as the center’s Skylab pro­gram director. Belew said that he was talked into taking the job during an offsite discussion in 1966 during which he was relieved of concerns about how the program would be developed, including how much discretion Mar­shall would be given in a program centered around crew operations, then the exclusive domain of the Manned Spacecraft Center. “I got involved in Skylab basically with a meeting with von Braun and George Mueller down on Guntersville Lake [about a half-hour from Huntsville], and they talked me into taking the job after some arm twisting,” Belew said. “We stayed up all night in that activity. And, let me tell you, they absolutely stood behind

everything that they said. No questions asked. They lived up to everything they said they’d do.”

Belew said that the relationship between Marshall and msc evolved over the course of the Skylab program, with the Houston center gradually shar­ing its traditional crew operations duties with its Huntsville counterpart. “It changed with time. I know that from time to time they would pose a question of, ‘We can’t do that because. . .’ and we’d take it over. That sort of thing. We took them over one by one.”

However, he noted that in addition to the Apollo spacecraft, there were other areas where msc led the effort. “On the biomedical, we did everything that they wanted, no questions asked,” he said. “We absolutely did every­thing possible in all the biomedical stuff. That was their main thrust. They wanted to baseline that. We knew that was priority number one. And on the solar stuff, we did everything that they wanted.”

As the program developed, the two centers began working more and more closely together. The cooperation was facilitated by an aircraft that NASA scheduled to make daily runs between Huntsville and Houston, allowing Skylab team members at either center to work face-to-face with their coun­terparts at the other. “We used that airplane a lot,” Belew said, “because we had a close relationship with them.”

For a center that had been focused almost solely on developing propul­sion hardware prior to that point, the transition to working with crew opera­tions proved not to be a difficult one, Belew said. “No, it sort of flowed pret­ty naturally. Astronauts were always here, in the neutral buoyancy, and that sort of thing. And they enjoyed the heck out of it.”

On the subject of the origin of that neutral-buoyancy tank, George Har­dy’s recollection echoed Mueller’s: “There is a story, too, about how that tank came into being. I don’t know all the details of that. In fact, I don’t want to know them; I’m not sure it’s safe to know them. That’s about as much as I know. There were some facilities that were approved and so forth, but somehow or another it turned out to be a water tank. And it was a very, very, extremely useful tool.”

Hardy also recalled the relationship between the two centers as one that evolved over time. He said, “There was some reluctance on having Mar­shall, who knew about big boosters with fire coming out the end of them but nothing about astronauts and what it takes to keep astronauts alive and

working. There were occasionally some pretty heated debates on how things were going to be done. I don’t know that there was a single time that we tried to contradict jsc on anything having to do with flight crew.

“But we started working closer together. Initially jsc had a contract with McDonnell Douglas for the Airlock Module, but that was transferred to Marshall. So Marshall ended up with basically all the workshop: the Air­lock Module, the Multiple Docking Adapter, and the atm [Apollo Telescope Mount], which was basically the cluster, short of the Command Module.

“We worked very closely with jsc, and astronauts were very much involved in it. I can remember when we first started working with flight crew on the control panel on the atm, it seemed like we changed the configuration of the switches and the location of the switches by the week. Crew would come up, and they’d want it this way, and we’d fix it that way. Next week, they’d want it that way, we’d fix it that way.”

The decision to use an s-ivb stage as the basis for the workshop established its basic parameters, but the rough design for the station was formalized on 19 August 1966 in a meeting at Marshall Space Flight Center’s headquarters, Building 4200. Debate over the design of the station had been going on for some time. “That was the culmination of a series of meetings that we had,” Mueller said. “But we were not closing in.” During the meeting, Mueller did a quick sketch of what the space station was going to look like. The crude felt pen drawing on a flip chart showed the large cylindrical workshop with an Apollo spacecraft connected to it via a smaller docking cylinder. Connect­ed to the docking cylinder by a tether was an Apollo Telescope Mount solar observatory. Mueller had to leave the meeting early, but before the meeting adjourned, his deputy, Maj. Gen. David Jones, initialed it for him, and the sketch became law—NASA had a design for its space station.

George Hardy described the meeting in which Mueller introduced the cluster concept: “It was here at Marshall, again at a management council meeting, where again the primary subject was a lunar mission, and Skylab got tacked on to the end of the day for a little discussion. Mueller was great at that; he could take one meeting and put an add-on to it for something that he wanted to spend a lot of time on. That’s when he first introduced us to the so-called cluster concept. Because even though a lot of missions had been brought together and integrated, we still had a so-called orbital work­shop mission, and we still had an atm mission.

“So that’s when he got up from his chair, and he went up to a flipchart with a magic marker, and he actually drew the sketch. And General Jones, who was his deputy, came up and signed it. We [had] all kind of kidded about it, talked about it, and said ‘Is that our new specification?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s your new specification,’ and Jones got up and signed it. That’s what we got as our direction. That was the original direction. That really solidified the program.”

In 1965 NASA was still pursuing the wet workshop option, which was then seen as the best way to develop an orbital workshop program as quickly as possible. Mueller had been working to get a wet workshop-based space sta­tion into orbit as quickly as possible with an original target date set for ear­ly 1968, which would have established an orbital workshop during the ear­ly phase of the Apollo flight program. Everything changed though on 27 January 1967 with the Apollo 1 pad fire. During a routine rehearsal for their upcoming mission, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaf­fee were killed when a fire started in their spacecraft and spread rapidly in its pure oxygen atmosphere. “It obviously had a real effect. We were scram­bling to get AAP pulled together,” Mueller said. “That abruptly disappeared from the agenda.”

The delay allowed time to further think through the debate involving the wet and dry workshops. One of the arguments for the wet workshop program had been its perceived benefits in fast-tracking the workshop pro­gram, allowing it to begin concurrent with the early Apollo missions. After the fire, however, with the efforts to get Apollo back on track, aap became a lower priority in the agency. With the loss of that supposed advantage, the pros and cons of the debate received a closer look. Each side had its propo­nents. “The dry workshop was really pushed forward by a scientist, Hom­er Newell,” Belew said, adding that Newell was to heavily influence anoth­er major decision in the program as well. “Homer Newell insisted that we have two workshops, fully equipped. He insisted that we make them iden­tical in every way.” Newell was to get his way in that also; two workshops were built.

The astronaut office also came out in support of switching to the dry work­shop, largely at the recommendation of Apollo 7 astronaut Walt Cunning­ham, who had been the corps’ representative on Apollo Applications. “I give him credit for supporting it from our office,” said Skylab 11 commander Alan

Bean, who had been involved in Apollo Applications himself prior to being moved to the Apollo program, leading up to his assignment to Apollo 12. “He was the guy that was pushing to have it on a Saturn v and everything, which I thought was real great. And also I give him credit for going against the general office hierarchy position and convincing them that would be a better way. I think that’s good, too, if you can struggle against Deke [Slay­ton] and Al [Shepard] and others and turn out to be right.”

In addition to Gilruth another outspoken advocate of the wet workshop option was NASA spacecraft designer Max Faget, who had been instrumen­tal in the development of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo vehicles. “We

sort of pinned him down in one of our management council missions, and he backed off a little bit,” Belew said.

The debate culminated with Mueller’s hands-on experience in the neu­tral-buoyancy tank at Marshall. From that moment the future was set. Muel­ler made the recommendation to the agency’s administrator that the Apollo Applications Program space station be a dry workshop and be launched on a Saturn v. The announcement that his recommendation had been accept­ed was made on 22 July 1969, two days after the Apollo 11 moon landing. “Maybe my credibility went up enough [after the landing],” Mueller said. “After the fire, it took a while to get my credibility back.”

The decision was to prove one of the most vital, if not the single most important, turning points in the development of Skylab. It not only made the program possible by avoiding tasks that may have proved impossible, but it also gave the workshop new purpose. From that moment all the var­ious parts of what had been the diverse Apollo Applications Program mis­sions began becoming a part of one unified program—the space station. (It was in February 1970 that the consolidated space station program was giv­en the name “Skylab.” An Air Force employee working with nasa, Don­ald L. Steelman, had submitted the idea when the agency solicited sugges­tions. While other suggestions included such things as continuations of the mythological nomenclature used for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, Steel­man’s straightforward suggestion was based on the fact the facility would be a laboratory in the sky.)

What had been planned as an entire series of Apollo Applications space­flights could all be manifested aboard a single launch of a Saturn v. Missions included in the bailiwick of Apollo Applications included microgravity sci­ence, long-duration spaceflight, solar astronomy, and Earth observations. A number of the flights originally discussed were lunar missions, including continued surface exploration after the initial landings. These flights were later transferred to the Apollo program. Originally, each of those fields was to be conducted independently, each with its own flight program. The dry workshop decision allowed the series of dozens of flights to be consolidat­ed into just four—the launch of the Skylab space station and the three crew launches. Experiments that would have required numerous Saturn IB boost­ers to carry them into space were all launched on just one Saturn v.

While the consolidation of the various Apollo Applications plans into one facility was of huge benefit to the space station program, in retrospect Muel­ler believes it had a long-lasting detrimental effect on American spaceflight. Before the decision was made to use the Saturn v, he envisioned Apollo Appli­cations as an ongoing series of scientific missions. With the Saturn v, how­ever, that ongoing series was transformed into one complete package. As a result the focus shifted toward what would be included in that package and away from continuing research afterwards. “Unfortunately, that was when we quit,” he said. “It’s a great mistake to get an endpoint without working out what’s going to happen then. One thing I learned is you ought to have the next two generations in planning.”

Nonetheless, there is no question that the Saturn v and the dry workshop enabled a Skylab scientific program that would not have been possible other­wise. An example of the changes the use of the Saturn v enabled is the Apollo Telescope Mount, a battery of eight astronomical observation tools that was attached to the outside of the Skylab facility. “The atm started out as one of the aap ideas, which was a major telescope in space,” Mueller said.

The Apollo Telescope Mount, he said, had its roots in a conversation he had with an official from the Mount Wilson Observatory, during which Mueller noted that “with the Saturn v, we could put the Mount Wilson Observatory up in space, and really get some real good views. And that led to a number of different looks at space observation. The atm came from that kind of set of thoughts.” Mueller said the subsequent research and devel­opment served as the foundation for the work that later led to other space – based observatories including the Hubble Space Telescope.

Though that conversation and the atm played an important role in the history of space telescopes, the idea of the space telescope predated them. In 1946 eleven years before Sputnik became the first object placed in Earth orbit, astronomer Lyman Spitzer Jr. wrote a paper in which he proposed that a telescope placed in orbit, beyond the interference of Earth’s atmosphere, would be able to perform observations superior to a terrestrial facility.

Originally, the Apollo Telescope Mount missions were not going to be a part of the space station program. Instead an orbital observatory was to be used in a series of independent Apollo missions. In keeping with the phi­losophy of the Apollo Applications Program, the atm was intended to make use of existing Apollo hardware and was originally designed to incorporate the telescopes into a free-flying spacecraft. There was a debate as to which

3- An early concept for a nonstation-based Apollo Telescope Mount.

existing Apollo spacecraft should be used to carry the telescopes: the Ser­vice Module or the Lunar Module. Some argued that it would be cheap­er and easier to integrate the atm into the Service Module. Mueller though was dedicated to the idea of eventually using the then-still-in-development Lunar Module as a multipurpose space-based laboratory and saw the atm as a step toward that goal. In addition the Lunar Module provided another advantage. While the Service Module reentered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up when the Command Module landed, the Lunar Module could remain in orbit. This meant that while a Service Module-based atm would have a maximum life span of a fourteen-day Apollo mission, a Lunar Mod­ule-based facility could be reused. However, concerns were raised about the idea of a free-flying atm, arguing that it would be unsafe for the astro­nauts involved. Since the Lunar Module was designed for descent to the sur­face of the airless moon, it was incapable of operating within Earth’s atmo­sphere and would not withstand reentry. If a problem developed during a free-flying Lunar Module-based atm mission, the crew would be trapped, unable to return to Earth.

In order to avoid this dangerous situation, the proposal was made to incor­porate the Apollo Telescope Mount into the orbital workshop program.

When plans still centered on a wet workshop, this would have required sep­arate launches. The Saturn IB that would carry the s-ivb stage into orbit would not be able to carry the telescope mount as well. Instead, the atm would still be configured as a separate free-flying spacecraft, which would be launched later and would then rendezvous with the workshop. With the decision to go with the dry workshop and the introduction of the Saturn v to the equation, however, this became unnecessary. The larger booster was capable of carrying the atm into orbit along with the station. As a result, the atm no longer needed to be designed as an independent spacecraft but could be incorporated into Skylab.

The evolution of the Apollo Telescope Mount contributed to the devel­opment of another of Skylab’s modules. Though not needed for this pur­pose in the final configuration of the station, Skylab’s Multiple Docking Adapter was originally intended to support the atm. When the decision was initially made to incorporate the telescope into the space station program, mission planners were unsure exactly how to do this, since they weren’t sure how to attach the atm craft to the station. The proposal was made to tether the telescope mount spacecraft to the workshop, essentially floating freely but “tied” to the station. However, this would also have suffered from some of the disadvantages of the independent Apollo Telescope Mount missions and was thus still considered too dangerous.

To avoid that situation, the docking adapter was developed—essentially an empty metal cylinder with ports for multiple spacecraft to dock with the station. This would provide a place for not only the Apollo spacecraft crew taxi to dock with the facility but the atm spacecraft as well, allowing astro­nauts to transfer easily between the workshop and the observatory. With the use of the Saturn v, however, this too became unnecessary. Since the Apollo Telescope Mount was to be attached to Skylab at launch, there was no longer any need for a docking port for it.

However, mission planners realized that the docking adapter could still be beneficial to the space station. Since it would allow two Apollo space­craft to be docked with Skylab at the same time, it could be used if there were ever a need for a rescue mission. As it turned out, the second docking port was never needed, and the module ended up being used primarily for the additional enclosed volume it provided.

Another decision that Mueller said had a major impact on Skylab—and

a lasting impact on human spaceflight—was the involvement of the Ray­mond Loewy/William Snaith, an industrial design firm, which looked at human factors on the space station. Loewy, who was seventy-four years old when approached to work on the space station, was a legend in the field of industrial design, having had a hand in everything from Coke bottles to office buildings.

Mueller described Loewy’s effect on the program, “One of the things that probably people don’t appreciate is, early on, I took a look at what Marshall was planning to do with Skylab, and I said, ‘I don’t think people are going to want to live there.’ I said we needed to get a human factors genius. So I got them to bring Raymond Loewy to really take a look at how to make it habitable. And I must say I think he had a positive effect on the design and probably had a lasting effect on how to go about designing for space liv­ing. His contributions to livability were one of the keys to the success of the Skylab.” Loewy’s contributions were “mostly man-machine interface – type things,” everything from a warmer color scheme for the interior of the station to a more agreeable design for its toilet system. Skylab’s ward­room —the area where the crew could eat, relax, and take care of routine tasks—was another of Loewy’s suggestions. Mueller said that Loewy later told him that his work on Skylab was one of the accomplishments of which he was most proud.

Not all of Loewy’s recommendations were readily received, however. “He wanted a window,” Mueller said, but he was unable to get engineers to agree that it was worth carving a hole in the side of the s-ivb stage for it. “He tried convincing them.”

According to George Hardy, however, concerns about the crew’s happi­ness on the station eventually won out: “I know of one meeting that was quite amusing. This was when we were in the process of going from the wet workshop to the dry workshop, and it was a meeting at Kennedy [Space Cen­ter in Florida], a management council meeting. It was a week or so before one of the latter lunar missions. [The workshop] got put on the agenda; it was just an add-on late at the end of the day. It wasn’t the major focus; not too many people interested in it. But von Braun and Mueller wanted to talk about it, so they did. Bob Gilruth acknowledged the subject, but he didn’t have a lot to say about it. He still had some lunar missions to work. So the discussion was we’re going to keep this simple. We’re not going to do a lot of things to modify this hardware; we’re going to do minimum modifica­tions on it and so forth. And we had some artist’s concepts of an s-ivb stage that could be inhabited in some way.

“And von Braun got up in the discussion; this was late in the evening, maybe 6:30, 7:00 or so. And anyway, von Braun got a little carried away with it, ’cause he was so excited about it. He went up to one of the sketches that was on the board and said, ‘We can put a porthole right here where the crew can see out.’ And Gilruth said, ‘Yeah, there we go, now we’re going to modify the whole thing.’

“So Mueller kind of called the meeting to a halt, and he said, ‘Well, it’s getting about cocktail time.’ He wanted to keep those two apart, so he worked on both of them, I think, that evening. Then came back the next day, and everybody was back together again. And after all that, they got a window.”

The process of making the decisions regarding the project that became Skylab proved to be more complicated than implementing those decisions. “I can’t think of one thing that I’d say was a real hard task,” Hardy said. The biggest challenge came not in the process of the engineering work for any one component or system but in integrating all the components together.

And in order for the systems to work together, the people responsible for them had to work together as well. “I used to tell my people that the tech­nical integration of the hardware was about 30 percent of the job, and the integration of the people was about 70 percent of the job,” Hardy said. “To me, that was one of the most fun things about Skylab, the integration part of it. You had the integration of two centers that had worked together, but worked together in a much different way on this program.”

Working to integrate those two centers, Hardy said, is one of the things he’s most proud of in the role he played in Skylab. “This was going to be the first manned spacecraft that was going to be operated in space with msc astronauts, of course, and msc flight controllers and that was designed and built under another center. The tradition and the history was that the flight controllers started getting involved, not necessarily at the very beginning of the design but in the design process, such that flight operations require­ments flowed into the design and development in a very real way in much the same way as flight crew requirements.” About a year before the launch of Skylab, the Marshall engineering team realized that while there had been some collaboration with the Houston operations team, it had not occurred on the scale that it would have on a program handled entirely in-house at the Houston center. Hardy got in touch with Gene Kranz, chief of Flight Operations at msc, and planned a massive review process, which lasted around three or four months. “For each major system area, like crew sys­tems, instrumentation, electrical systems, propulsion systems, we took the designers of that system, whether they be Marshall guys or [contractors] or whatever, and the operators, the msc guys who were going to handle pri­mary flight operations, and we put those people together with some struc­ture to the review but a lot of opportunities for interaction and questions and discussions, and conducted these reviews.”

The review process provided two major benefits. First, it enabled the two teams to provide feedback to identify and correct problems so that they wouldn’t arise after the station had already been launched. But in addition the process provided a second benefit. When the mission controllers had problems or questions during the operational phase of Skylab, they were able to ask them of engineers whom they had met face-to-face and worked alongside. Those relationships had developed naturally on spacecraft pro­grams managed entirely in-house at msc but had to be forged deliberately on such an unprecedented cross-center program.

“That was very, very effective,” Hardy said. “I think because of that, we developed a relationship with flight operations people that was invaluable during the course of the mission, and I think it paid off from Day i, when we lost the heat shield. And then of course the continued operations of Sky – lab were again a testament to the centers working together.”

Those continued operations required that Marshall, which had already been providing engineering support to mission controllers for the boosters it managed, greatly increase its operations support efforts. Hardy began dis­cussing with Kranz what would be needed for this project. The two quick­ly reached the opinion that the level of support that would be required was much greater than either center had realized.

Hardy set about gearing up the Huntsville Operations Support Center (hosc ) at Marshall to provide twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week engineering support for the operations team at msc, setting up a three-shift – a-day rotation schedule, with a fourth shift set up to give the other three time off.

In addition to the integration of the two groups from the two centers, the teamwork between NASA civil servants and contractors proved to be vital to the success of the engineering support efforts. Hardy cited as an example contractors from IBM, which worked on the atm and the instrument unit. While NASA had three senior civil servants (as it worked out, one for each shift) with expertise in the gyroscopes used to control Skylab’s orientation, most of the know-how for the gyros on the operations support team resid­ed with the IBM contractors, and that knowledge proved extremely useful as the program progressed.

“We got down to losing rate gyros and losing control moment gyros,” Har­dy said. “And those guys, along with the Marshall guys, would come in with different control schemes that just a week before we said would be impossi­ble. We’d say, ‘If we lose this rate gyro, then we’re done.’ And we would lose it, and they’d come in with a control scheme that would work. The greater the demand got for more ingenuity in that area, the more they produced.”

None of that is to say, though, that the relationship between the two cen­ters in the area of operations was always seamless. While Marshall and msc would eventually establish good working guidelines for what responsibil­ities fell into which bailiwick, there were a few snags that had to be ironed out in the process of reaching that point. msc director Chris Kraft recalls his involvement in making sure that the program made the best use of each center’s strengths: “As we in Flight Operations began to come to grips with Skylab and the fact that we were going to be responsible for taking care of it and the astronauts who would be involved, several sticky issues came to light. In typical msec fashion, they had set up what they intended to be their own flight operations group with the intent of flying the machine them­selves. There is no doubt in my mind that they saw this as their opportuni­ty to get directly involved in manned spaceflight.

“They were building what they perceived as their own Mission Control Center [mcc] . This became obvious as their budget submissions were made and in their relationships with us. When this became apparent, I challenged this at both the management council meetings and directly with the man­agement at msec. I don’t think headquarters was willing to support this approach, but I wasn’t about to sit still for what I saw as an infringement on the center responsibility (roles and missions). The lead manager for msec in their flight control work was Fridtjof A. Speer. Fred, as we addressed him,

was a typical German from the old school. That is he was very competent, knew his business, but was equally stubborn in his approach to the issue. He had obviously been given his marching orders and was adamant about taking over this aspect of the program.

“After several meetings with him and his engineers, it was obvious we would have to confront him head on, and we did. He insisted that it was msec’s responsibility to do the flight control on all of the hardware they were responsible for, and he intended to carry out these functions. I and my people were equally adamant that msc was responsible for all NASA manned spaceflight control and that we intended to control Skylab from the mcc in Houston. It took a number of months to bring this to a point where head­quarters recognized the duplication of effort going on here, and I’m sure the press of the budget for operations activities finally forced their hand to step in and adjudicate the issue. Speer did not give up easily, but I think Eber – hard Rees recognized they would lose this argument and directed Speer to cooperate.

“From the beginning we had made it clear that we had no objections to msec having their people familiar with the various Skylab systems perform these flight control functions in the Houston mcc. Speer, after a direct meet­ing with me on this subject, finally agreed to this concept. Even so, Hunts­ville Operations Center spent a lot of NASA’s money on an elaborate set up and manned it throughout the program. As might be expected, as the time for detail flight control training became imminent, Speer backed away from having his people in Houston full-time and had the msec rep in Houston fulfill most of these responsibilities. We ran the program, but msec had their Hose operational practically full-time. In all fairness, Fred Speer supported the mcc very well and spent a lot of time there personally throughout the program. He was also very helpful in the conduct of the missions.”

In one of the more interesting aspects of the relationship between the two centers, the materials laboratory at Marshall Space Flight Center essential­ly took on the role of primary contractor to the Houston center on some of the biomedical experiments. The Manned Spacecraft Center had sought a company interested in developing and building the flight hardware for the experiments but found none willing to take on the work. “They couldn’t get anybody to take that research on to build the bicycle ergometer and

the metabolic analyzer, because industry viewed it as a one-shot,” said Bob Schwinghamer, who was the head of the Marshall materials lab. “They didn’t know what the potential was for it, and hell, they didn’t want to do all that stuff. So von Braun goes down there and tells Gilruth, ‘Yeah, we can do that for you.’ Those guys in Houston just couldn’t get anybody inter­ested. But von Braun could do anything. ‘Yeah, we can do that.’ He was something else.

“So he calls me up there in the office one day, and he’s got the project man­ager from here [Lee Belew] sitting in there with him. And he said, ‘Bob, we want you to build some biomedical experiments. I want you to deal direct­ly with Houston on this. Go to [msc’s Skylab program manager] Kenny Kleinknecht and whoever the doctor is down there.’ He looks at Lee, and said, ‘Lee, I want to do it this way ’cause I want to cut all the horseshit paper­work out of this in between.’ And we were off and running the next day.”

The msfc materials lab was tasked with developing and building the low­er body negative pressure device, the bicycle ergometer, and the biomedi­cal experiment support system. While he sent his Marshall superiors cour­tesy copies of his paperwork, Schwinghamer said things worked well with his lab reporting directly to officials at msc on the work. “It got to where they were demanding a report once a month,” he said. “And that was pretty frequently when you’re trying to build hardware. So one time, I told John Massey, ‘Go right in the middle, and leave thirty-two pages out, and ship it.’ And so he shipped it. Then I waited a couple of days, and I called down there and said ‘What did you think of that last report?’ They said, ‘Every­thing’s all right, just keep it coming.’ I said, ‘You didn’t worry about the thir­ty-two pages missing in the middle?’ We both had a big laugh. After that, things got a lot easier.”

Schwinghamer noted that private business missed out on a great oppor­tunity by not developing some of the equipment. The metabolic analyzer that his team built proved to have Earth-bound applications for doctors, who used it for tests on patients. “That spin-off turned out to be a pretty good thing,” he said. “But they just weren’t interested.”

It was during work on a urine sample volume measuring system that Schwinghamer first developed a relationship with a man who was to pro­vide him with some rather unique—but ultimately invaluable—assistance. “One day, a guy called up, Bill Thornton,” Schwinghamer said. “He says on

the phone, very innocently, ‘I’d like to help you if I could.’ I said, ‘I’m look­ing for any help I can get.’ What can I say?”

Thornton was a member of the sixth group of astronauts selected, the second group of scientist astronauts. Even before joining the corps though, Thornton already had a background in spaceflight and specifically in micro­gravity biomedical research, having performed research for both NASA and the Air Force’s space program. A brilliant researcher and a physically pow­erful man, Thornton proved quite capable of both building equipment dur­ing the development phase and breaking it during the testing phase. His tall, muscular build contributed to his distinctive ability for finding poten­tial bugs by pushing equipment to—and past—the breaking point, which would play an important role in the Skylab program.

The materials lab had been working to try to figure out how much vol­ume the urine system should be able to handle. “I had some really good people,” Schwinghamer said. “I even had some biologists in my lab. And I thought, ‘Okay, how much volume should it handle?’ And nobody seemed to know.”

The male members of the materials lab workforce were called upon to help determine the answer. Cups were placed in the men’s room, and the staff was asked to use those cups whenever they needed to urinate. Each worker initialed his cups so that his daily output could be tracked. They were then asked to estimate how their output at home in the evening compared to the amount being measured at work.

“We did the means and standard deviation of the cup and added a third or something,” Schwinghamer said. “Over a sample of fifty-sixty people, I came up with a mean and a standard deviation, and I took the mean, and added three standard deviations, and it came out to be about 900 to 920 cc [cubic centimeters], just under a liter. And Thornton comes up, and guess what, he pees 1,200. He peed 1,200, and I had to redesign the damn thing.”

It would not be the last time Thornton would send one of the Schwing – hamer’s lab’s projects back to the drawing board. “Then he said, ‘I’d like to look at this bicycle ergometer you’re doing.’ And I thought, ‘Oh man, I’m in trouble,’ ” Schwinghamer said. “So I took him back to the lab, and Dr. Ray Gauss was working on it back there, doing a good job. He had that feed­back circuit so he could maintain a constant heart rate and all that stuff and adjust the torque on the pedals automatically. Thornton gets on that, and what does he do, he breaks the shaft holding the pedals.” The team went back and increased the thickness of the pedal shaft from a half-inch to five – eighths of an inch. “And that was enough, he couldn’t break that one. He tried like hell, but he couldn’t break that one.” (Thornton would have a con­tinuing relationship with the bicycle ergometer later in the program, how­ever, during which he picked up some unfinished business with it.)

“He was something else,” Schwinghamer said. “But you know what, I’m glad he was there. That stuff functioned flawlessly. I kept an eye on how the biomeds were doing [during flight], and they did very well. Nobody report­ed any deficiencies or malfunctions even. And I always thought, ‘Thornton, you did me a big favor, buddy.’ He was a ninety-ninth percentile man. If he couldn’t break it, nobody could break it. The guys out in the lab, they’d say, ‘Hey Pop, when’s King Kong coming back?’—they called him King Kong.

“After it was all said and done and over and the missions were accom­plished, I thought, I don’t know if everything would have functioned that flawlessly without having him really run it through its paces. And he did the job superbly. He was a good one.”

In theory, countdowns are pretty straightforward things—time goes by, and the launch gets closer. For quite a while, however, that didn’t seem to be the case with Skylab. Time would pass, but the launch would get no clos­er, something that became known as “the T minus one year phenomena,” Flight director Phil Shaffer recalled, “Lots of us, as Apollo started stretch­ing out, would finish an Apollo thing, and then we’d go work on Skylab for awhile. And when we came back to it, it was still T minus one year. Part of it was this craziness with the funding, but it was like they couldn’t get their act together to decide what they were going to go fly. It really got to be a joke. ‘Maybe we’ll get to work on the Shuttle, and it will still be T minus one year.’ We weren’t making any progress. We’d go away for two or three months and work on the next Apollo flight, and we’d come back, and the schedule would have been reworked, and we were at T minus one year again. It seemed like it just went on forever. It was never going to be anything oth­er than T minus one year.”

Finally, though, the countdown did tick away. The Marshall materials lab was to perform one of the last steps in the development and construction of Skylab. “Three days before liftoff, somebody noticed that we didn’t have an American flag on Skylab,” Schwinghamer said. “So somebody said, ‘Oh hell, that’s no problem. We’ll just make a nylon flag and stick it on there with Velcro.’ I said, ‘Nylon? You gotta be kidding me. You ever have your nylon – covered chair sitting out in the sun? That ain’t gonna work.’ ”

Among the equipment in the lab was a solar irradiator, which could not only simulate the light and radiation produced by the sun but could be turned up to levels several times greater than actual exposure levels expe­rienced at Earth. Schwinghamer had some nylon tested in the machine at a ten-sun level. “In about two hours, the nylon crapped out,” he said. “So I knew that wasn’t going to work.

“I had this boat that I used in the Gulf of Mexico to fish all the time, about a twenty-footer, white,” he said. “And I had found this paint, and you could buy it in the paint store in Huntsville. So I gave the guy some money. I said, ‘Go down and get red, white and blue. I know that stuff can stand the ultraviolet.’ So he did that, and we started building the flag.”

The team used the paint to create a flag on a thin sheet of aluminum. The completed flag was then tested in the solar irradiator at ten suns, but did not change color.

“Two days before launch, they flew it down there and stuck it on the side with Velcro,” he said. “It didn’t come off in flight, either. That was anoth­er thing everybody got excited about, but that Velcro hung in there like gangbusters.”

Schwinghamer recalls informing the owner of the store of the unusual application of his paint. “I went back after it was in orbit, and I said, ‘Hey, you know what, your paint’s in orbit on the Skylab.’ ‘Oh, is that right?’ He didn’t think a thing of it. I’ll be. Can you imagine: paint from a little old paint store in Huntsville, Alabama, is in orbit, and he doesn’t think a thing about it.”

What is it like living in space, not just visiting for a little while but actually setting up a home and living and working there for two months? Beyond the novel and unique circumstances encountered immediately, what is day-to­day life like as a “resident in orbit”? In other words what is it like to “home­stead space”? And, when you return to Earth, how do you hang on to an accurate memory of the unique experiences you’ve lived through?

For two members of the Skylab 11 crew, the best way to remember the details of their homesteading adventure was to maintain an in-flight diary. It would have to be done in the minimal time available after all the science and other work was accomplished. Yet both commander Alan Bean and sci­ence pilot Owen Garriott maintained a journal during their time on Sky – lab, preserving not only a chronology of mission events but also a personal record of their thoughts and impressions during their stay in space.

“We launched and arrived at Skylab on July 28, 1973, called Mission Day i,” Garriott explained. “As you may imagine, we were pretty busy at first and even though I hoped to make entries in my in-flight diary every day, some days were just too full. Still, as I reread the entries today, now over three decades later, the mission flow and a sense of continuity remain. It was actually Mis­sion Day 4, or July 31, before I had a chance to make my first entry.”

Alan Bean wrote in his journal after going to bed at night, as a way to wind down his day. Neither of his fellow crewmembers was even aware of the existence of this diary at the time—nor, for that matter, until more than thirty-two years later when he contributed it for this book.

(The excerpts from the Bean diary in this chapter have been modified with direction from Bean, for the sake of clarity. The entire diary is repro­duced in unabridged form as an appendix.)

Alan’s first writing was done on Day 10 (6 August 1973), although he starts by referring back to events prior to launch:

Bean, md-i:

Launch Day. I am writing this in the morning of day io. Could not sleep, eva today, so thought I might catch up. Slept well early tonight [the night before launch], took Seconal and hit the bed about 7pm, so did Jack and Owen. Awak­ened on time by Al Shepard. He andDeke [Slayton] kept track of us the last few weeks more than usual. This has mixed blessings…. First there were the micro­biological samples. Then physical. Then eat. . . . . Al Shepard rides with us in van as far as the Launch Control Center. I watched him because he held the rdz [rendezvous] book—when he got up to get off, he forgot [to leave the book] and I had to ask. On the way he told us he was our last minute back up—he then mentioned John Glenn having his suit at the suit room prior to Al’s first flight [ready to take Al’s place].

Despite the thruster problems during their approach and rendezvous phase, the SL-3 crew was able to dock with Skylab with no further prob­lems. The hatch was opened, and Skylab became the first spacecraft to be lived in by two different crews.

Lousma described his first moments in his new space home: “I remember being in the Multiple Docking Adapter, in which everything was oriented around the circumference. And I never did figure that out for two months.” Most of the architecture in the workshop, including the lower deck used for experiment and living areas, had a normal Earth-like configuration, where there was an “up” and “down” as on the ground. But when an astronaut floated through the Airlock Module or the Multiple Docking Adapter, he was never sure what orientation to expect. It always required examination of the experiments mounted around the circumference to get in the proper position to operate the hardware.

Very shortly after the crew entered the Skylab, though, a new problem arose. As they began settling into the station, the symptoms of space sick­ness began to be felt.

Garriott, MD-4 (9:30 p. m. on 31 July):

Writing in “mid-air"— difficult!—First day, thru rendezvous, no noticeable or unexpected symptoms, altho didn’t want much to eat. After rendezvous I began working in the md/ows, did notice symptoms of “stomach awareness". Jack did become sick, but problem with adaptation not fully realized.

By md-2, wanted almost nothing to eat & intermittently became very queasy.

Believe I had one Scop-Dex that evening & an hour later began considerable improvement in feeling & outlook. Still not hungry. Jack sick several times ear­ly, then got on Scop-Dex with some improvement. Al usually pretty active but indicates problems with too much head movement. Message arrives saying take Scop-Dex tomorrow & if start, take another one every 4 hours. On this day (md – 2), I do ~jo min of head movements after pill. Jack & Al don’t [do head move­ments], altho they took drug.

NASA was already well aware of the possibility of “space sickness,” but the fact that the first Skylab crew did not encounter much if any space sick­ness may have led people to think that it might not be encountered on later flights as well. “My diary concentrates on the ‘stomach awareness’ or ‘space sickness’ for several reasons,” Garriott explained. “It was a major objective of the flight experimentation to find out the degree of discomfort and hope­fully how to minimize or avoid its occurrence entirely. We were equipped with the best medication available at the time, pills of scopolamine/Dexe – drine, which we had all tried before flight in situations challenging to one’s vestibular system. For example, in aircraft ‘zero-G flights,’ which make many or even most passengers (including experienced pilots) nauseous, a ‘Scop – Dex’ capsule will usually eliminate any tendency to become sick to one’s stomach. We had a rotating chair on board Skylab, tested preflight many times. Anyone with a normal vestibular system is essentially guaranteed to vomit when exaggerated head movement coupled with rapid chair rotation is continued for ten or fifteen minutes!”

Lousma had the most immediate problem with nausea, followed by Gar­riott, and then Bean. The crew was supposed to begin promptly the process of reactivating Skylab after its period of dormancy following the first crew’s departure, but the symptoms they were experiencing made getting much done quickly a daunting prospect.

“I started not feeling good when I took my suit off in the Command Mod­ule,” Lousma said. “We didn’t take any medications before we left because we didn’t want to slow our reactions, and I didn’t expect to feel bad. But when I took off my suit, I started not to feel so good. When I got into the space station, the Skylab, I didn’t feel any worse until I really started mov­ing around. But when I started to work, and getting things unstowed and set up, then I started feeling like my ‘gyros’ were going around and around. I thought, ‘If it’s going to be like this for two months, it’s going to be a long two months!’ ”

The problem, Lousma added, got worse the more he moved around but would abate somewhat when he rested. “I think probably the best cure was to recover to the point where you don’t feel so bad and then strike out again until you did. Every time you could last a bit longer before you had a prob­lem with it. For about two days, I felt just a little bit of vertigo. But I contin­ually improved. I think the thing that was most debilitating was, because I didn’t feel good, I stopped eating for a while. I just didn’t feel like eating. So I think I got behind the power curve in terms of energy—just didn’t have enough nourishment—and it took a little time to build that back up.”

The mission commander’s experience was much the same. “We all got kind of upset stomachs to different degrees,” Bean recalled. “If I would be still, then it would gradually go away. But then I wouldn’t be doing any work. So my feeling was, if I would stay still, then I felt okay, but you couldn’t acti­vate the workshop that way. I would work as much as I could, and when I’d zoom around and unpack, pretty soon I’d start feeling an upset stomach. So I’d just have to slow down. It just took a lot longer. I never did vomit, but if I’d kept going, I would have.”

Bean also recalled that not only did the symptoms slow work down but they made the thought of eating unappealing. Since the crew was going to have to eat, doctors on the ground recommended that they try eating four or five smaller meals a day to see if it would be easier to get through their dai­ly menu with it divided up into smaller portions. Bean was disappointed at the prospect of a work pace already slowed by nausea being further reduced by having to stop frequently for meals. “I kept wondering if the nausea was going to be like this for the whole fifty-six days,” he said. “I kept thinking, we can do it but it’s sure going to slow down what we want to do. We had all these plans of activating the workshop real quick and getting right to pro­ductive experimental work. We wanted to be the best we could be as a team, and so this was distressing, and yet, that’s the best we could do.”

Lousma recalled, “We all kind of helped the other guy out, and I was prob­ably the guy that needed more help than anybody. But we worked togeth­er to do the things we needed to do to get situated. And sure enough, after about five days we got well, and we could just zip around and do our jobs and everything.”

The problem kept the crew from getting the start they would have liked on their work, but it did not affect their relationship with Mission Control.

“We were also honest with the ground,” Bean noted, “even though it was a little embarrassing; we thought of ourselves as a ‘right stuff’ crew, and ‘right stuff’ astronauts don’t get sick! Later, when our flight was over, we proved that ‘right stuff’ crews can get sick, provided they find a way to overcome it and perform well before they come back to Earth.”

In addition to their vestibular concerns, the crewmen noticed other phys­iological changes, including some involving bodily functions of considerable interest to elementary school children, judging by their inevitable questions to astronaut speakers about these matters. “Of course, in reality, everyone has these questions in mind, but it is only the uninhibited children who bring up the issue immediately,” Garriott noted.

Bean, MD-3:

We are farting a lot but not belching much —Joe Kerwin said we would have to learn to handle lots of gas.

Got to stop responding to ground so fast and just dropping what I am doing— causes us to run behind on the time line. Do not know just what to do about this. . . .

Still losing a lot of things, too big a hurry. Wish the flight planners would let up. The time taken to trouble shoot the condensate system shoots this whole time­line. Got to stay on schedule.

The intestinal gas issue was not a direct effect of spaceflight itself as it was also encountered by the smeat crew on Earth. The cause is more likely that the human body generates a certain mass of gas depending on one’s diet, and in a low pressure environment (5 psi in Skylab and smeat versus 14.7 psi on Earth at sea level), the gas expands to about triple its normal volume.

Garriott, MD-3:

On MD-y everyone improving but still slow & inefficient. Incidentally, we have all been working from 0800 till 2200—2400, with almost no breaks. Only a few minutes devoted to looking out window (Fantastic —Gulf of Mex, Hou <—> Yucatan; Pacific Coast, Hawaiian Isl, Mediterranean], etc!) Believe we each had 2 Scop-Dex. Seemed comfortable, except at meals. Meals are bad for every­one. No one sick, Jack worked all day, with difficulty. eva day keeps slipping!

While the crew was able to go about most of its assigned tasks, albeit more slowly than planned during those first couple of days, changes had to be made regarding another major task — an eva that had been scheduled for Mission Day 4. “The ground controllers were most sympathetic to our problems, and we all agreed that we should slip our first eva day until we were feeling bet­ter,” Garriott said. “It could be a disaster if either of the two eva crewmen, Jack or I at first, were to vomit while outside in our pressure suits.”

Though their trip outside was delayed, the crew was gradually becoming more efficient at the work to be done inside the station and to get caught up had already started working extended hours (something that was to be a theme throughout their stay on Skylab). Still they took rare opportunities to appreciate the unique vista their accommodations accorded.

“An early surprise for me came on MD-3 when I was not yet used to the great distance to the horizon in all directions,” Garriott recalled. “We had just passed over Houston, where our homes and families were located, and I was watching out our wardroom window to see all the familiar terrain pass beneath us—the large white buildings at the Manned Spacecraft Center (appearing as small dots), the freeway to Galveston, Clear Lake where the whole family enjoyed (sometimes!) small boat sailing races. It all was past my view in only a few minutes, when I looked toward the top of the ward­room window and there was an island in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico! But there are no large islands in the Gulf! I immediately realized that my field of view extended all the way from Houston to Yucatan, the ‘island’ I was now viewing.”

Garriott, MD-4:

Supposed to be a day off, altho MD-3 was too. No one took Scop-Dex. Al & I very near normal, Jack much improved. We all went thru m-ijiprotocol [experi­ment on metabolic activity] on bike, w/o instrumentation & no bike mods. I did 30 head movements of131 type [vestibular function experiment], w/ no effects. Believe my vestibular system nearly adapted after ~j2 hrs, certainly almost so. Appetite improved, but still not good. Had to force down a filet tonight. Whew! Paul B. [flight physician Dr. Paul Buchanan] hadgood news for later meals—eat what/when we want.

As the ground-based pi s (principal investigators) wanted all the vomit and fecal material to be returned for postflight analysis, it was all placed in sterile bags and inserted into a specially designed pressure-tight enclosure that could be both warmed and vented to a vacuum. In this way all water

was evaporated in a few hours, leaving a dry and easily managed residue for return to the ground.

Bean, MD-4:

Jack was taking a cooked fecal bag out of the dryer— laughing— here is a real nice ripe one. I said, bet you are a goodpizza cook. No, said Jack, pancakes. We had too many fecals and vomitus bags to cook—

MD-5:

We’re in extremely high spirits today, first day we allfeel good. Owen said that today we ought to ask for a reduction in our insurance rates because we were no longer running the risk of drowning or auto accident.

The crew had run the lbnp (lower body negative pressure) experiment on Day 5, which subjected their bodies to stress similar to what would be expected when standing erect back on Earth, and all did pretty well. Now that everyone was feeling better, it was time to reschedule the spacewalk. Day 6 seemed about right, and plans were set in motion. Those plans, how­ever, fell through when the second thruster leak was discovered. As the crew and the ground worked to determine the cause and implications of the sec­ond thruster failure, the eva was once again delayed, this time until Day 10. In the meantime, life and work on Skylab continued.

Garriott, md-8:

Yesterday we all felt perfectly fine. Fully adapted & enjoying 0g Appetites improv­ing but not up to normal, and “weights" (or, more accurately, body mass) sta­ble for several days.

Their vestibular problems were far enough in the past that the crewmem­bers were enjoying the experience of weightlessness. They were also work­ing to get caught up after having fallen behind schedule during their days of malaise, undertaking all of the tasks they were able to do. The crew could accomplish all the medical experiments and Earth resources protocols, but the solar physics agenda was greatly constrained because most of the cam­eras required film that could only be replaced by eva.

“On md-9, we accomplished two of the Earth resources operations,” Gar­riott said, “which was kind of a big deal because it required a major change of Skylab’s attitude in space. The whole station was reoriented with use of the large control moment gyros and pointed toward the Earth instead of

33. Garriott exercises with the cycle ergometer.

the sun. We worked these experiments early, since we still had no film in the solar cameras.”

Bean, MD-9:

Left sal [Scientific Airlock] vent open last night after water dump. Thought I was so good at it, did not use check list—fooled because this was first night with­out experiment in sal. [Skylab featured two Scientific Airlocks, which allowed small experiments to be exposed to vacuum outside the spacecraft. One, on the “sun-side” of the station, was used for the sun-shield parasol, and couldn’t be used for experiments the rest of the mission. The other, on the opposite side of Skylab, could still be used.]

Owen let Arabella out of the vial. She had been in there since days prior to launch. She had not come out so Owen got the vial off the cage, opened the door, shook her out where she immediately bounced back andforth, front to back, four or five times, then locked onto screen panels at the box edge provided for visu – alization-there she sits clutching the screen. Owen and I talked of giving spi­der food because she has not moved one halfday. Owen said “no” because when she gets hungry is when she spins her web. She can live two-three weeks with­out if she has to.

First back-to-back erep. Jack [looked for] Lake Michigan. But got Baltimore instead. Or Washington, his prime site.

Saw what we thought was a salt flat but turned out to be a glacier in Chile. We could see Cape Horn—Cape Horn and Good Hope all in one day, fantastic.

Owen wanted to know if we had tried to urinate upside-down in the head [the waste management compartment]. He said it is psychologically tough. Jack said he tried it and he peed right in his eye.

Diving thru workshop different than in water— here the speed that you move (translate) is controlled entirely by your push off so for some spins or flips, you can have a V2, 1У2, 2 V2, 3 V2, etc. body rotations. Difficult to push off straight and to get spins you want. You must watch your progress as you spin—it’s tough to learn but to keep from hitting objects, it’s a must.

It was a great day —first back to back erep and it came off perfect. Jack and Owen good spirits for eva tomorrow—we worked all afternoon and evening on prep, much more fun than on Earth in ig.

Owen worked 22 hours today because he counted his sleep cap time. Every day is filled with memorable experiences—sights, sounds, emotions, hope, fear, cour­age, friendship. I just wish we could go home to our wives at night.

My urine volume lower than Owen and Jack. Been drinking a lot but must do better. Been concentrating on eating too much. Owen said meals were the high point of a day on Earth and here too. Only difference is there it’s the start, up here it’s when you finish.

I cut a hole in the bottom of my sleeping bag near the feet — too hot, had to tie a knot to keep from freezing in the early morning.

Heard about leak in am [Airlock Module] primary and secondary cooling loop. Pri should last ij days and secondary 60 days. Wondering what ingenious fix they will come up with [on the ground].

No csm master alarm today. Almost a “no mistake"day.

Arabella and Anita became well-known names in 1973. The public was enthralled by the two “cross spiders” prepared for spaceflight by a high- school student in Massachusetts, Judith Miles. “Fortunately, ‘cross’ refers to a large mark on their backs, and not to their disposition,” Garriott remarked. Miles proposed an experiment to study their method of web formation in weightlessness, which is a clue to their mental activity as they adapted to the microgravity environment. Arabella was released into her fully enclosed box from the small metal container about the size of one’s thumb. Her initial webs were very scruffy-looking, but every day they improved after she con­sumed the last one and spun a new one. The webs finally ended up looking

every bit as good as they would in an Earthly garden. Despite Bean’s con­cerns, the spiders remained healthy, and after about three weeks Arabella was returned to her container and Anita released. She proceeded to exhib­it the same behavior as Arabella, even after being cooped up in that small container for about a month.

“I remember when we got Arabella out,” Lousma said. “This was Owen’s job; he’s the scientist. We hooked up this box with this open door. He said, ‘Hey, Jack, how about helping me get this spider.’ So we got the spider out. And it didn’t know where it was, the poor spider. Finally, she figures out she can stick herself on something and somehow fasten herself.”

Arabella and Anita captured the public’s fancy, and Lousma, who gave the public a look at Skylab with his televised tours, admits feeling a bit of jeal­ousy at the time over the spiders’ status as spaceflight superstars. “It really disappointed me a little bit that on the ground the general public got more insight into what was happening with Arabella than what we were doing.”

The two spiders were the subject of a “gotcha” the second crew considered leaving for their Skylab successors. They had a large (fake) spider and web to place over the docking adapter hatch when they left. Unfortunately they mistakenly thought it had been left on Earth and didn’t set it up.

Around this time Harriott began to get calls from the solar science team on the ground about one somewhat obscure item he had not yet completed. The first mission had found that the xuv monitor, which enabled them to see the sun in extreme ultraviolet (xuv) light, had extremely low sensitivi­ty, and the TV display was so faint as to be useless. So the ground developed a small conical light shield that the operator could place over the TV dis­play and peek through the small hole at the apex of the cone. “Even this was still too dim,” Harriott said, “so we were provided with a recent technologi­cal marvel called a Polaroid camera! When the camera shutter is opened, it remains open until enough light has been passed through to properly expose the film. So this was ideal for us—we mounted the camera at the cone apex looking down on the TV image. When enough light had been accumulat­ed, the shutter closed automatically and the camera developed the print. As you probably remember, it then went ‘bzzz’ and delivered the print out the bottom of the camera.

“Every day they asked if the xuv monitor camera had yet been installed and operated. ‘No, not yet, but I’ll get to it soon,’ I replied. After three or four days, it became clear they were really interested in how it was going to work, so I took time to set up the conical cover and the camera. When complete,

34- While their early efforts indicated trouble adapting, the spiders were quickly able to spin webs that appeared as they would have on Earth.

including the preinstalled first film pack, I thought I should check out the camera operation before trying it on the sun. As Jack floated into view, I snapped a quick photo, followed by the ‘bzzz’ and out came the developed print—of a recent Playboy centerfold! All ten sheets of that first package were similarly pre-exposed and we all had a great laugh. But we never said anything to the ground about it until they made their next inquiry about the camera. I then reported that ‘Yes, the camera operation was normal and providing quite interesting photos.’ That was all that was ever mentioned in­flight, and only on the ground two months later did we congratulate Paul Patterson on the Naval Research Laboratory solar physics team for his cre­ative ‘gotcha’ and amusing surprise.”

Bean, md-io:

eva day. I had a tough time sleeping, ok for first 6 hours or so then off and on —finally writing at normal wake up time, iiooZ (0600 Houston) because they let us sleep late. Bed is great. I am going to patent it when I get home. The bun­gee straps and netting for the head and the pillows were my idea. Might come in use someday because no other simple way to make og feel like Earth.

Jack sleeps next to me then Owen at end— the reason, his sleep cap equip­ment fits better.

Funny how good we feel now, I think [at the beginning ofthe mission] we all

would have said “to hell with this, let’s go home”. No one ever said it in words but that was the way we all looked at each other around day 2 and 3.

Sleeping is different here because the “bed clothes” do not tend to restrain or touch your body. This causes large air space about your body, that your body heat doesn’t hold. It’s difficult to snuggle down. Have to put undershirts (long) and t-shirt on during the night. I cut feet out of the long handles then use them for pajamas. Also I mod’ed [modified] my bed by cutting a hole in the netting near the feet, too cold at night so close it up with a knot.

Little worried, Funny —Owen’s PCU [Pressure Control Unit] is #013 and his umbilical is #13. I’m not superstitious, but. . .

Started taking food pill supplements today. Kit is junkie’s paradise.

Jack discovered new way to shake urine collection bags to minimize bubbles. I called ground and said, “we even have our professionals — Owen atm check­out, me condensate dump, Jack urine shaking ”

After being delayed for nearly a week, the time for the crew’s first space­walk finally arrived on Day 10. Jack and Owen were assigned to go outside on this first one, leaving Al inside to tend the store and assure everything went well. When the missions were originally planned, before the launch of Skylab, film replacement was to be about the only thing to be done on this spacewalk. But now the work needed to be almost doubled. The para­sol that had been extended through the Scientific Airlock during the first mission to shield the workshop from the direct sunlight had been in place for over three months. Its ability to shade the workshop was beginning to deteriorate. Still aboard the station, however, was the second thermal mit­igation system that had been launched with the first crew back in May, the Marshall Sail twin-pole sunshade. Installing it should again cool tempera­tures that were very gradually beginning to rise again as the parasol’s effi­cacy diminished in the sunlight.

“We had the twin-pole sunshade to deploy over the top of the parasol in addition to the film replacement,” Garriott said. “So after the film installa­tion was first completed, I had to connect eleven five-foot sections of alumi­num poles, twice, forming two long poles. These were then extended to Jack some forty or fifty feet away, where the poles were mounted in a v, and a large ‘sail’ pulled across them with nylon lines. This may have been the only ‘sail’ this Marine has ever rigged, and without a bit of wind to fill it out!”

As had been the case with the solar-array wing deployment conducted by the first crew, Skylab had not been intended to support spacewalks like this. No provisions had been made for spacewalkers to get around, save for the limited path installed to access the atm film canisters. For the work he was to be doing, Lousma had no translation aids provided to help him reach the area from which he would be installing the sunshade. Garriott remained near the Airlock Module hatch to remove the segments of the poles from their packaging, mate and lock each piece together and then extend the long poles to Lousma who had positioned himself far out on the truss structure. (Even without translation aids on Skylab’s exterior to help him reach his des­tination, Lousma was in no danger of floating off into space, since he was connected to Skylab by an umbilical running back to the Airlock Module.) Once he was in place where he would be doing most of the work, Lousma had a set of foot restraints designed to attach to the structure at that loca­tion and secure him in place. “You just kind of clamped them on, and you could stand there and enjoy the views,” he recalled.

After getting into position, Lousma next had to mount an adapter to the truss that featured two slots into which the long fifty-five-foot poles would be inserted. Garriott began putting the pole segments together with a standard bayonet-type connector. He fitted each segment into the next, depressed a spring, rotated the segment about twenty degrees, and latched it into place. Then a rubber ring was rolled over the fitting, securing the connection. On a later spacewalk, the crew found that this rubber locking ring had rolled back away from its connection, but the bayonet connection had been ade­quate to hold the segments together. When the two long poles were assem­bled, Garriott passed them on to Lousma, who fixed them into their slots, so that they stretched all the way to the far end of the workshop. Lousma then had to deploy the sunshade onto the poles, stretching it across the poles with long ropes or “lines,” eventually covering almost the whole workshop exposure and the old “parasol” deployed by the first crew.

While assembling the poles, Garriott encountered an unexpected prob­lem. During the preflight testing of the sunshade equipment at the neutral buoyancy tank at Marshall, a difficult decision had been faced: whether to take the flight hardware underwater and then into space and risk corrosion and malfunction or only test it on the dry floor out of the water without the added realism that practice in neutral buoyancy would provide.

“We finally decided that for the twenty-two pole segments, a floor test without pressure-suited operation, would be adequate,” Garriott said. “This was about the only compromise made in testing under the most realistic conditions possible. Naturally, this returned to bite me in space. When I had to remove each individual rod segment from their aluminum trans­porting frame on which they were all mounted—manually, in a pressure suit—my ‘fat’ fingers in their thick gloves could not get under the rods to lift them against the elastic straps that held them tightly against the trans­porting frame! I ended up having to squat down in the pressure suit, hold­ing the frame beneath my foot, use one hand to lift each rod upward against the surprisingly tough elastic, and then use my other hand across my body to wrench each rod from under the elastic strap. It may sound simple, but it turned out to be the most difficult physical task of the whole eva, which we might have been able to modify had we tried it all in a pressure suit on the ground. And I had to repeat all this about twenty-two times! (Send this to the ‘lessons learned’ department!)”

Lousma recalled that the neutral-buoyancy training had served him quite well. “We learned how long it took us to do each task, and I think it took us twice as long in space. That wasn’t because we weren’t prepared. It was sim­ply because we had the time and wanted to do it right. And we worked slow­ly and double-checked and rechecked everything as we were doing it.”

There were all kinds of concerns that the twin poles were going to be too “whippy” because of their relatively thin diameter compared with their fif­ty-five-foot length, which Lousma said made them not unlike a giant fish­ing pole. “I wasn’t worried about that too much,” but he could tell a differ­ence as they got longer. Lousma also encountered one unanticipated problem during the spacewalk. “The twin-pole sunshade worked very well, except for one little episode,” he remembers. “When you look at the Skylab photos the sunshade is kind of brown, but has a white streak in there.”

When the sunshade was packed for launch, it was “folded like an accor­dion” into a bag. However, because of the rush to get ready to fly during the ten-day period prior to the launch of the first crew, the adhesive used to attach the pieces together had not had time to cure fully before the sun­shade was folded up and packed. As a result, when Lousma unpacked the sunshade in orbit and began to deploy it, the adhesive prevented it from unfolding as well as it was intended to do.

“So I had to bring that whole thing back toward myself,” he said. “It was all out of the bag and billowing up all over, and by hand I had to unfasten all of those folds. Then I had to attach the two corners that were nearest me with a long lanyard, and drift out to two places on either side of the mda to attach the lanyards. When the large sail was deployed, the twin poles were flopped down on top of the parasol and against the Skylab workshop, and the lanyards tightened. It nearly covered the workshop and worked quite well. So that was done, and I thought, end of story.

“But it turns out that I had missed one of those folds, and so it was out there like that for a long time, and getting browner and browner. Then the sun did the rest of the job and unstuck that one little piece. And so you see that white streak in there, that was the one that had remained folded for the longest time.”

Lousma estimated that the sunshade deployment took up about three hours of a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk. In addition to the routine atm tasks and the sunshade, he and Garriott also explored the exterior of Skylab to try to gain clues as to the location of a coolant leak. The source of the mysterious leak would plague the second crew throughout their tenure on the facility. “During our inside time we also had to do quite a bit of exploration, taking some panels off,” he said. Removing the wall panels allowed access to the station’s “plumbing” but proved to be a difficult task since it was another maintenance activity that had not been anticipated preflight. Assuming that there would be no reason to detach the panels, engineers had designed them to remain firmly in place with no simple mechanism for removal. Despite their efforts, the second crew was unsuccessful in finding the source of the coolant leak. Ultimately a method was devised for the third crew to recharge the coolant supply, yet another unanticipated procedure.

The atm film exchange provided Garriott with the opportunity to do something he had been looking forward to. “One of the first things I did for fun was something I had planned before flight,” he said. “Is there anyone who has not looked over the edge of a high cliff or a tall building and felt an extra surge of emotion and adrenalin at the view? So here I stood at the front end of the atm solar telescopes to replace film, but could also look straight down a 435-kilometer (270-mile) ‘elevator shaft’ to the ground! It is a differ­ent perspective when in a pressure suit with nothing between you and a hard vacuum other than a thin, Plexiglas faceplate, as compared to looking out the window of a jet aircraft or even the wardroom window of Skylab.”

Bean made a special addendum to his diary about the spacewalk:

Jack said, being out on the sun end, was a little like Peter Pan—or that you were riding a big white horse —feet spread wide across the whole world— the Earth

35. The Marshall Sail deployed on Skylab.

is visible on both sides, at the same times and you can see 360 degrees—riding backwards.

Watching out the window as Jack worked in the dark; I could not look at him in the light as he was too close to the sun, it was fantastic to see the sun­rise. It began as a light blue band which grew with a fine yellow rim near the limb—the blue gets larger then.

Just before sun up you could see flashes of light toward the horizon where thun­derstorms were playing. This pinpointed the coming horizon which was not yet discernable against the dark of the Earth from within the lighted cabin.

Gold color grows in last 15 sec to change much of dark blue into bright orange. As the sun rises the Earth’s horizon slowly moves from head to toe on Jack as he is silhouetted against the blue line. It gives the feeling of going around a big plan­et, a big ball rather than just a disk movingfrom in front of the eye. The science fiction movie effect was fantastic.

And Garriott’s diary summed this all up with only five words: eva day — went very well.

Garriott, md-ii, 12,13:

Full atm ops. On 11, got a flare right off in ar8" Had been working that ar [active region] all orbit. Very fortunate.

MD-12, dble erep + more good atm.

md-ц, M-3 x-ray flare, well covered & then a 0-2 or-3 [a classification of intensity], all from ar8$. The last covered only by xuv Mon on vtr . Also a good s-063 [ozonephoto] w/erep in am, and s-o<;<; CalRoc suc­cessful! Vy good day, indeed.

Everyone in excellent spirits. Tomorrow is more or less “off day" but we’ll stay busy.

Can become disoriented w/ rapid spins. We all still feel some sense of up & down, related to orientation of i-g trainer & eqpt installation.

Fish orient “down" twd[toward] wall, usually and fairly quiet. But if “stirred up" a little & held in middle of room, still do outside loops, pitching down.

Fed both spiders today. Not sure if they will eat.

With the second crew’s Apollo Telescope Mount operations now well underway, the collection of instruments was producing groundbreaking results. The flares, for example, were very exciting for the crew to witness. These energetic outbursts on the sun showed up particularly strongly at ultra­violet and x-ray wavelengths visible to the observers on Skylab with their TV screens—because they were above essentially all of the Earth’s atmo­sphere —but not to ground observers. The ground saw the active regions (ars) in visible light and could direct the crew’s attention to promising locations on the solar disk, but unlike Earthbound astronomers the crew could see the first indications of an outburst from Skylab with ultraviolet and x-ray dis­plays. The “CalRoc” Garriott mentioned on Day 13 was a coordinated obser­vation of the same active region on the sun by Skylab and a rocket flight to high altitudes by the Harvard College Observatory experimenters.

The fish were part of an extra, small experiment that Garriott had asked to do well before launching, for the crew’s own interest. Arrangements were made by a veterinarian on the staff of the Houston space center, Dr. Richard C. Simmonds. The experiment included two small mummichug minnows and fifty unhatched eggs in a small plastic bag that the crew taped to a wall or bulkhead. The minnows had the strange, and quite unexpected, response to weightlessness of swimming forward but looping or pitching down. Watch­ing the transparent eggs develop and the fry after hatching also proved inter­esting. Even the fry born in this weightless environment exhibited some of the same looping behavior. These observations eventually led to one scien­tific paper and later several more space experiments—and more scientific papers—on later Shuttle Spacelab flights.

Bean, md-ii:

Passed the lbnp today for the first time. Think I was too far in it and squeezed around stomach, cut off blood, will move saddle from у to 6.

Did a lot of flying about the workshop just before sleep tonight. Skill need­ed, but great relaxer.

Wish Owen would move Arabella. Arabella finished her web perfectly. When Owen toldJack at breakfast, Jack said “well that’s good, I like to see a spider do something at least once in a while".

md-12:

My green copy ofChildhood’s End floated by. If you wait long enough, every­thing lost will float by. A dynamic environment no one can be stranded in cen­ter of a space because small air currents have an effect.

Tried to fly (like swimming) last night. But air currents much more dominant.

Fire and rapid Delta p drill today. Owen needs this the most but hates them the worst. I tried to stick with him and do this together, Jack goes alone — when I am distracted, Owen will be doing other things not drill related and I must get him back.

Slept better last night (upside down) because it was cooler from the twin boom sunshade.

Arabella ate her web last night and spun another perfect one.

Garriott, MD-14:

Another good day! Houston reportedfilament lifting, got to (a Tm) panel as large loop was ~r=2.$ [extended out to a radial distance of about 2.3 solar radii]! Fol­lowed all the way out beyond R= 6. Excellent, I thought. Also made hemoglobin check (~іб-іб. у all three)… tv of Arabella, etc. Supposedly a “day off", but we made 4 atm passes, 3 s-oijops, etc. Back at it tomorrow! Also talked w/hm [Hel­en Mary, his wife] and family. Said flare was big news locally, w/scientists.

More than just “another good day,” Mission Day 14 was a history-making one for the Apollo Telescope Mount, which was used to capture an unprec­edented image of the solar corona. One of the instruments on the atm, the White Light Coronagraph, would hide the bright face of the sun behind an “occulting” disk and image a superimposition of all of the visible light wave­lengths in the corona. The sun’s very bright upper region, which is what is visible to the eye on Earth, is about one million times brighter than the faint corona, which can only be seen from the ground at the infrequent times of a total solar eclipse. On Day 14 the ground saw what appeared to be the start of a solar eruption at visible wavelengths and brought it to the attention of the crew, even though they were not manning the atm panel at the time.

“I got there in time to see what is now called a ‘coronal mass ejection,’ or cme, in progress, where the ejected material in the form of an enormous magnetic loop was moving out through the corona,” Garriott said. When he first saw the loop, its height had already reached about the width of the sun, and by its peak a few hours later, it was more than three times the sun’s diameter. “The radial extent of this giant magnetic loop could be measured on our TV screen. Then on the next orbit about ninety-three minutes lat­er it was obviously stretched out much farther and it could be measured again. A simple calculation allowed the minimum speed of the ejection to be estimated, which turned to be about 500 kilometers per second! At that speed, it would reach the Earth in about three days. As far as I know this is the first visual observation of this phenomenon ever made.” Since coronal mass ejections can have a noticeable impact on Earth when they reach our planet, the groundwork laid on Day 14 toward better understanding them has had lasting benefits.

Garriott recalled getting immediate feedback on the day’s events during a phone call with his wife. “I had a telephone visit with the family at our home in Nassau Bay,” he said. “The wives brought us up to date on local news; for example, they told us that the TV reports and the solar scientists comments seem quite enthused about the ‘flare’ observations. It was our pipeline to the ‘real world!’ ”

Measured hemoglobin levels on all three crewmen had reached the upper end of normal, which Garriott suggested might have been due to the loss of water in weightlessness and a reduced total blood volume in circulation. Bean said that during his time on Skylab, he had to make a conscious effort

to avoid becoming dehydrated. “The thing that I noticed for myself is, I had to make myself drink water,” he said, “because I wasn’t thirsty then. And the next day I would have less energy. My urine volume would be low, and it finally dawned on me that I was getting dehydrated because I just wasn’t thirsty. So it got to where every time I came near the table, I’d take a drink even when I didn’t want it. And that helped. But I would fall back. After about four or five days of drinking water, maybe the fifth day I would not do it so much; I’d get complacent. Then I’d notice the sixth day that I got tired early, and then I would remember my low urine volume that morning. So I remember that as being a continual problem for me.”

In fact, Bean said during the entire mission, he had to make a conscious effort to stay in good shape and not allow his desire for productivity push him past the point of exhaustion. “Every day I remember trying to do as much as we could that day without hurting the next day,” he said. “I’d say to myself sometimes, ‘Uh oh, I worked too long,’ I was on the edge of fatigue each day at the end of the day. And if I didn’t get the sleep and food and water I needed, then I’d be fatigued the next day. I always felt like I was right on the edge, and I had to be really careful to keep myself healthy in order to do the next day the best I could, and feel really good all the next day, and be in a good mood. People get in a bad mood, I think, if they get tired and fall behind. We had good relations with Mission Control. In fact, our rela­tions with Mission Control were great except when we wanted more work and couldn’t get them to schedule it for us.”

Bean MD-14:

Day off—we had mixed emotions. We were tired and needed rest yet our chance to do good work was almost one-fourth over. When each flight hour represents 13-14 Earth training hours then you can make (up for) a lot of pre-flight effort with a little extra in flight effort. We did however do some atm and some soip. We ask for extra. Plus housekeeping. Wipe, dry biocide wipe, the place is immaculate and not a predatory germ within miles, much less traveling at 18,000 mph.

Got a thrill today. Tried to put out a urine bag [through the Trash Airlock] with the end filter for the head in it in addition to three urine bags. It would not eject. I tried to close the doors and breathed a real sigh of relief as it came closed. I removed the filter from the bag and tried again, this time it moved 1” or so then stuck. I tried to close the door but this time it would not. My heart was beatingfast. Could this be happening to us. Could we not have a way to get rid of our garbage? I tried the ejection handle again, and no luck, the door was stuck. Finally the only way was to force it. I tapped it again and again at first no success, but finally a little at a time she broke free. The heart still beat fast but maybe a lesson was learned. Why did they not build the lock as an invert­ed cone so whatever was in there could always be moved down the ever expand­ing diameter.

Owen did the spider TV three times. Once because he recorded it on channel a, once because the TV switch was in the atm and not ows position, the last time it was okay. He got behind and I did some of his housekeeping as he was still up when Jack and I were headed for bed. Jack said “Owen, do you have anything left I can help you with". Owen said “no". But that’s the way Jack is.

Notice we do not seem to reflex to catch something when we drop it as we did the first few days. It’s enjoyable to just let a heavy object float nearby.

Garriott, MD-15-16:

Things beginning to ease up just a little. We’re considerably more efficient and flight plan may be a little less tight. Al now asking for more work (!)… All feel­ing excellent. Al doing lots of acrobatics (he’s good). Jack is walking around on the “ceiling”

Garriott was not the only one to feel that the crew was beginning to hit its stride around this time. Being as productive as possible had been one of Bean’s foremost goals for his crew from the outset, and the limitations they had faced early on had been a disappointment to him. He and the others had been working all during the mission to become more efficient, and around this time, they could tell they were getting close to the mark.

“We were in there working as best we could; and we were following the flight plan accurately; we were following our checklist, and as a result we were getting a lot of things done,” Bean said. “I felt like it took us until around Day 16 to really be as efficient as we ever could be. That was my feeling, and also looking at the data later on. We began to be pretty good at it.”

“So we sat down and had a crew meeting and decided that we needed to have an inventory from the ground as to where we were and what we had to do to catch up,” added Lousma.

Bean recalled: “Maybe at a third of the way through, or a fourth of the way through, we called the ground and asked how we were doing. I knew we’d fallen behind because of being sick, and I thought maybe they’d tell us we’d done 90 percent so far of what we should be doing. And they told

us we’d done 50 percent, 60 percent, something shocking. Well we knew we weren’t going to go back to Earth doing 50 percent. They will have to shoot us down because we aren’t going back till we’ve done the best we can do. We were going to find a way, and that’s kind of when we decided we were going to have to do things differently because we had to catch up, at least we all thought so. So we began to try to be more efficient. You know, we thought we were being efficient, but this motivated us to become more so.”

Every possible step was taken to increase efficiency. The crew stopped eating all of their meals together, so that two crewmembers could be work­ing at all times. As soon as the crew woke up, someone would begin man­ning the atm station while the others went about their morning routine. Bean said that not long afterwards he realized that Garriott was the best of the three at manning the atm console, so he and Lousma began swapping duties with Garriott so that he could man the atm more.

The crew, and Bean in particular, began working to move items to and from storage during the day to reduce the amount of time that had to be spent on housekeeping. “We were working as much as we could,” Bean said. “We were really hustling around.” Finally, the crew reached a level of effi­ciency such that they were getting all of the work done that they had sched­uled on a given day. But, having gotten behind at the outset, simply reach­ing 100 percent efficiency was not enough for Bean. “We began to try to get housekeeping done before it was scheduled, so we could say to them, ‘We’ve already got the trash thrown for tomorrow, we’ve already got the food moved, go ahead and put us on the atm,’ ” he said. “As I remember, we had to con­vince them to give us more work. We were ahead, and then they would call up and they wouldn’t have anything new the next day, and we would be twid­dling thumbs. We were ready to go, but they hadn’t geared up for us yet. I remember us talking with them for about two or three days before Mission Control finally said, ‘ok, let’s give them a lot more work.’

“We then got going, and so we were just zipping around there as good as we could from wake up till rest before sleep. Because you can’t just stop working and go to sleep, we knew that you had to kind of take thirty min­utes or an hour,” Bean said. “We were working all the time, except Sundays. Then we began to work Sundays after a while, because there wasn’t a damn thing to do, at least I felt that way. What are we going to do, sit around and just look? Not likely! We had trained hard for two and a half years, and we are going to make the most of our limited days, only fifty-six, in space. At least as much as we could. So we got going!”

Before long, the ground had to work to keep up with the crew. As Lous – ma recalled: “We got so good at what we were doing that it took so much less time than they had anticipated that we asked for more work, and that’s where they devised the Earth observations experiments: ‘Can you see this; can you see that; what can you see physically or visually from space?’ We would photograph those places and report on them. Every mission after that—I don’t know if they do it anymore, but Shuttle missions had Earth observations briefings and some special things to look for. So that was all derived as a result of our mission. They also jury-rigged some additional experiments using hardware that we had on board. They had some kind of experiment that had to do with transfer of fluids; it was not one we had planned to do. The point is they gave us extra work to do and things that we hadn’t planned on doing, so we actually ended up with more experiments than we started with.”

A major thing the crew had going for them, Lousma believes, was how well they got along. “I think our crew was somewhat remarkable in that we were such good friends,” he said. “We trained for two and a half years, and I don’t ever remember a cross word. I don’t remember one during the mis­sion, or since.”

Even as the crew was becoming more efficient at their work, they were also becoming more efficient at their play. After over two weeks in weightless­ness, the astronauts had become acclimatized to the unique acrobatics that microgravity allowed. “For an unusual experience, one could walk around upside-down on the ceiling of the laboratory area,” Garriott said. “It was fun to play ‘Spider-Man’ and walk around on the ceiling or elsewhere.”

While the entire crew had gotten their “space legs” by this point, it was Bean whose microgravity maneuvering was the most impressive. “I was amazed at how proficiently Al performed flips, twists, and other acrobat­ics while jogging around the ring of lockers in the ows,” Garriott said. “While Jack and I looked every bit the novices we were, only after inquir­ing did I find out that Al had been a gymnast in college! If only we could submit video instead of personal appearances, we might have had a shot at the next Olympics.”

The long straight layout of the pressurized volume of Skylab was the basis

of another amusement for the crew. “Another challenge,” Garriott said, “was to launch oneself at modest speed all the way from the bottom of the living and experiment deck and try to pass through the ows, the Airlock Mod­ule, the mda, and reach the csm without touching anything—a floating distance of some fifty feet with narrow hatches between each module. With practice we could all do it—sometimes.”

Bean, MD-i6:

Had a thriller, was writing in my book when caution tone then warning tone came on —Jack in the toilet—Owen and I soared up and found cluster att [atti­tude] warning lt [light] and acs [attitude control system light] on. We looked at the atm panel and found much Tacs firing andx gyro single, ygyro okay, z gyro single. A quick look at the atm panel showed multiple Tacs firings. Both Owen and I were excited, it had been some time since we practiced these fail­ures, plus we are in a complicated rate gyro configuration—we both really were looking at all things at once—das [data acquisition system] commands, status words, rt[rate]gyro talk backs, momentum and cmg wheel position readouts. We elected to go a TT hold but Tacs keptfiring, so we then turned off the Ta cs, looked at each rate gyro and set the best one back on the line. We would have gone to the csm but with our quad problems that would be a true last resort. No, we had to solve it right then. We put the rate gyros back into configuration then enabled Tacs, then did a nominal momentum cage — this seemed to make the system happy — namely Tacs quit firing. Owen and I had settled down by then and were solving the problem again and again to insure we have not for­gotten any step. We came into daylight— were only two degrees or so off in x and y so went to S. I. [solar inertial]— maneuvered too slow so we set in a five sec maneuver time and selected S. I. again—Houston came up and I gave them a brief rundown — Owen, never giving up time, started my atm run for me while I went down for dessert of peaches and ice cream.

erep passed today, Jack got four targets, we then had an erep cal [calibra­tion] pass taking specific data on the full moon—all three of us working well together, we have trained a long time for this chance and we want to make the most of it.

Jack made a suggestion to walk on the ceiling as the floor for a few min­utes —we did and in less than a minute it seemed like the floor although covered with lights, wiring runs and trays. Our home seemed like a new place—cluttered but nice — the bicycle hung overhead and was different as was the wardroom table but many lockers and stowage spaces were much easier to see and reach—I might use this technique to advantage when hunting a missing item or looking in a locker drawer.

Had to ask Capcom, Story Musgrave, to give us more work today and also tomorrow—we are getting in the swing— when you’re hot, you’re hot. We will have about 44 more days to do all the things we were trained to do for the last 2 V2—4 years — time is going fast and we must make the most use of it. Most of what we learned will have no application after Skylab—such as how to oper­ate specific experiments, systems, where things are stored, experiment protocol, how to operate the atm, erep, etc.

The gyroscopes that allowed Skylab to maintain its attitude proved to be an occasional hassle. One failure of the gyros was particularly memo­rable for Bean, who committed a rare violation of procedure in the heat of the moment: “I remember the time we lost attitude hold. The alarm went off, maybe even in the night; I don’t even remember when it was. We had a procedure if it did, and I can remember not following that procedure. It’s one of those deals where you make [someone else] follow the procedure, but when you’re there, you don’t have to do it.”

Rather than trying to regain attitude control with the control moment gyros, Bean opted for the more immediate method of using the TACS thrust­ers, which had a limited, and unreplenishable, supply of cold gas, a large amount of which had been expended in the barbecue rolls before the arriv­al of the first crew. “I can remember not following the procedure and wast­ing some of the gas, wasting some of that to ‘zero out’ the rate gyros, instead of doing other things,” he said. “I can remember the ground didn’t say any­thing. Then later, about a day later, they came up with a new procedure, ‘just in case,’ which really was the same procedure, except, ‘Why would you guys do what you did?’

“At the time I threw that switch, I knew it was the wrong thing to do. It was too late then. It didn’t even seem right then, it just seemed like the expe­dient thing. We solved the problem quickly that way. But it wasn’t a good thing to do. I can remember me throwing that switch and thinking at the time it was a bad idea.”

Bean, MD-17:

Had bad experience today, sneezed while urinating— bad on Earth—disaster up here.

Did 10-15 minutes on dome lockers. Handsprings, dives, twists, can do things that no one on Earth can do —fantastic fun and I guess good limbering up exer­cises for riding the bike.

I went up and looked out of the mda windows that faced the sun, but at night. What an incredible sight, a full moon, Paris, Luxemburg, Prague, Bern, Milan, Turin all visible and beautiful wheels of light and sweeping under the white crossed solar panel of the atm. Normally you cannot look out these win­dows because of the sun’s glare, I could not watch Jack and Owen on their eva. Now we are over the Bay of Bengal. In just 16 minutes we swept over Europe and Eastern Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and finally over India. Too cloudy to see Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. Sumatra and Java will be here soon. We repeat our ground track every 5 days but 5 days from now as we go over the same point of ground the local time there changes so that in 60 days we will have seen allpoints between 50N and 50s at 12 different times of the day and night. At least once we can watch Parisians [Paris residents] getting up, having breakfast—

Owen and I spent his first night in ij days just looking out the window dur­ing a night pass. We came over places that aren’t our erep targets, the Darda­nelles were visible, then he pointed out the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee—I said I had been as high as anyone on Earth and had visited the lowest point on Earth, the Dead Sea, last year. Owen talked ofthe night air glow—the fine white lay­er about a pencils width above the surface of the Earth.

We had looked last night for Perseid meteor shower with them burning up below us. Did not see any during soip — to hit the atmosphere, to make a shoot­ing star, they all fly past us—with no meteoroid shield, hope we do not contact any one of them.

MD-i8:

Fixed my sleeping bag today, safety pinned on two top blankets and took up slack in blankets—too much volume of air to warm at night. Have been wak­ing either around 1 to 2 hours prior to 6o’clock [normal wake-up time]. Hous­ton time and having difficulty going back to sleep. Maybe this will help, sleep­ing upside down has helped, the cooler ows as a result ofthe twin pole sunshade deployment is perhaps the greatest contributor.

Normal morning sequence is wake up call from Houston, I get up fast, take down water gun reading, then put on shirt and shorts for weighing. Take book up and weigh while Jack gets teleprinter pads and Owen reads plan. I weigh, Owen weighs, then Jack. I fix breakfast after dressing, with Owen a little behind.

Jack cleans up, shaves, does urine and fixes bag and sample for three of us, I fin­ish eating as Jack comes in and I then clean, shave and sample urine, I’m off to work at first job as Owen goes to the waste compartment. Jack is eating and about 30 minutes later we all are at work.

A sudden realization hit me this afternoon—there is no more work for us to do —atm is about it. Except for more medical or more studen t experiments what a sad state ofaffairs with this space station up here and not enough work to do.

We could think up some good TV productions getting 5000 watt-min of exer­cise per day and that should be enough.

Boy oh boy have I been farting today. You must learn to handle more gas up here and I wondered if we wouldforget when we went home. Owen said can’t you just see Jack in his living room with all his family and friends around and he forgets.

I am so glad that Owen and Jack and I are on the same crew. Our person­alities fit one another well—Jack always working, always positive, always hap­py — Owen always serious, well maybe not always.

Owen looks funny lately as he has not trimmed his mustache hair nor shaved under his neck too well— our little windup shaver and the poor bathroom light being the problem. I don’t look too great either, my hair getting long, wonder if “O ” or Jack will cut it on our day off

Owen got his ego bent last night. He had been conscientious about weight loss, wanting more food, and salt—peanuts are a favorite, Dr. Paul Buchan­an called on his weekly conference and told Owen, [that] Jack and I were doing okay but he needed to have a chat with him [Owen]. Paul said, Owen, we have been looking at your exercise data over the last two days and don’t think you are doing enough, maybe your heart isn’t in it—Owen about flipped because he takes great pride in his physical program pound for pound he does more than Jack and I. He could hardly hold back, afterward he worked out till sweat was all over his body, then called on the recorder to tell Paul and those other doctors the facts of the matter. Maddest I’ve seen him in months. [Garriott explained that it turned out the ground had not yet read the data off the recorder, and the issue was smoothed out later.]

As Bean noted, the sleeping bag modification referenced at the beginning of this entry was the second major mod he made to his “bed.” The sleep­ing quarters were designed in such a way that an air vent would cause air to flow from the feet to the head when a crewmember was sleeping in the bed.

Bean found it difficult to sleep in that configuration and unstrapped the cot from the “vertical” bulkhead where it was mounted and inverted it so that he was sleeping “upside-down” compared to the other two astronauts. Garriott noted that while Bean’s modification to invert his cot worked fine on Skylab, where each crewmember had his own “bedroom,” it could have been more problematic if the station had been designed with the three shar­ing one larger area since it could be disconcerting to carry on a conversation for any length of time with someone in a different body orientation.

Near his upside-down bed, Bean kept a sign posted on the inside of a locker door, which he made a point to read at the start and end of each day, and which thirty years later he still says was an important part of his life on Skylab.

A man is what he thinks about all day. “The only time I live, the only time I can do anything, the only time I can be anyone is right now.

Each hour we have in flight is the culmination of approximately 12 to 13 pre­flight hours (1У2 days). These hours well spent are our only tangible product for literally years of work and preparation.

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fear­ing to attempt.

Did we enjoy today.

Ask for questions.

Importance of the individual.

Write in my crew log.

Garriott, MD-i8:

Not enough to do today! Al doing most of HK [housekeeping tasks]. Mentioned to Al— he agreed— that often when “sitting" still with eyes closed, there is an apparent sense of motion. Sort ofslow vibration (2 or 3 second oscillation), back and forth… Maybe body is actually perturbed slightly by air draft, but I think not. Does seem to be a vestibular “false motion."

Brightflashes occasionally. Always dark adapted. Believe have seen with eyes open. Usually spots, not necessarily pin-points. Occasionally a longer streak. Only one eye at a time.

The odd body oscillation Garriott noted he later determined was proba­bly real motion caused by each stroke of the heart pushing arterial blood out through the body. The crew’s vestibular systems were probably unusually

З6. Bean reading in his bed on the wall of his sleep compartment.

sensitive to any body motion as the large gravitational acceleration could not be sensed in free fall.

The bright flashes of light were explained later as passage of an energetic particle through the retina creating a flash that the crew could see. It almost always seemed to occur when Skylab was near the South Atlantic Anom­aly where the Earth’s magnetic field is a bit weaker than at most locations, and trapped energetic particles can dip down to lower altitudes like that at which Skylab orbited. The phenomenon was not isolated to Skylab—oth – er astronauts since have also reported seeing bright flashes while crossing through the anomaly.

Bean, MD-19:

We have been trying to get the flt [flight]planning changed. I especially have

had a lot of free time, Owen and Jack to a lesser degree. Jack keeps on the move all the time, Owen has a long list of useful work that he brought along, things that other scientists have suggested, worthwhile. How do I accomplish this feat of us producing our maximum without infringing on Owen’s time. He deserves some amount per day to do with as he chooses.

In a way space flight is rewarding but on a day to day it is awfully frustrat­ing. Jack today spent whole night pass takingstar/moon andstar/horizon sight­ings on his own time to satisfy an experiment. When the pass was over, 20 marks made, he was debriefing and as he was talking he said, well, I did those sight­ings with the clear window protector still on. He had not noticed it in the dark. The data would be off by some small amount and that just didn’t suit Jack. He told the experimenter on record that he would repeat them later.

Teleprinter message: To Bean, Garriott and Lousma

We have been watching and listening as the three of you live and work in space. Your performance has been outstanding and the observations that you are making are of tremendous importance. Through your efforts Skylab 3 is a great mission.

Keep up the good work.

Signed,

Jim Fletcher [nasa Administrator]

George Low [nasa Deputy Administrator]

Received this today. Why do they not send something similar when we are not doing too well, like days 2-4. We appreciated this but just wondering not only about them but about myself.

Went to bed on time, do not feel as energetic as usual so feel something was coming on. Sleep is the best thing to repair me, it always works on Earth.

Bean, MD-22:

Our first real day off Best news was in the morning science report where it said we would catch up with all our atm science as well as the corollary experiments except for medical which was reduced by 24 hours the first half of the mission, we would do the rest—I called and discussed the additional blood work, histol­ogy and urine analysis [specific gravity] that Owen had been doing and want­ing them to count that.

We did housekeeping a bunch and had to plan two tv spectaculars. Since we have a Tm all day we had to schedule it in the 30 min night time crew rest. Hair cut next, then acrobatics, then shower. Lots of planning for 3 ten min shows but think the folks in the old USA will enjoy.

The shower was cooler than I like it— the biggest surprise was how the water clung to my body—a little like jello in that it doesn’t want to shake off It built up around the eyes, in the nose and mouth (the crevices) and it gave a slight feeling oftrying to breathe underwater— would shake the head violently and the water would drop away (not down but in all directions) some to cling to other parts of my body, some to the shower curtain, some sort of distended the water where they were and snapped back. The soap on the face stayed and diluted with rinse water tasted sour when I opened my mouth. The little vacuum has sufficient pull but is rigid and will not conform to the body—so does not do too well there, but is okay on the inside walls, floor and ceiling. Jack had said it was better to slide my hands over my body and to scrape the water offand over to the shower wall. This worked for hair, arms, legs, but difficult for my body especially back — two towels were required to dry off because the water did not drain.

MD-23:

Flew T 020 for the first time. Jack as usual had the dirty work but was trying harder because of his error yesterday. The work was slow and tedious because it was the first time around and because the strap design was poor.

Jack said ‘I’ve done some pretty dumb things in my life but I never got killed doing it— in this business that is saying a lot’—

Owen said “now the dumbest thing I can remember was flying out to the (solar) observatory near Holloman, nm—short hop so I decided to do it at 18,000 ft— as I neared there I started letting down, called approach control— we talk­ed and as I descended their communications faded out—I kept thinking why should they fade out— it suddenly dawned, shielded behind mountains —full power and a rapid climb in the dark saved my ass—I think of the incident sev­eral times every month over the last three years. ”

Garriott recalled, “I thought I had never mentioned this to anyone, any­where, since it was such a dumb thing to do. I had forgotten about this one time in Skylab. I had worked all day on atm things in Boulder, Colorado, that day, then drove to Buckley Field in Denver, to fly solo by T-38 to Hol­loman afb and work the next day at the solar observatory in Cloudcroft. A beautiful clear night, stars but no moon. When I heard approach control at the airport, I started down. dumb! When their voices started breaking up and then faded out, I asked myself why. When realization came quick­ly —mountains!—it was maximum power (burner) and steep climb until I heard their radio transmissions again with no further problems. I have con­tinued to think about this incident frequently for the next thirty-five years, but it is so embarrassing that I have never admitted it to anyone — except on this one Skylab occasion!”

Bean’s diary for that day continues:

Jack was saying that when we got back he and Owen might be considered regu­lar astronauts — Owen laughed— it was beyond his wildest dreams to be classed as a real astronaut.

Been wishing Owen and I had taken pictures of the Israel area the first time we stayed awake to see it—I want to give pictures of this region to some of my religious friends.

Jack’s having his ice cream and strawberries. Jack’s food shelves when we transfer a 6 day food supply are almost full of big cans plus a few small— Owen and I have halffull shelves with more or less equal amounts of small and large cans —Jack really puts down the chow.

All are in a good mood, morale is high in spite of all the hard work, we are getting the job done.

MD-24 A tough, tough day. Worked almost all day on trying to find the leak in the condensate vacuum system—hundreds of high torque screws, stethoscope, soap bubbles, tfpsi nitrogen, reconfiguring several pieces of mo equipment— we never found the leak—that effort must have cost $2.4 million in flight time.

Owen got this word that the citizens of Enid [Oklahoma, his home town] would be putting their lights on for him to see—I went up with him—it was the clearest, prettiest night we’ve had— we could see Ft. Worth-Dallas particu­larly —a twin city, one of few — then Oklahoma City then Enid then St. Lou­is then Chicago — Owen made a nice narration. He said started to say he saw Tulsa up ahead and realized it was Chicago. Paul Weitz said that was the one thing he never became accustomed to on his flight— the speed which you cover the world, especially the U. S.

This was not quite the end of the story, however, as Owen heard more about the incident following his next conversation on the family private communication loop. It turns out his wife, Helen Mary, also raised in Enid, felt she had to call the radio and TV stations in Enid and try to explain how Owen could be so thoughtless as to not even mention their major citywide effort to be seen directly by him.

Perhaps his predicament was best explained by Alan’s comments on Mis­sion Day 35 after most of the fuss was over: “That night we both went up to see the lights of Enid—he talked of Mexico, Ft. Worth, Dallas, here comes Tulsa, look at St. Louis, Chicago—everything but Enid—Helen Mary called up there and tried to soothe the people—she gave Owen hell—I kept tell­ing him to say something about Enid; they had a direct TV hookup, radio hook to us and all lights including the football field.”

“That’s been an embarrassment to me ever since,” Garriott said more than three decades later. “In fact, I undoubtedly saw Enid, but because there were so many lights all across the area, I wasn’t certain just which ones were from Enid, and by the time I thought I had it figured out, we were past Chicago, less than two minutes later.”

Bean, MD-26:

Owen reported an arch on the uv monitor in the corona yesterday. We called it Garriott waves to the ground— he was in the lbnp and was embarrassed and told us to knock it off— we were happy for him. Today he heard the ground could not see it in their taped tv display — he went back and checked and found it to be a sort ofphantom or mirror image of the bright features of the sun except reflected in the camera by the instrument. He’ll get over it (maybe that’s why he was distant).

Crippen woke us this morning with Julie London singing“The Party’s Over." Jack wanted to make this Julie London Day, so did Crippen so he could call her but Owen won out with Gene Cagle Day [who played a major role in the atm development at msfc].

MD-27:

Would you believe it we get better н-alpha pictures at sunset than we do at sun­rise because our velocity relative to the sun is less and that effectively changes the freq[uency] of the filter in each н-alpha camera and telescope—not a small item either.

Owen’s humor—I said “watch your head" as I pulled out the film drawer. Owen replied “I’ll try but my eyeballs don’t usually move that far up."

We were laughing about this malfunction (“mal") we had after we discovered

the water glycol leak—I wanted to call Houston and say “Jack is working on the cbrm [charger battery regulator module] mal, Owen on the camera mal— tomor­row after we fix the door mals, the у rate/gyro mals and the nylon swatch mal, I’ll start work again on the coolant loop or the water glycol leak mal. ”

Everyone feels better about eva—I worry too much and Jack will pull it off. Funny how easy it looks now that we are going to do it—did it get easier as we understood the plan or did we just want it to be doable? Morale is high—did perfect on my mo 92/iji (medical experiments).

Mission Day 28 brought the crew’s second spacewalk. Like the first space­walk of the mission, the second would include an extra task to repair a prob­lem with the station. In addition to the routine task of changing out the atm film canisters, the eva crewmembers would also install a cable for the six-pack gyros.

The Skylab’s attitude, or orientation, control system relied on two sets of gyroscopes. The large Control Moment Gyroscopes were used to torque the whole Skylab to a new attitude or hold it in position. A set of smaller attitude control gyros was used to monitor the attitude of the station. These smaller gyros had proved erratic since the station’s launch, and while they contin­ued to function, the decision was made to activate a new six-pack of gyros on the second eva in hopes of providing improved attitude control.

During the four-and-a-half-hour spacewalk, the two astronauts changed out the atm film cassettes and left two samples of the material used for the parasol outside to be recovered on a later eva so that the effect of exposure could be monitored.

In the days leading up to the spacewalk, Bean found himself having to make a difficult decision—who would go outside and who would stay inside? The original mission plan had called for each of the three astronauts to get two turns at an eva, and the second was to be performed by Bean and Lousma. Bean’s diary captured the decision-making process for who would go on the eva :

Bean, MD-24:

Heard tonight we may put in the rate gyro 6pack—I told Owen [that] Jack & I would do it because they did the twin pole and because that sort of work fits my skills better than Owen’s—hope it did not hurt his feelings but that is the way I see it and that’s my job — Owen even brought it up by saying “I think you want to put out the 6pack and that’s okay with me—I’m glad to do it but know you want to"— I said you’re right we don’t need this job but ifit comes up we will pull it off.

MD-25:

Today was a special day —found out we were going to put in the rate gyro pack — who to do it— Owen still wants to do it and so do I. Made up my mind that it would be Owen and I but after reading the procedures realized that I should stay in because ofmy csm experience — Owen and Jack are just not up on it and it is the best decision —Jack will do the 6pack as he is the most mechan- ical-Owen does not do those things as well as Jack, it will be taxing to tell him tomorrow—I was awake about two hours trying to put the pieces together and think Owen and Jack outside — me inside is the best way.

MD-26:

Told Owen and Jack about eva crewman, they both seemed happy, told them what factors were involved and who I felt most qualifiedfor each position. Called Houston and told them later, they seemed happy. I started looking at the equip­ment for the job—all in good shape.

“I felt that was my job,” Bean said. “I wanted to go eva too. But I felt it was my job. I was mostly concerned with the Command Module and atti­tude system. Even more important, Jack was the strongest guy. If anyone could twist those connectors that had never been designed to be loosened in flight, Jack was the man. He needed to be out there. And Owen could support him out there. We didn’t need me.”

Though Lousma was also trained as a Command Module pilot, Bean felt it made more sense for Lousma to perform the eva than to man the Apol­lo spacecraft. “To suddenly move Jack from the right to the left seat in the csm, not a good idea. It’s a better idea to let me do what I’ve been doing all this time. Let Jack do the twisting. He was the strongest; he’s also good at repairing things. He was the right guy.

“So we told the ground, ‘You know, we’ve got an eva coming up in just about three days. We’ve been thinking about our crew assignments for a couple of days. And we think that this would be good. What do you think?’ And sometime later on the next day they said something, like, just in the update, ‘We think that’s right.’ So we were always ahead of them in these kinds of things, or we tried to be anyway, so that we had the right people doing the right job.”

The six-pack gyros were so called rather logically because they consisted of a set of six gyroscopes. The six-pack itself was actually installed by Gar – riott inside the Skylab, but turning over attitude control to the new system required going outside and connecting up a set of cables to circumvent the station’s original attitude control rate gyros in favor of the new ones. Using a special tool designed for the task, Lousma had to twist the old connec­tions from their sockets and then twist the new cables into place—a task notoriously much more difficult in microgravity than on Earth. If you twist something in microgravity without gravity holding you in place, you also twist yourself unless you’re secured in place. The work that was to be done had not been anticipated during the Skylab’s design, and as a result there was nothing on the structure for the purpose of keeping an astronaut from spinning around an object that he was trying to twist.

“So I ended up wedging myself somehow so that when I turned on these [connections] that were hard to get off I didn’t rotate myself out of the pic­ture,” Lousma said. “It took a fair amount of sweat and so forth to figure out how that was going to be done. It was one of those things that the water tank misleads you on. It’s not perfect in neutral buoyancy.”

Bean, MD-28:

eva day. I was talking to myself during eva and Jack wondered what I was say­ing—I told him I was just shooting the shit. Jack quipped, “get any?— what’s the limit on those?"—Owen was saying “ come on,… hustle… give us some of that positive mental attitude"— pma (he doesn’t believe in it. But knows I use it on me and them also.) “Go Earl [motivational author Earl Nightingale]," Owen said. I said “you need it, it works on you whether you like it or not".

Jack had a difficult time with a connector or two—it was difficult for me to keep from asking questions of Jack as I wondered ifthat would be the end ofthe show but he said don’t talk for awhile and just let me work on it. He did for a very long у minutes and then reported connected.

Owen was elated with the view over the Andes — the 2jo degree panorama with 5 solar panels in the field ofview to form a perspective or frame work. They were flying over all the world outside of the vehicle going iyooo MPH. Lost three shims and one nut taking off the first ramp.

We have only i to 2 min of tv because of recorder time left so have to hold it for Owen’s return to the fas. Owen had to come out of the foot restraints to remove the ramps from the so 56 and 82 a doors. Sun end BA lights worked this

time —Jack said he can see many orange lights, we were over mid Russia—not many cities — Orion came up, a beautiful constellation, Owen still working on bolts at Sun end.

Got a master alarm-смо gas-s/с going out of attitude—I put it in Att Hold— Tacs x was at 16degrees.

Sometimes, like on a tall building, get a controllable urge similar to jump­ing off which is to open a hatch to vacuum—or take off a glove or pop a hel­met—fortunately these are passing impulses that you can control but it is inter­esting to know they take place.

Great eva today—all happy tonight.

Owen bitched about the medical types that take care of ourfood because they told [crew physician] Paul Buchanan our food cue cards were wrong for optimal salt and they had not bothered to update it and had been making them up with supplements. — Owen flew off the handle because he has been wanting salt.

It is comforting to know someone (many someones) on the ground are work­ing our space craft problems faster and much better than we. We generally per­form a holding action if we can. Till help and advice comes, then take the info or suggestions and do them. This is the only way we can free our minds to do the day to day task, the production tasks where someone is trouble shooting our problems.

Rearranged my bunk room —put a portable light on the floor near the head of my bed and turned my bed bag upside down so that I could grab the items inside easily. I used the door next to the bottom locker (pulled out about 30 degrees) as a writing desk. Stole the power cable for the light from the spiders’ cage—hope Owen doesn’t get upset. He has been getting messages to feed them both filet and keep them watered. Will we bring them to the post flight press conference?

The teleprinter is a device about which you can have mixed feelings—it would be hell to get the information any other way so it must be cared for as an expenditure of effort. But at the same time every time you hear it printing you know it is more work for you to do. Wish we would get a non work related mes­sage sometime.

Garriott recalled the view during the spacewalk being amazing. “As I was sending film canisters back to Jack with a telescoping rod, I had a few moments to just enjoy the scenery. At that moment we were moving east­ward across the South Pacific approaching Chile. To my right I could see the high Andes Mountains, topped with snow and even high lakes and salt

deposits, extending all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Looking to my left the Andes extended all the way to Peru. Large cumulonimbus clouds [thunder­clouds] reached upward to quite high altitudes near the equatorial tropics, their vertical extent noticeable even from 435 kilometers high, and long shad­ows were cast in sunset colors, over 100 kilometers down-sun. Then look­ing straight ahead of our ground track, I could see over the Andes, across Argentina, to the Atlantic Ocean! Magnified ”

“The eva s were really the most memorable part of being up there,” Jack Lousma said. “The launch and reentry obviously get your attention, but every other day kind of fades into the day before and the day after except for the times we did the eva s. Those were just spectacular. Of course at that time we didn’t have the continuous communication [provided by the com­munication relay satellite]. We could just talk when we were over a ground station, and if we were lucky, we could miss every ground station for a full orbit. You’re out there all by yourself. You just kind of felt self-reliant, more self-reliant than you might otherwise feel.

“But the evas were spectacular. I remember going out to the Apollo Tele­scope one time and having Alan turn off the running lights on the Sky- lab. We were in the darkness over Siberia somewhere, and there’s no light down there. I almost couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; I’m whirling around the world at 17,500 miles an hour, hanging on by one foot; I can hard­ly see anything. And I thought, who in the heck has ever done this before? Nobody—or at least, it was a rather unique opportunity. It was those kind of things that I relished, that made the whole trip memorable.”

Bean, MD-29:

Felt good to have atm film again. Operating the atm telescopes and cameras is one of the most enjoyable tasks here. It is challenging, you can directly contrib­ute to improved data acquisition—Owen has effectively changed the method of operating it in just % of a month. The Polaroid camera and the persistent image scope have made a significant difference.

I had Houston give all the atm passes tomorrow, our day off, to Jack and I, so Owen could finish some things he is behind on and do some additional items that he has planned prior to flight— the flight is V2 over and he has had little spare time—he needs some to be happy.

Using the head [waste-management compartment] for sponge baths because

sponges squirt water out when pushed on the skin. Bathing has become more pleasant as I have been less careful about sprinkling water about. I tend to now splash it somewhat. And after the bath is complete, wipe up the droplets on the walls. None on the floor like on Earth if you do the same.

We passed Pete, Joe and Paul’s old spaceflight mark, in fact we now hold the world record for spaceflight— it feels good to be breaking new ground said Jack today. We will be V2 into our mission tomorrow night.

Our TV got too hot during Eva and quit working— we will do the rest of the mission on one TV I guess. Funny, they did not insulate it sufficiently. We had a plan to put it at the solar air lock for eva but can’t do it now.

Jack has a small sty on his left eye, he wanted some “yellow mercury" but settled for Neosporin. Jack treated himselfbut Owen will examine it tomorrow—Paul Buchanan saidfor us to be extremely careful because that could be contagious. Perhaps a streptococcus of some type.

Reviews of the shower were somewhat mixed. While some of the crew­members found that it was an agreeable luxury for occasional use, it could also be rather time-consuming. “‘Bathing’ in the shower facility provided meant floating in an erectable water-tight cylinder, preparing warm water, spraying yourself to get wet, soaping up, rinsing off, collecting waste water, and then reversing the whole process. It was an enormous waste of time,” Garriott said. “It typically took more than an hour to complete. Especially true when a wet washcloth or sponge, soapy if desired, can do just as well in only five or ten minutes and one feels, and actually is, just as clean as in the shower. As a result, Alan took a total of two showers, Jack one, and I took zero for the whole mission. Yet we all remained quite well cleansed, espe­cially after working out each day for exercise.”

Garriott, MD-30:

First relaxed day! We stayed busy, atm all day (Al & Jack), but not too much hurry.

I sent down three TV bits (Arabella —>Anita; rocket stability; water droplet). Good science debrief even Bob MacQueen got on mike! A new precedent.

“The standard procedure had always been for the Capcom, another astro­naut, to do all the talking with the flight crew,” Garriott explained. “They are each well known personally to the crew and can possibly appreciate the crew’s situation better from their own experiences. Whatever the purported

reasoning may be, there is likely a bit of ‘turf protection’ involved as well. Communication is a crew task and nobody better interfere! Even the flight directors, who have the official responsibility for all mission decisions nev­er get on the ‘air-to-ground’ loop to talk to the crew. (ok, a few instances of center director or others excepted. Maybe even the president of the Unit­ed States.)”

“But with Science (capitalized) recognized as the main purpose of the entire program, why not let one or more Pis—principal investigators—dis­cuss how things are going, especially when requested by the crew? Com­mon sense did prevail, and Dr. Robert MacQueen became the first pi (of the White Light Coronagraph experiment and representing the entire solar physics team) to discuss some science issues directly with us. We discussed his coronagraph observations, flares and precursors, and several other items, most or all of which could have been handled by our proficient Capcoms, including (late) astronomer Karl Henize. But it did set a useful precedent, and it was repeated later in the mission with other disciplines.”

Bean, MD-30:

We are going to sleep just under one hour to the mission midpoint. Our science briefing today showed that we had made up the atm observing time we missed early in the mission and predictions are for us to exceed even the 260 hr atm sun viewing goal. We are ahead in corollary experiments.

Took my second shower, noticed that I could not hear most of the time unless I shook my head because large amounts of water go into my ear openings. I was the only one showering today.

Exercised today although that is not my plan for day off— not doing the exer­cise would be a nice reward but did not have time eva day.

Jack made an excellent observation when he saidnasa should play down the spi­der after the initial release because it tended to detract from the more meaningful experiments we are doing up here. Will the taxpayer say, now that I know what they are doing up there, I don’t like my money going for that sort of thing.

Owen tried to do a science bubble experiment with cherry drink but [it] didn’t look too promising to me. He kept losing the drop ofdrink from the straw.

I have noticed if I do not force myself to drink then I will drink much less than on Earth and will dehydrate—I do not seem to automatically desire the prop­er quantity of water. I suggested that when we get back we may not naturally readapt to one g and become dehydrated there. Owen does not agree at all.

MD-31:

Spent part of the morning composing a message to the dedication of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Space Center. Thanks to Owen’s andJack’s suggestions, it turned out acceptable I think. It must have because at the dedication Dr. Fletcher read only President Nixon’s and ours.

When I used to float from compartment to compartment I would be a little disoriented when I got there—now I look ahead as I enter and do a quick roll to the ‘heads up’ attitude for the space I’m entering.

Owen said his only regret was that he would never adapt to zero-g again—he thinks Pete [and his crew] is the only one besides ourselves that has ever done so.

MD-32:

About every other night I get up because of unusual noises—mostly they are all thermal noises. The most unusual view occurred once as I was in my bunk and peered up to the forward compartment. The У2 light from the airlock revealed three white suited figures, arms outstretched, leaning several awkward ways—silent, large with white helmet straps-one drying, the others waiting to dry. I was shook a little by the eerie sight so I went to the wardroom and looked out. The dark exterior with white airglow layer and white clouds filled the lower right portion of the window like it was one foot away. It startled me even more.

MD-33:

Morale is high—work level is high. — Last night after dinner Owen asked Jack if he (Jack) would like him (Owen) to take his last atm pass. Jack said no he was lookingforward to it— he wanted to find some more Ellerman bombs—[bright points in penumbra near sun spots] as he got some earlier—I interrupted and mentioned that the flight planners had voice uplinked a change in the morn­ing, assigning me to the pass. Owen laughed— here we all are fighting for the last atm pass [ofthe day].

Kidded Owen about wearing his M133 cap—I said Jack and I better watch ourps & Qs tomorrow, Owen will be in a bad, criticizing mood— he took the kidding well, hope it will have effect.

I have been decreasing my number of mistakes significantly by only doing one job at a time. Invariably if I do [more than one task], I do not get back in time or do not catch simple error in the first set up.

Bean found it difficult to avoid multitasking—starting up one experi­ment and then moving on to another one while that one was running. The

atm provided particular temptation in that respect. After he started a task, there would be nothing else he could do for a little while, and he frequent­ly found himself working on something else to fill the time. However, he found that while that period of time was long enough to make him want to do something else, it was short enough that he was gone from the atm too long when he did.

On Day 37, Garriott wrote in his diary: “Almost everything on my personal list of extra items has been worked in. TV Science Demos are not too good. Still may get some worked in.” For a generation of school children, these “science demos” were one of Skylab’s most familiar legacies.

“Before flight, I prepared a list of (hopefully) interesting demonstrations that I might videotape or record on film that could be turned into instruc­tional films for students, probably high-school level, but possibly older and younger,” Garriott remembered. “They would be unique to the weightless environment and also challenge their thinking about physics in this exot­ic environment. I obtained a few one-quarter-inch by two-inch rod mag­nets before flight (a few dollars from Edmund Scientific), stowed them in my personal gear, and made use of other on-board hardware items for these demonstrations.”

Indeed, the magnets were quite effective in demonstrating for students the unique environment of microgravity. When released from Garriott’s fingers, they oscillated back and forth like any terrestrial magnet, but now in three dimensions instead of one or two like an ordinary compass. When two magnets were put end-to-end, their oscillation rate was much reduced. When placed side by side, they hardly oscillated at all because their two magnetic fields canceled each other out.

Another experiment mounting frame was used to spin extra large, flat metal nuts off the bolts on the frame. It is well known that nuts do not stay on bolts well in weightlessness, because the lack of gravitational forces reduc­es friction and makes them easy to “spin off.” A very stable spin was pro­duced in this way as compared to spinning them by hand alone when they always have a considerable wobble. When a magnet was taped to their face, the spinning nut was found to precess very nicely in space.

After the crew returned home, these films and videos were edited and a script prepared to show how the experiments all function in weightless­ness. Each is about fifteen minutes long and was prepared with help from

astronaut Joe Allen and a local contractor. They were distributed by most NASA centers and have been viewed by many millions of students in their classroom settings. They are titled Zero-G, Conservation Laws in Zero-G, Gyroscopes in Space, Fluids in Weightlessness, Magnetism in Space, and Magnetic Effects in Space. Bean recalled being impressed both with the experiments that Garriott did and with his dedication in using his Sunday free time to carry them out. “Owen did some experiments on Sunday, which I see even today on TV,” he said. “Those were good experiments. Good stuff.”

Though much of the central footage for the videos was shot live in orbit, Garriott had a few additional scenes to add upon his return to Earth, includ­ing one featuring a somewhat unwilling accomplice. “In the Conservation Laws film and video, I decided to try to film and explain how a cat always lands on its feet when dropped from a modest height,” Garriott said. “I had demon­strated a similar result while in space. So I used our own house cat, Calico. But only once, as he learned very quickly what I had in mind. He was to be dropped from only about three feet onto a pillow just out of the camera view just in case it didn’t work as planned. When dropped with feet upward, in a small fraction of a second he had rotated around with exaggerated tail and body motion to place feet downward and had extended his claws, which raked across my nearby hand! (‘Serves you right,’ I can almost hear now from all the cat lovers reading this.) I carefully hid the blood appearing on the back of my hand from the still-rolling camera. But it does make for a fascinating explanation and it is none too obvious, to explain how a cat or a high diver or an astronaut can start with no body rotation whatsoever (no angular momentum) and then reorient themselves to face in any direction desired, before coming to a complete stop again. The cat does it instinctive­ly and very fast, with high frame speed required to see it.”

Bean, MD-38:

Got my firstflare today—A c6 in active region 12. I noticed it while doing some sun center work as an especially bright semicircular ring around a spot. There were 8 or so similar bright rings but this one became exceptionally bright both in hydrogen-alpha and in the xuv. I debated with myself about stopping the scheduled atm work and going over and concentrate on the possible flare. As of this time it had not reached full flare intensity and it is not possible to know whether it will just keep increasing in intensity or will level off then drop. As I elected to stop the experiments in progress and repoint I noticed about 5800 counts on our Be (beryllium) counter. —A true good flare would be 4150 counts.

It never got much higher. Owen hustled up at once to help—He noted [exper­iment number] % was not at sun center so we repointed it (It was 80 arc sec too low) We took pictures in all except 82A which is extremely tight on film at this point. Owen stayed up late doing atm because of the activity.

Paul [Buchanan] had Joe Kerwin talk with us the other night. Joe had heard we had asked to stay longer and he indicated they had discussed it on Day 22 or 24 and decided against it. He seemed to think they had made the proper deci­sion. Joe indicated Pete, Paul [Weitz] & he were in preflight condition—the only real funny was the fact their red blood cell mass was down 15 % or so and their bodies did not start making it up till about Day ij. Why it waited that long they do not know. I wondered ifit were possible to affect the mechanism so that it stopped forever. Seems far fetched, but a thought.

As an astronaut you become very health conscious—if we were not so healthy we could become hypochondriacs. I’ve worried about a rupture in the lbnp. My legs losing circumference, back strain on the exerciser, gaining too much weight, not having a good appetite in zero g, heart attacks, you name it—I worried about it—As Owen said—from a health viewpoint these may be the most impor­tant 2 months in our lives. He could be right with the changes going on and the remoteness of medical aid.

Garriott, MD-39:

Writing at atm panel, first time I’ve had enough time to write up here! We’ve had fantastic solar activity the last 3 or 4 days. ssn (sunspot number) greater than 150 (ij8 once, I think). Subflares more or less routine. We don’t respond in flare mode to save film.

Sunspots have been observed from the ground for centuries. At one point in history even acknowledging the possibility of sunspots was a dangerous belief since it seemed to indicate that the sun was not “perfect.” By the time of Skylab, however, a lot more was known about them, such as that the spots come and go over about an eleven-year cycle (or twenty-two years, for those who watch their magnetic polarity). At times of least activity, they may all be gone; and when Skylab actually reached orbit, it was near the time of sunspot minimum. But much to the crew’s surprise, amazement, and plea­sure, the sun decided to “act up,” and generated more than one hundred of these spots and regions across its face at times. A very “measle-y” appearance but great news for the solar physicists. During the second crew’s two-month stay on orbit, the sun made two full rotations and also changed its sunspot

activity from the low teens to over 150. It provided a marvelous opportuni­ty to study the sun in all its suits of clothes.

Bean recalled that “along about halfway through or so, we began to real­ize that when Owen manned the atm, which was our most continuously operating experiment and the primary experiment, that things went bet­ter — the coordination with the ground, the knowledge. So very soon, I said, ‘I’m not going to do the atm anymore, let’s let Owen and Jack do it.’ I tried to put Owen on there as much as I could, as much as he could take. Because we felt the data was better when he was there. As I remember, when flares came up, he was generally there.

“We were journeymen there I felt, Jack maybe was better than me, but Owen was much superior. And we could do the other stuff like heating up the furnace so it’ll melt metal. You just turn on the switch and do the check­list, and we didn’t have to make much in the way of decisions about what we were seeing there. It’s just a fact. Owen was just superior at it. And it fit him. He enjoyed it, and knew more about it, and loved it. It was his kind of stuff.”

Bean, MD-39:

I mentioned to Owen that our attitude varies like the sun’s activity—now it’s way up because the sun’s activity is up. Owen avowed that ours is up or way up. Always positive. I mentioned that the first few days it didn’t seem way up. He allowed that. It wasn’t down—sort of like rain on a camping trip —You just have to be patient, good times are ahead. He also allowed that that would be a quotable quote when we got back.

Forgot to mention Jack saying that if they extended us we could always do bmmd calibrations all day—Right, 1 on the bmmd, i on each smmd, then rotate every hour.

In the middle of last night I heard a loud thump—It actually shook the vehi­cle. I got out ofbed and looked at all the tank pressures in the cluster and even in the CSM. Nothing seen—I recorded the time oj2<; and told Houston this morn­ing. They called back and said they broke the data down at minute intervals and found nothing— they are now breaking it into У2 sec increments. Some­thing happened, but what I don’t know. Perhaps it was a sharper than usual thermal deformation.

Lousma’s crack about the calibrations was a bit of astronaut humor, since the crew felt that they wasted far too much time simply calibrating the body

and small mass measuring devices, when in reality the calibration numbers never changed. Garriott had made a reference in his diary just a few days ear­lier to how much time was spent on the calibration. “By golly, I would make note of it in this diary and remember to tell the pi, astronaut Bill Thornton, what a pain in the butt and waste of time all this was!”

Bean, MD-40:

Jack is pedaling the bike with his arms—good for shoulder and arms, he can do щ watt/min for у minutes.

Owen just flew by with the evening teleprinter messages — We try to find a new record, our old record is from the dome hatch to the ceiling of the experi­ment compartment.

Owen was on the atm almost all day doing jop [Joint Operation Plan] 12 —Calibration rocket work to compare with a more recent sun sensor instru­ment to insure our instrument calibrations have not drifted.

erep tape recorder easy to load, tape has not set and does not float off the reel & make a tangle.

Story Musgrave said there was a sound in the background like a roaring drag­on —It was the sound of Jack pulling the mkii exerciser.

Jack’s triangle shoes are wearing out—Hard work on the bike & mkii most­ly. He is going to recommend SL4 bring up an extra pair.

Took a soap (Neutrogena) & rag bath today after work out— Do a soap one every other day—And a water one the other day. We are all clean—Body odor just is not present nor is a sticky feeling after exercise.

Several things I have learned up here but the most valuable for atm opera­tion is “Do not try to do anything else while you operate atm — You invariably make atm mistakes" Another is “2 to 5 minutes is too short a time to let your mind wander on another subject when you are within that time from a job that must be done then — such as a switch throw, photo exposure, etc. ”

Our condensate system vacuum leak has fixed itself— somehow when I con­nected it all back up after the dump probe changeout, it did not leak. The ground thinks it’s a fitting on the small condensate tank.

The second paragraph of that entry refers to length of the teleprinter tape for one day’s messages from the ground, some twenty-five feet, all of which had to be read, divided up among crewmen, and then executed to accom­plish that day’s activities.

The jop 12 was another of the crew’s calibration activities, in which they compared Skylab measurements with similar measurements made from a rocket launched from the ground reaching very high altitudes, to assure that the Skylab instruments had not drifted in sensitivity.

Garriott, MD-40:

3 atm passes today. Got a good flare in ляп [active region 12], an м-class (report­ed by the ground, a rather large one) and another probably high class C flare in ляр. Really prepared for it— “text book" situation. Everyone should have good data. Then good post flare on 3rd orbit.

Later saw aurora Australis (southern hemisphere), w/ photos, then several hours later, 0303Z, large extensive aurora borealis (northern hemisphere). Good photos, і and 4 second exposures.

Paul B. said we had a 7 day extension! We all thought beyond 60 days, but he only meant for next week: days 40—4J! Oh well—

Note difficulty in finding “dropped objects." Eyes not accustomed to focusing at intermediate distances. Seem to always look at “bottom"surfaces.

“This was an unexpected phenomenon,” Garriott explained. “When we dropped or lost a small item, we usually could not find it again promptly. We always seemed to look on hard surfaces where we would normally have left it. But three-dimensional space was just too difficult to search visu­ally. Soon we found a solution, however. Air circulation was always from our living areas (should say volumes, since we can use all three dimensions now) and then collected at a single intake filter high in the ows dome area. Every morning we could visit the intake duct, probably find a little lint from clothes and so forth, and also all the little items, pencils, notes, that we had lost the day before.”

Lousma discovered another trick that helped him deal with the same problem. When he found it difficult to locate something lost in the three­dimensional space in front of him, he tricked his mind into looking at the situation differently by literally turning the problem upside-down. “When we were looking for something that we lost, the best way to find it was to turn upside down,” he said. “Because you normally look at the top of every­thing, you don’t think about looking under there. But when you’re upside down and look for something, you look at those places that you don’t nor­mally see, or that your eye doesn’t get drawn to, because you tend to expect things to be sitting on something.”

37- Lousma demonstrates basic grooming on Skylab.

The auroras were a particularly beautiful sight from orbit. Bean recalled being surprised at how impressive they were viewed from above. “Strangely enough, because I wasn’t that interested in auroras, I remember seeing both auroras,” he said. “Owen became the first person, I think, in history, to see both auroras the same day. He saw them during the same orbit, about for­ty-five minutes apart.

“They looked different, and they looked strange. They were bright, and streaming. They were just easier to see than from Earth. I can remember just being amazed at the size of them, and the nice colors of them.”

Bean, MD-41:

As I was waiting to start the erep pass & we had a 3 min maneuver time to z-lv. I did two chips [small segments of the operations plans] of the atm contingency plan for no erep then powered it down for erep. Bet that’s a space first.

Grand Rapids blinked its lights for Jack Lousma tonight. He said some good words over the headset.

MD-42:

Owen got a x class flare first time manning the atm panel this morning, we all hustled up there to help. It was well done. The big daddy flare we have been wait – ingfor. All ofus were laughing and cutting up. Owen had said yesterday he had used all his luck up. Guess he didn’t or he’s running on Jack’s or mine.

Took apart the video tape recorder and removed 4 circuit boards, 63 screws did the job. No sign ofcircuit problems, burns, loose wires, etc.

Owen & Paul had it out on the exercise, as Paul said last night Owen was slacking off. Jack was up at the atm and was laughing and hollering as was I. We have been callingOwen "slacker”this evening. [Bean and Garriottsaid post­flight that they consider this one ofthe funniest episodes of the mission.]

Owen and I got 10 erep film cassettes, 1 erep tape, 3 Earth terrain camera mags and a soip mag out of a… bag where the sl-2 crew had left it. Wonder if we could use it on our mission or on a mission extension.

I am very happy with the way our crew is performing— We are doing the job without problems & without giving problems. In my view, it’s a profession­al performance.

Garriott, MD-41:

Paul B. [flight physician Buchanan] complains about slacking off on [exercise] work. Probably data error. More tomorrow. ..

MD-42:

atm discussion…. White Light transient, bigflare… Sort of "chewed out” Paul B. on his data interpretation. Apparently [they] had lost several days of data. Alsays I was "too hard”. Jack thinks okay, just "business like”. However, don’t want a reputation [for] "baddisposition”. Hmm, have to work on that.

[Today is daughter] Linda’s [seventh] birthday. Sent greeting via Capcom.

MD-43:

Talk of reentry, etc., beginning. Good ^wlc transient [a "wlc transient” is a white light coronagraph transient, now usually called a coronal mass ejection or

cme]. Almost passed it up. Very good one, I think. Would have missed it, prob­ably, except that I had a lot of “observing time”—free.

Al decided that I could go eva on the 3rd one! Glad to get all three!

… health andspirits are higher than ever. We’d all like an extra week exten­sion. Hardfor Al to stay busy—about right for me.

… Al sent down the wrong chest girth for Jack. Something like 142 cm inspi­ration and 96 cm expiration. Ground medical report said too much, even for a Marine!

… May try taped message to Crippen tomorrow.

MD-44:

Lots of good southern aurora. Greenish at lower altitude—reddish above. Lots of structure, kinks, vertical striations, changes by the minute. Some of it almost directly beneath Skylab just before sunrise.

Easy day. Did tv show with magnetic demonstration].

MD-45:

Pretty good day, nothing special. Up an hour early, plus bed ~2 hours late for atm, though. Not too tired. Still in runningfor [a mission] extension.

“On the evening of md -46, I finally played the trick that had been in work for over two months,” said Garriott. “It even had the flight controllers puz­zled for twenty-five years! My objective was to pretend that my wife, Hel­en, had come up to Skylab to bring us a hot meal, even though this was an obvious impossibility. Here is how the scheme worked. I recorded her voice on my small hand-held tape recorder before flight, pretending to have a brief conversation with a Capcom, with time gaps for his replies. The Capcom would be my only ‘accomplice,’ but his role would be carefully disguised. It was also necessary to have some recent event mentioned to validate the currency of the dialogue, so it would seem it could not have been record­ed before flight. The short dialogue is printed below in its entirety. I knew that both Bob Crippen and Karl Henize were going to be Capcoms for Sky – lab, so they were brought into the planning, given the script and rehearsed on their timing. They kept the short script on a piece of paper in their bill­folds, awaiting the right moment.

“For our flight in August-September, there would be many occasions of natural disasters involving forest fires or hurricanes, which would be wide­ly known throughout the United States. So a few comments about one or

the other were made on the tape. This led to four different scripts being recorded, one for each of the two Capcoms and one each for the two nat­ural events. I would play the tape on the normal air-to-ground voice link with my wife’s recorded voice and the Capcom would respond as if totally surprised by the female interloper.”

Near the end of one period of voice contact Garriott said to the ground, “I’ll have something for you on the next pass, Bob.” Crippen replied, “Roger that, Owen.” Then quietly and surreptitiously, he reviewed the brief script that had been in his pocket for all these weeks. Soon after coming into voice range, the ground heard this voice on the standard air-to-ground link:

Skylab (a female voice): “Gad, I don’t see how the boys manage to get rid of the feedback between these speakers. . . . Hello Houston, how are you reading me down there? (5 sec. pause) Hello Houston, are you read­ing Skylab?”

Capcom: “Skylab, this is Houston. We heard you alright, but had diffi­culty recognizing your voice. Who do we have on the line up there?”

Skylab: “Hello Houston. Roger. Well I haven’t talked with you for a while. Isn’t that you down there, Bob? This is Helen, here in Skylab. The boys hadn’t had a good home cooked meal in so long, I thought I’d bring one up. Over”

Capcom: “Roger, Skylab. Someone’s gotta be pulling my leg, Helen. Where are you?”

Skylab: “Right here in Skylab, Bob. Just a few orbits ago we were look­ing down on those forest fires in California. The smoke sure covers a lot of territory, and, oh boy, the sunrises are just beautiful! Oh oh. . . . See you later, Bob. I hear the boys coming up here and I’m not supposed to be on the radio.”

“Then quiet returned to the voice link, but we were told later, Bob Crip­pen had lots of questions coming his way in the Control Center,” Garriott said. “What was going on? Where was this voice coming from? Bob must have been a very good actor, because he claimed complete ignorance and innocence of how it happened. Everyone heard it coming down on the air – to-ground loop. The whole two-way conversation sounded like a perfectly normal dialogue. No breaks or gaps, and they all heard Bob respond in real time. Could I have recorded Helen’s voice on a ‘family conversation’ from our

home? Yes, but there was no recent one. How would she have known about the fires, or who was to be on Capcom duty and how could she respond to Bob’s comments in real time, as everyone could hear?

“No one ever worked out how this was accomplished. Finally, at our twen­ty-fifth reunion celebration in Houston in 1998, and with many of the flight directors and controllers present and still with no clue as to how it was done, I described it all as above. My prejudiced opinion is that this was the best ‘gotcha’ ever perpetrated on our friendly flight controllers!”

Crippen recalled: “That was kind of a fun trick. There was head rubbing. Everybody in the mocr, or the control room, was looking like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ We did a good job. It was fun. Working those missions got to be tough. We did all kinds of things to try to come up with levity. That was a nice one that the crew got that the ground control didn’t know about.”

Bean, MD-46:

This was a good day right up to the end. I had a M092hyi scheduled after dinner and at about 2 min from completion I had to punch out. I had a very warm tin – gly feeling in my arms and shoulders. Don’t know whether it was too much hard driving today or just what— my urine output 2 days ago was larger by 100 % my normal— It even beat Owen & Jack. It probably means something.

Flight Director Don Puddy said, “Crip’s birthday is today and we have a sur­prise for him. Maybe you could sing Happy Birthday from orbit. (Incidentally, our wives and kids were at MCC tonight) We rounded up Owen’s sound effects tape, found the party sounds and when he came up the next site we played the tape, told him we were having a party in his honor and sang Happy Birthday. Jack stood back and hesitated to sing for some reason. Crip was moved I could tell— they brought out a cake for him — He is one swell guy, and efficient too.

This was the last comm. pass tonight so he told us that he hated to be the bear­er of bad news but our request to stay longer had been considered but that it was decided to hold to the present entry schedule of Day 60. We answered with a simple, “ok, thanks.”

We talked of it the rest of the evening—I ran around saying how great that was — now we could get home—Now we could get off the food— our Command Module would never last more than 60 days — Owen said, “He never thought we would be extended because there was no positive reason for doing so, atm film used up, more erep sites than ever thought possible, we’re all healthy, all cor­ollary experiments overkilled— to sum up—more risk with little to gain—we could not think of any directorate but our own who would support us. atm wants us back for data to look at prior to SL4, erep wants its data, medical wants our bodies. Jack was disappointed.

Got call from the ground wanting to know who had been riding the ergom – eter during Jack’s M092 /iji—I said me. I knew Paul would ask about it later (by the way, this occurred yesterday) tonight Paul wondered if I thought I could monitor M092 from the bike—I said yes, but that I knew the medical director­ate would not like it. I asked if he could ride a bicycle and carry on a conversa­tion at the same time. He said he went over to the simulator and tried it & it seemed ok to him.

In Apollo you go for just a visit or trip to zero g. In Skylab you live it.

“In earlier manned spaceflight programs and missions ‘launch to land­ing’ flight plans were prepared in detail and then executed with updates as required,” flight director Phil Shaffer said. “Basically it was held intact to satisfy mission requirements established before the flight design process began. In Skylab, sections of the flight plan such as launch and rendezvous or deorbit and entry were similar, and a complete nominal plan was gener­ated for the on-orbit operations for such activities as determination of con­sumables usage budgets, but the actual daily on-orbit plans were generated in real time to recognize situations and conditions as they were in the pres­ent time frame.

“As a result, the folks at NASA headquarters thought they should be directly involved in planning the activities to be planned in the near-real-time flight planning processes. This preference was not known and was not prepared for by the flight operations people until late in the premission time frame.

“I believed there was an inherent conflict when upper-level management people stop limiting themselves to setting objectives, requirements, and guide­lines and begin trying to control implementation and execution, especially when control was down to the level of specific procedures. I did not believe they were trained for this and were not required to be sufficiently familiar with the specific configuration of systems and hardware. I believed the selec­tion, scheduling, detailed planning, implementation, and execution respon­sibilities rested with the flight control and flight crew people who were both trained and familiar. In any case the result was the establishment of the Mis­sion Management Team (mmt) that met outside Mission Control and pro­vided inputs to the planning teams that were sometimes inappropriate.

“On Alan Bean’s flight, this conflict surfaced when the mmt sent direc­tion that the crewmember serving as the lbnp experiment monitor was to discontinue the practice of riding the ergometer [stationary bike] during the performance of this experiment. Their concern apparently was that since the experiment subject could lose consciousness when the pressure was reduced on the lower part of his body, the monitor could not respond quickly enough in terminating the depressurization. However, the practice of riding the ergometer during lbnp activity provided a free exercise opportunity and in fact the monitor did not have to get off the ergometer to reach the control for repressurization. He could reach it from the seat.

“An mmt representative came into Mission Control to deliver the input for the day, and I had the good fortune to be the flight director that day. He directed me to tell the crew that henceforth and forever more the lbnp monitor would not ride the ergometer during the experiment. So I asked ‘And the rationale for this is. . . ?’ and he told me how dangerous the mmt thought the practice was. I started to ask him where they thought the mon­itor ought to be but didn’t as it probably would have started a nonconstruc­tive debate. Instead, I told him ‘I need to talk to Bill Schneider, now.’ Bill was the program director for Skylab from NASA headquarters. The mmt messenger looked at me for about a heartbeat and left.

“In short order Bill showed up at my console, and I told him, ‘Bill, you guys are making a big mistake with this direction to not ride the ergometer during lbnp operations.’ I described to him the proximity of the ergome­ter to the lbnp and its controls and then told him, ‘I want you here on the console with me when I tell Alan that the lbnp monitor can no longer ride the ergometer during the lbnp experiment because he can not adequate­ly monitor the subject. Further, Bill, I want you to respond to Alan direct­ly when he comes on the downlink and tells us how little he thinks of that idea.’ Bill looked at me for an instant and said, ‘Don’t tell him. . . we are not going to do it that way.’

“And we didn’t; we continued to take advantage of the free exercise peri­od during lbnp operations for the rest of Skylab.”

The decision not to grant the extension marked the beginning of the end of the Skylab II mission. The crew began preparations for their return home in earnest. The next day Bean noted in his diary that he had received sever­al changes to the entry checklist (reflecting the new procedures needed due to the thruster malfunction) and had spent an hour or so reading through the revised version.

“The other evening I spent an hour or so in the csm touching each switch as I went thru the entry check lists,” he wrote in his diary. “Nice to find out one does not forget too rapidly.”

The approaching end of the mission meant that the crewmembers also had to begin a staged shift of their circadian rhythm—the body’s sense of when it should be asleep or awake—to prepare for the return to Earth. The schedule for the final day of the mission had already been planned out to assure that the crew had the opportunity to get as much rest as possible before beginning reentry. For the remainder of the mission, they would gradually change their scheduled sleep and wake periods to transition their circadian rhythms so that they would be ready.

Garriott, MD-47:

Two busy days. More aurora, atm sees a more quiet sun now, severalereppass­es; the bad news last night was no further mission extension was possible. 59 V2 days would have to be it. We would be eating into the third crew’s food to do that, which we ended up slightly infringing anyway — mostly the sugar cookies, I think. And I’m sure the atm film will be exhausted before then, as we are already having to ration ourselves. Just too many fascinating things to record!

Bean, MD-51:

Day off. We did our usual 2 erep & atm plus not much else. We go to bed 2 hours early tonight to shift our circadian rhythm around— We did not want this but can live with it. I went to the csm to get a Seconal to sleep on time. — Owen couldn’t find the ows Seconal— it was in some other drug cans that the ground had him move. Later he inventoried some drugs — This sort ofthing always puts him in a bad mood.

Pedaled the ergometer for 99 straight minutes, to establish a new world’s record for pedaling non-stop around the world— and as Jack said, I did it without wheels too. Owen was interested and thought he might do it later in the week when our orbit had decayed and then beat my time by a second or less. Bruce McCandless [Capcom]pointed out that he must exceed by at least 9% to estab­lish his claim.

Owen did some good TV of how the TV close up lens could be used medical­ly —He looked at Jack’s eye, ear, nose, throat & teeth and discussed how the TV

might be used by doctors to aid us in diagnosis and in treatment of problems we might have, say, an eye injury, a tooth extraction, suturing a wound or any number of things from a broken bone to skin rash. Owen has a mind that dwells on the scientific aspect of all that he does. He knows much about much—he is interested in all branches of sciences. He is a great back of the envelope calcula­tor—able to reduce most problems to their simplest elements. He has done great school room tv demonstrations of zero g water, magnets, his spiders.

MD-52:

Our circadian rhythm is in good shape today after the shift. Found out today that we had 6 hrs from tunnel closeout to undock—then 1 hr 44 min from there to deorbit burn then 24 min to 400,000 feet. A nice slow timeline that will allow us to get set up, double/triple checked for our entry. —Maybe we [can] stand up 2 hours later — well, we’ll see.

a Tm operations have become much simplified the last week — with all the solar activity the film is gone. — It was a freak on the sun and we were lucky to see it.

Garriott, MD-52:

“Day off ” yesterday [but did] several tv shows, magnetic effects demo, medi­cal demo. Jerry Hordinsky [the next crew’s physician, who was filling in since Paul Buchanan was en route to the recovery ship], mentioned a “limited test” in which subjects were given Scop-Dex to see if it affected their medical tests. He said in one subject there was a minor effect. Jokingly, I asked how the other test subject did. Jerry replied that “he had no effect”.

[Remarked Garriott: “Some study! I intended my question as a joke, but there really were only two subjects!”]

MD-53:

Some free time still. Every one still feeling tops. We’re winding down now, get­ting ready for final eva and reentry. Doing a few 2-hour time shift adjustments to get ready for reentry [west of San Diego]. Finally pulled out a library book a few minutes ago and read for 10 minutes. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Space is too fascinating a place to experience, to waste time doing what can be done just as easily at home, that is, read books! I’ll philosophize when I get back home.

Bean, MD-53:

Owen &Jack were doing tv of paper airplane construction and flying. The trick is not to cause them to have lift or they willpull up into a loop—with more space

they would continue in loop after loop. The designs were different than we’ve all made as kids—more folds in the nose in the inside edge of the wings.

We interrupted our work to do some special TV—I took 2 of the M309 /Т-20 pressure bottles put a twin boom sunshield pole between them and taped that up. I then put some red tape and marked 500 on each. We now had a “1000-lb bar­bell". We showed Jack with Owen and I lifting the barbell up to Jack. He gri­maced till he was red as he lifted it up. . . He lifted it again and as he came to full up he released his triangle shoe locks and kept going off the top of the cam­era field of view!

We then did the Bean push up—both hands first, then with Jack on my back, then also Owen on his back—then a one arm push up then the finale a no arm push up with all 3. The piece-de-resistance was a 3 man high with Owen at the bottom, me in the middle and Jack on the top. Owen was great. He wobbled around like we were toppling. We now must put it all on movies to use after we get back. — Funny, you never know what movies people will find funny—It gives a welcome relief from the science we do.

MD-55:

Out the wardroom window we saw a bright red light with a bright/dim peri­od of10 sec. It got brighter and drifted along with us for 20 min. or more. I said it was Mars but Jack & Owen said a satellite—it was because it also was mov­ing relative to the stars. It may have been very near, it was the brightest object we’ve seen.

Also saw a laser beam from Goddard. It looked like a long green rod perhaps as long as your fingernail held at arm’s length when viewed end on, that is 20 times longer than in length (which was parallel to the horizon) than in width. Tomorrow the ground will tell us that Goddard did not have our trajectory right and did not point at us—we may have seen the side view somehow. Owen said at the time a laser should appear only as a bright point oflight and not a bar.

Entry -3 day. CSM checks went well— somehow I knew they would. We only look at the g&n [guidance and navigation] and the real problem might be the RCS [Reaction Control System, with the failed thrusters]. Well, we’ll know soon enough. There’s no reason to believe anything’s wrong with the two remaining quads. The days can’t pass fast enough. We have done our job and are ready to get back. At least I am, I don’t know about Jack, but Owen would like to stay.

Garriott, MD-55:

Another full day. [Lasted until] An hour after scheduled bedtime. . . Al and

Jack saw laser on one pass. I missed it, twice. Tomorrow again… “Ice Cream” party tonite… [Jack s wife] Gratia said our “stunts” were on national tv! Oh well.

atm about [shut] down. . . I’ll miss old Skylab. Really hate to leave for a variety of reasons. Mostly all the unique things to do and see. A geographer’s paradise. Jack and I would both like to spend days at the window w/ camera. Next time!

While the crew had early on abandoned always eating meals as a group in favor of increased productivity, the “ice cream parties” were one social occasion that remained a part of the routine throughout the mission. The crew had arranged their menus such that they all ate ice cream on the same nights.

“On one of these occasions we all gathered around the wardroom win­dow to eat ice cream and strawberries and watch our ground passage all across Spain, Italy, the Mediterranean, Greece to the Near East,” Garriott said. “Another memorable experience, keeping in mind the history of West­ern Civilization!”

That experience was one that stayed with Bean also. “We could look out the window and eat,” he said, recalling that the area around the Mediterra­nean Sea looked “just like an atlas, except it seems like there was a volcano making smoke. I remember those as really nice times.”

While the view of Earth from an orbiting vehicle is universally hailed by anyone who has seen it as an unforgettable experience, Bean said he was also awed looking out at the spacecraft he called home. “I can remember being amazed looking out the windows at the structure of the Skylab,” he said. “How heavy and big. These beams were big; the things that rotated the atm were just huge. And here it was up in orbit, and going about 17,000 miles an hour, and you think it’s a fragile spaceship, but really it’s more like a bridge. It’s more like one of those old bridges that you cross that have all those truss­es. It reminded me of that. In fact, there were trusses all over this thing. That was always amazing to me, how much heavy weight there was.”

The crew, and Lousma in particular, had made national television earli­er in the mission with the video tours of their home, featuring a glimpse of life in space, complete with such mundane, yet out-of-this-world tasks as a weightless haircut. “It was fun to do them, because you could be humor­ous, and show everybody what it was like,” Lousma said.

Garriott, MD-56:

On to the “overage food". Lots of meals left— tuna and bread for lunch. Pork loin and asparagus for dinner.

When the Skylab workshop was launched, it carried with it provisions for all three crews. They were divided up according to the nominal mission lengths—one twenty-eight-day increment and two fifty-six-day increments. In addition, however, additional provisions (the “overage” Garriott men­tioned) were included in anticipation of the possibility that one or more of the missions might exceed the nominal length. Despite the overage provi­sions, however, members of the third crew have reported that some of their provisions seemed to be missing by the time they reached Skylab; most nota­bly strawberry drinks and butter cookies.

Food was not the only item affected by the mission duration limitations, either. Jack Lousma explained, with tongue planted firmly in cheek when discussing his crew’s virtuosity respecting their successors’ supplies: “One of the things, of course, on the Skylab was that most all of our equipment and gear and food and clothing and whatever didn’t go up on the [separate crew launches] to get there, but they went on the original launch of the Skylab.

“And when we got up there, we were all scheduled to have a certain amount of everything. There was a group of stuff for the first crew, and they pretty much kept to their stuff; they didn’t get into ours. And there was a certain amount for the second crew — that was us. And we pretty well confined our­selves to our stuff. We didn’t get into the third crew’s stuff at all.

“Actually, what we did was, we knew we were supposed to be up there fifty-six days, or whatever multiple would get us over the landing site and that these guys were going to be up there fifty-six days too. We wanted to stay longer than them.

“So at Day 40 or so, we asked if we could stay ten more days. It went in multiples of five; every fifth day you were over the right landing site. And Mission Control deliberated on that for about a week. And they finally came back about Day 50 and said, ‘You guys have used up your food—or you will—and you’ve used up your film. And we don’t want you getting into the supplies for the third crew.’

“We wouldn’t do that anyway; we were very careful about that. But on the other hand, we were having somewhat of a problem because we were limit­ed in our supplies of underwear. The plan was we would all have a change

of underwear every two days for [the planned mission lengths]— twenty – eight days, fifty-six days, fifty-six days.

“Since there were no laundry facilities on the Skylab space station, soiled clothing was jettisoned into the evacuated lox tank via the Trash Airlock and was replaced with new clothing. The allocation was for one change of outer garments every two weeks and one change of underwear every two days. So the ground had the delicate dilemma of deciding how to provide enough sets of skivvies for both crews from a carefully calculated, limit­ed supply without compromising the duration of the present and next mis­sions, the doctors’ hygiene restrictions, and especially the crews’ most per­sonal expectations with respect to living and working in space with the same comfort to which they had become accustomed with regular chang­es to clean skivvies.

“On the morning of the last appointed day of the last set of skivvies, it became clear the ground had solved this problem, at least to their satisfac­tion. The answer was uplinked on the teleprinter while the crew slept.

“The solution to this problem was printed in a common humor form of the era known as a ‘Good News, Bad News’ joke. The message was: ‘With respect to today’s regular change of underwear, we have Good News and Bad News for you.

‘The Good News is: You will get to change your underwear today!

‘The Bad News is: Al, you change with Owen; Owen, you change with Jack; and Jack, you change with Al!’

“All of this was in keeping with a motto the Skylab 11 crew shared among themselves: ‘Never lose your sense of humor!’ ”

The final eva of the mission was the shortest of the three, with a duration of less than three hours. Garriott again ventured outside, this time accom­panied by Bean, on his only eva not taken on the surface of another world. The pair retrieved their second and final set of film canisters out of the atm for the return to Earth, just days away. They also picked up one of the two parasol material samples that had been put out on the previous eva.

As with the second eva, Bean found it a difficult decision to choose who would go on the final spacewalk. According to the original plan, at this point Garriott would have gone on both of the first two spacewalks, and Lousma and Bean would have had one eva each. Instead, both of the oth­er two crewmembers had two spacewalks, so Bean had to decide which of them would get a third.

On Mission Day 43, Bean wrote in his diary: “Made a decision for Owen & I to do the eva. Talked it over with Jack before I asked Owen—Reason was that he would probably get another chance to fly & to eva, but Owen would not. In my opinion Owen has made this spaceflight much more inter­esting than it could have been with three operational types.”

Ironically not only would Garriott fly again, but he would end up with a longer total spaceflight duration than Lousma, who also only made one Shuttle flight. Neither, however, would ever go on another eva.

For Bean the spacewalk was an unforgettable experience, unlike anything else he encountered during spaceflight. The highlight was a darkened half­orbit with no responsibilities. While he was working on the instrument doors on the atm, the ground radioed up that they would need to test the doors in the light and thus told him they just needed him to wait out the rough­ly thirty-five-minute night pass. “They said, ‘We want you to stay out there overnight, and then when the morning comes, then we’ll test the doors.’ “So I had nothing to do then for the night pass, and I remember we weren’t in night yet, we were going into it across the Mediterranean, looking down at Italy and Sicily, with the volcano [Mt. Etna]. Next, looking down at Egypt, the Nile Delta was very obvious.

“Off in the distance was Israel and Saudi Arabia, and it was dark there. I could see the flares from all these oil rigs, and they were just all over the place. Most of them were in the water, in the Persian Gulf, though I couldn’t tell it then, but when we got closer I could, ’cause it was still sort of dark on the ground, light where we were. I remember thinking that was an amaz­ing sight.”

“And then, I’d been a gymnast in college, so I kicked out of the foot restraints and did a handstand on the handholds there, and I felt like I’d set the world record handstand for height and speed. I remember that as fun. Then we came back into the daylight.”

Another memory that stands out for Bean from his Skylab eva experience was, after the Airlock Module was depressurized, first egressing through the open hatch into open space. “I can remember that being more scary than the hatch on the moon,” he said. “Because the hatch on the moon was smaller and you went out backwards. And also when you went out, you were look­ing at the door and the frame and then you looked over here, and there’s

the dirt. It wasn’t like you were going to fly away [The moon even provides about one-sixth of the Earth’s gravitational force]. When that hatch opened on Skylab, and we were sitting there looking out, it just seemed like we could fall out! I mean, there was nothing there.

“As I tell people if they ask, it was much more science fiction to go eva in Skylab than it was to go eva on the moon. The eva on the moon was much like training; you were in light, the sky was black, but everything else was the same. You were standing there, like we trained over and over. But when you go eva in space, it’s like crawling out the window on an airliner and just going along the wing, and looking in the engine. I mean, something that would be impossible to do. But I think it’s the nearest analogue to what we actually do on eva. We crawl out on the vehicle, and go along the side, and there’s nothing you can do on Earth like that.”

Finally, after nearly two months in space, the time had come to return to Earth. Of course, leaving Skylab meant that at least two more adventures still remained for the crew. The first, more immediate and dramatic, was reentry. Back on the planet below, the rescue-mission crew had proved in the sim­ulator that it would be safe for the three astronauts to return home in their crippled Apollo spacecraft. Now, however, it was time to move those pro­cedures out of the simulator and into real life, maneuvering home with the two thruster quads still available. Once that adventure was complete, the sec­ond would begin. Though perhaps less exciting than the former, the second adventure would last longer and prove to be a bit more challenging—read­justing to life on Earth after living for two months in weightlessness.

Backup crewmember Vance Brand was among those waiting in the con­trol room during reentry. He, Don Lind, and others had spent a lot of time developing and testing the procedures the crew would use to fly their space­craft home. Now, it was time to put those procedures to the ultimate test. The atmosphere in Mission Control, Brand recalled, was a mixture of con­fidence and concern as the astronauts began their return to Earth. “We were confident, but you know any little thing could mess it up, so nobody was overconfident,” he said. “We expected success.”

By and large the actual reentry flight was not too much more stressful than it ever is to fly a superheated metal box down from hundreds of miles high at speeds many times faster than the speed of sound. After procedur­al adjustments made to compensate for the locked-out thrusters, the crew

38. A long pole was used to extend the film canisters to Garriott at the sun end of the atm.

managed to return to Earth without serious problems, other than some dif­ficulty in reading the deorbit checklist.

The checklist of course had been revised in the wake of the thruster fail­ures, and Bean had made extensive notes above, below, and in the margins on almost every line all the way through the book. When Garriott began to read the checklist, he found it extremely difficult to make out Bean’s dis­tinctive handwriting during the dynamic reentry phase. Further, he had not participated with Bean on any of the rehearsals of these procedures. So he was almost lost in trying to read the sequence of these very critical steps.

Garriott said he was considerably embarrassed by not being able to help Bean more by reading the extensively modified deorbit procedures to him, allowing Alan to focus on just “doing the right thing.” Bean recalled: “The thing I remember about reentry was not positioning some rcs switches cor­rectly. We got behind and Owen could not read my notes in the checklist because of the limited space (and my ‘unique penmanship’). I said, ‘Give me the book, and I’ll reconfigure the switches.’ So he gave me the book; then I reconfigured a few. I had a lot of other things going on, and I didn’t recon­figure them all. About ten minutes later, we began to drift out of attitude and we got a master alarm, and I then reconfigured the rest. I switched to ‘direct’ and returned to the proper attitude.”

Lousma recalled the transition from weightlessness to four – G during reentry,

as well as the unforgettable view: “Facing aft during entry, Al and I could watch our fireball. It was about four feet in diameter and about forty feet behind the cm. It was like flying in a cone of flame which extended from the cm to the fireball formed by ionized gases and particles from the abla­tive heat shield. The fireball would dance rapidly around its central loca­tion but would break up when the roll thrusters fired, after which it would quickly reform. There was a frequent, loud banging noise right next to our heads when the roll thrusters fired followed by frequent right and left roll­ing maneuvers to keep the cm on trajectory.”

They soon began to feel atmospheric drag increasing, and eventually the smaller stabilizing parachutes opened, and then the three large main chutes opened to slow the Command Module down for a splash into the ocean. “Entry was very dynamic in terms of sound, sight, and physical sen­sations,” Lousma said. “At 25,000 feet, there was a loud, clanging noise as the nose-cone ring was explosively jettisoned to expose the parachutes. It tumbled away, and we were jerked into our seats as the two, small, white drogue chutes were deployed on long lanyards above the cm to slow it down and stabilize it for main chute deployment. At 10,000 feet, the drogue chutes were cut loose. There was a rapid sinking feeling until the main parachutes unfurled into a partially open, ‘reefed’ configuration so as not to tear the panels in the parachutes. In a few seconds, the reefing cords were automat­ically severed to allow the main parachutes to open fully for the remainder of the descent into the Pacific Ocean.”

Apollo Command Modules were designed to remain stable in the water in two different positions. The more preferable of the two was called “Sta­ble 1” and involved the narrower nose end of the cm pointed toward the sky with the crew lying on their backs inside. The second stable floating mode, Stable 2, was the inverse of the first. In Stable 2, the Command Module set­tled upside down, with the heat shield on the wide end of the cone facing upward and leaving the upside-down crewmen literally hanging in their seat straps.

When the crew’s Command Module landed in the water, it settled into Stable 2. Then a switch was thrown, inflating several small balloons near the apex of the spacecraft. As the bags inflated, they slowly tipped it back to an upright position from which it would eventually be lifted out of the water to the deck of the uss New Orleans, the recovery ship. The crew remained in the capsule while it was hoisted so that the flight surgeon could make mea­surements before they got out of the spacecraft.

“The frogmen were in the water immediately after splashdown,” Lous – ma said. “One of them looked in my window to determine our status while we were still in the Stable 2 orientation and while we were pumping air into the three spherical air bladders on the nose of the cm to change its buoy­ancy so it could rotate nose up. ‘Hanging from the ceiling’ in one-G was uncomfortable after two months of weightlessness. The cm is not a good boat, either, especially upside down.”

On the ship, Garriott, who had no interest in using the shower on Sky – lab, finally got his chance to enjoy the real thing. “I had my first real shower in two months and it sure felt good,” he recalled. Although trained to take short Navy showers after three years of sea duty on destroyers, an exception was made for this one—long, warm, and pleasant.

He also found that when he turned off the wall light in his sleeping com­partment, he realized that he could not walk to the bunk without falling over. His vestibular system was completely deconditioned, and only his eyes were of much use to determine what was up or down. “So, back ‘on’ with wall switch, go to bunk and turn on bunk light, then wall switch ‘off’ and back to the bunk,” he said. It was several days before the otoliths could be trusted to provide a good sense of what was up and down in complete darkness.

After preliminary medical tests on the uss New Orleans, the ship steamed back to San Diego. Garriott recalled being greeted by a friendly face when the recovery ship finally made port. Throughout the mission the crew had complained about the tedious and, in their opinion, unnecessary constant calibrations they were required to make on the mass measuring devices. Garriott had made a note to complain vigorously to the principal investi­gator for these devices, fellow astronaut (and smeat crewmember) Dr. Bill Thornton, when he saw him.

“When we docked in San Diego, the first person I saw on the pier was Bill, carrying the biggest bottle of champagne I’ve ever seen and wearing a grin from ear to ear, a lengthy stretch of real estate,” Garriott said. “My resolve evaporated in moments. Bill may not even know my original intent until he reads this.”

On the water, it was ok,” Alan Bean said. “I felt heavy, but not especially

weak or anything. And so they hoisted us out of the water, and they start­ed taking us out. We had our G-suits inflated, which I thought was a waste of time until I stood up. And then they brought us out of the Command Module and helped us, which I didn’t think we needed. I’ll tell you now, I think we really needed it a lot!

“They set us down in chairs. And I can remember sitting in those chairs for a ceremony on TV, and I can remember thinking, ‘I hope this gets over soon because I just don’t feel good.’ I didn’t think I would faint, but I didn’t feel right. So I wasn’t into any ceremony; I was more interested in lying down. So we sat down with our legs apart. We were all sitting wide stance because of our lack of stability.

“We got through that. I felt like I faked it through because I didn’t let anybody know how much I wanted to lie down. Then they had to walk us down to sickbay for tests. I can remember walking along with the doctors on either side and thinking, ‘They don’t need to be there.’ But twice, maybe three times, during the walk, I suddenly pitched left to right, and they held me up, kept me from falling. And I can remember saying, ‘Boy, this ship is sure rolling,’ and they didn’t say, ‘No, it’s you,’ which they knew it was, but I didn’t because it didn’t make sense that I could suddenly pitch left or right. I never knew that was the problem initially. I don’t ever remember having vestibular problems, ever again. It was later that I began to understand that the ship never rolled, it was me pitching off. So it wasn’t that I was dizzy, it was like I suddenly lost my balance.

“And so we got down to the test facility, and the NASA doctors laid us on a table and started monitoring us, and boy, it sure felt good to lie down. After a while, they deflated my G-suit, and then they had me sit up for awhile and watched my blood pressure and pulse. I guess the blood pressure went down and the pulse went up, or whatever it does, they never said, because they didn’t want to affect the data, I guess, but I could tell.

“Then they had me lie down again. I can remember going through this period and not really feeling good, wanting to lie down all the time. That’s what I wanted to do. But they wanted to get me physically ready to ride the exercise bike again. So they sat me up again and looked at my vital signs. After a time they had me stand up. Well, my pulse and blood pressure didn’t like standing up, so the doctors had me sit down.

“During this time, other doctors were performing the same evaluations

on Owen and Jack. I could see both were further along in recovery than I was. That was motivation for me to do better, but there was nothing I knew to do. And we’d hold on, but I wanted to lie down. Finally they got me on the bike. I think I was the last one on the bike. But, I got on the bike and rode the bike. I’m sure I didn’t do very well, but I didn’t faint or anything; and I sure was glad to lie down again.

“We probably did the lbnp, which I probably had to punch off without fainting, because several times in orbit I had to punch off or nearly had to punch off [that is, relieve the negative pressure on the lower half of your tor­so, which tends to pool blood in your legs and may cause fainting]. For me, the toughest thing in flight was the lbnp. I dreaded that thing. Because I really had to concentrate almost like when you’re pulling G s to keep con­scious in aircraft acrobatic maneuvers. I’ve since found out that I’m a low – blood-pressure guy. It’s just something that’s good in a way to be low-blood – pressure, but it’s bad in that way.

“I remember then for the next two or three days, not wanting to either sit up or stand up much, so every chance I got, in debriefing or anywhere else, I’d lie down. I’d get out of my chair and lie down on the floor and prop my head up and talk. It took me two or three days to finally feel normal. It probably took some time to get the lbnp and bicycle ergometer back to normal as well.”

Lousma also recalled obligations dragging by after his return: “Upon return, we had a really long day. We had to get ready to come home and get picked up. We felt like going to bed when we got back, and the doctors wanted to keep us up and do all these medical experiments. I remember just really being up longer and feeling more tired than I imagined I would be, to get all the medical stuff done on the deck on the ship.

“The medics weren’t always best friends with some of the guys, but I never felt that way about them. We cooperated with them no matter what it was, to do an experiment or to do some preflight test or postflight tests, whatev­er they wanted to do to get their job done.”

As the crew’s readjustment progressed, routine tasks occasionally took on new complications. Moving a suitcase on his first night back in his stateroom, Bean pinched a disc in his back and had to receive treatment for it. A cou­ple of times, getting out of bed during the night to go to the bathroom, he

fell to the floor while attempting a floating move similar to what he would have done in orbit. “I didn’t get hurt or anything, but I thought, ‘That’s weird,’ ” he recalled.

Lousma said that it took between four days and a week for his vestibu­lar system to fully readapt to life on Earth. “I don’t remember having a big vestibular problem. I don’t remember having vertigo or feeling dizzy. The vestibular response that took the longest was to walk in a straight line,” he said. “Our muscles and our brains didn’t work together on lateral motions, because we hadn’t simulated any of this straight-ahead bicycling motion. We were strong, but we hadn’t used those sensors that are used to do lat­eral. I remember getting back to the office in Houston in a big wide hall. I’d be going somewhere, and all of a sudden I find myself on the other side of the hall, and I didn’t mean to be there. I wasn’t falling over, but I mean­dered for three or four days, probably, something like that. Your whole sen­sory system recalibrates itself.”

It took a similar amount of time for his body to return to something resem­bling the condition it was in before the mission. “The doctors said I was back in my preflight shape in six days,” Lousma said. “That’s overall. But when I got back, I felt lightheaded when we had to stand up. We had less blood vol­ume, I think, and fewer red cells. For the first week or so when I went home, when there were things to be done, I didn’t feel bad, I just felt lazy.”

Other elements of the readjustment, though, took a little longer. “I mea­sure myself on how fast I can run two miles, and I have that pretty well docu­mented personally. I was running two miles between 12 :зо and 13 [minutes]. I shot for less than thirteen minutes. I guess 12:2$ was the fastest I ever ran, but I could usually come in around 12:45. I was under thirteen on a regu­lar basis. If I wasn’t, I was disappointed. It took three weeks to return to the same speed as I had left with. So it all depends on how you measure it.”

Like Bean, Lousma had a moment or two when he forgot to take into account the effects of living in a one-G environment. “That first night on the ship, we were in sickbay, I guess. I was in a bed with rails on it,” he said. Noticing that the door was ajar and letting in light, Lousma decided to get up and go close it. “I grabbed hold of those rails and was going to float over there, and I didn’t go anywhere.

“One of the funny things that happened, after I was home for about five days or so, I was shaving one morning. I use shaving lotion, and got myself

all shaved up.” He picked up the shaving lotion with one hand and attempt­ed to toss it to the other with the sort of quick push that would have done the job on Skylab. On Earth of course the bottle dropped immediately. “Pow, right in the sink. Smashed the whole bottle.”

For Alan Bean the conclusion of Skylab II was not only the highlight of the mission, but also one of the proudest moments of his life. “It sounds strange, but for me, it was when we landed on the water. I felt like—and I still feel this way — that we had given the best we had for fifty-nine days,” he said. “That meant a lot, and still does mean a lot. I felt like that mission was from my viewpoint the highlight of my career, as being the best astronaut that I could be. I felt like our crew was the best crew we could be because we had done the best we could. We got sick; we couldn’t help that. We bundled along. And then we went normally, and then we went to overdrive to catch up, and then we passed. So we ended up coming with a great percent.”

He said that he was very proud of a report published after the mission summarizing the crew’s accomplishments, reflecting the fact that they had accomplished 150 percent of their assigned objectives. On 12 October 1973, the top headline ofJohnson Space Center’s “Roundup” newsletter read “sL-3 ‘Supercrew’ Gets 150 % of Mission Goals”. It continued:

Although the Skylab-3 mission has been completed, scientists and principal investigators will be busy for years analyzing data from the experiments per­formed by astronauts Bean, Lousma and Garriott.

Kenneth Kleinknecht, Skylab Program Office manager, said at the post-flight press conference that the crew brought back to Earth more than 150 percent of their goal in scientific data.

“With the longer duration mission, the crew gets more proficient because of in-flight training and experience. . . .” Kleinknecht said.

Reg Machel, manager of the Orbital Assembly Project Office said that sev­eral new things which had never been observed before were recorded in this mission.

Among these new items are coronal holes, or voids in the sun’s corona. Exper­imenters found that the velocity changes of the gasses and of the material mov­ing across the sun were much higher than anticipated. Data was also gathered on major solar flares.

Over 10,000 frames were taken with the multispectral camera, 2,000 frames with the Earth terrain camera and 25,000 frames with the visual tracking sys­tem. The multispectral scanner, infrared spectrometer and micro wave sensors recorded over po, ooo feet of magnetic tape data. “The vts film turned out to be better in this mission than the previous mission from a standpoint of resolu­tion and clarity of Earth sites. This Earth resources data is about three times the amount of data gathered on Skylab 2,"Machel said.

Also, the beginning and ending stages of tropical storm Christine were cov­ered as were African drought areas, Mt. Etna—an active volcano and a severe storm in Oklahoma.

“I’ve always been proud of this,” Bean said recently of the article. “That’s why I have it in my briefcase, even though I haven’t looked at it for a long time; I’ve had it there. We were called a ‘supercrew.’ We were. Nobody had done that. We did, compared to previous mission estimates, more than any crew had ever done in any program, and we started out behind. So we real­ly were as great as we could be. I’ve felt good about that. That’s the prima­ry feeling I have about Skylab, is just ‘Wow, we did what we wanted to do. We did the best we could do.’ ”

“You have to find a way to accomplish the goal. We were able to do that. We went fifty-six days, and three more. Even with all the thruster problems, we accomplished the goal.”

Jack Lousma said: “Maybe the best way to characterize it for me was the final impression I had when we were rolling around in the Command Module on the water. I felt the most professionally satisfied I have ever felt, with the exception of the Columbia mission I commanded, about equal, I guess.

“That number one, we were alive, and number two, we did a good job. We’d not only done the best we could, but we got it all done and really did a good job. That was the most rewarding professional sense I ever had, was on both flights, and that professional satisfaction lasted a long time after the Skylab mission. If I had never flown another mission, I would have been a satisfied guy that I’d done a good job on my spaceflight and had been pro­fessionally rewarded.”

Owen Garriott said: “I have asked myself, to whatever extent it is true, what are the reasons for our success on this mission? No doubt a commit­ment to doing the best one can was important and even Alan’s ‘positive men­tal attitude’ was to some degree contagious. An adequate degree of compe­tence is obviously essential.

“But the one overriding characteristic of our flight, even the whole Sky – lab program, is that of team spirit. We had it to a greater degree than expe­rienced in any other group I’ve been involved with in my career. How else can the ten-day effort to ‘Save Skylab’ be explained, after all the problems that arose when Skylab was launched on May 14, 1973 ? The thousands of Skylab Team members had it too.

“I believe it was that unquenchable team spirit that was the most impor­tant single characteristic responsible for our success and that of the whole program. It should not be overlooked that this characteristic is definable and teachable in other situations for those who are willing to make the not insignificant commitment to maximum achievement.”

The nine astronauts selected to serve on the Skylab flight crews represented three different demographics. Only two, Alan Bean and Pete Conrad, had flown in space before. Three of them, Owen Garriott, Ed Gibson, and Joe Kerwin, were members of the first group of scientist astronauts NASA had selected. The remaining four, Jerry Carr, Jack Lousma, Bill Pogue, and Paul Weitz, were unflown pilot astronauts.

The Moonwalkers

Not only were Bean and Conrad the only two flown astronauts on the Sky – lab flight crews, they had flown their last mission together; on it, the two had walked on the moon.

With three previous spaceflights under his belt, Pete Conrad was far and away the senior member of the three Skylab crews. Born in June 1930 in Phil­adelphia, Conrad at an early age developed a love of flying. After earning a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from Princeton, Conrad pur­sued that love as a naval aviator. He went on to earn a place at “Pax River,” the Navy Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, where he served as a test pilot, flight instructor, and performance engineer.

It was there that Conrad first applied to become an astronaut in the ini­tial selection process that brought in the original Mercury Seven. Though he was not selected in that round, the experiences of friends who were chosen inspired him to try again, and in 1962 Conrad was named as part of NASA’s second class of astronauts, a group of nine men that also included Neil Arm­strong, Frank Borman, Jim McDivitt, Jim Lovell, Elliot See, Tom Stafford, Ed White, and John Young.

His first spaceflight came three years later when he served as pilot of the third manned Gemini mission in August 1965, commanded by Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper. Gemini 5 was to have a mission length of eight days, the first of two times in his life that Conrad would set a new space­flight duration record.

4- Members of the first Skylab crew: (from left) Joe Kerwin, Pete Conrad, and Paul Weitz.

Just over a year later, Conrad moved up to a command of his own, flying the Gemini ii mission with pilot Dick Gordon in September 1966. The sec – ond-to-last Gemini mission, flown just months before manned Apollo flights were then scheduled to begin, Gemini 11 was intended to gain more expe­rience with rendezvous and extravehicular activity (eva), two areas which would be vital for Apollo.

When Conrad flew again three years later, the success of Apollo was a fait accompli. Four months earlier nasa had fulfilled Kennedy’s mandate “of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” before the decade was out. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had become the first and second men on the moon on 20 July 1969, and next it was Conrad’s turn. The Apollo 12 mission reunited Commander Conrad with Command Mod­ule pilot Gordon, and Bean joined the two as Lunar Module pilot. On 19 November Conrad and Bean left Gordon in lunar orbit and touched down on the surface. As he became the third man to walk on the moon, Conrad referenced Armstrong’s famous “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind” line in his own first words on another world: “Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.”

Alan Bean was born in 1932 in Wheeler, Texas. Like Conrad, Bean earned

his bachelor’s degree (in aeronautical engineering at the University of Tex­as) and followed that with service in the Navy, having been in Reserve Offi­cer Training Corps (rotc) while in college. After a four-year tour of duty, Bean also attended Navy Test Pilot School and then flew as a test pilot of naval aircraft.

He was selected as an astronaut in NASA’s third group in October 1962—a class almost as large as both of its predecessors combined—along with Buzz Aldrin, Bill Anders, Charles Bassett, Gene Cernan, Roger Chaffee, Michael Collins, Walt Cunningham, Donn Eisele, Ted Freeman, Dick Gordon, Rusty Schweickart, David Scott, and C. C. Williams.

Bean’s first crew assignment was as backup for Gemini 10, along with C. C. Williams. While his crewmate preceded him in getting an Apollo assign­ment, as backup for Apollo 9, that slot went to Bean after Williams’s death in a crash of one of the T-38 jets used by the astronaut corps. From that assign­ment, Bean rotated up to the prime crew (the flight crew, as opposed to the backup crew) of Apollo 12.

It was his participation in the Apollo 12 mission with Pete Conrad that led to their joint involvement in Skylab. Bean had previously worked on Apollo Applications, supporting the program as a ground assignment while wait­ing to be placed on a crew. He served as the astronaut head of aap until he became a member of Conrad’s backup crew for Apollo 9. After transferring from aap to Apollo, Bean maintained his interest in the program and kept up with its development (noting with approval, for example, the change from the wet workshop to the dry).

Alan Bean recalled the decision to pursue a Skylab mission: “We were starting to talk about what we wanted to do; this was on the flight home from the moon. Dick wanted to stay in Apollo because we knew we were cycling threes, so he could be commander of Apollo 18. [Under the regular rotation, an astronaut, after a mission, would skip two missions, be on the backup crew for the third, skip two more, and then be on the “prime” crew for the next mission.] First, we decided we’d divvy up every flight, and we’d swap around. This was Pete: Dick would be the commander of the next one, and the three of us would run the space program. But then as we got to talking about it, Pete wanted to do Skylab. And we both felt that we didn’t want it to get crowded, other people deserved chances too. So we thought, well, we’ll try to be part of Skylab.

“So Pete says, ‘That looks like it’d be a good thing to do, looks like it’d be fun.’ I don’t think Dick was interested. A lot of the astronauts weren’t inter­ested in flying for twenty-eight days or fifty-six days. We were; we thought it’d be good adventure.

“I never did go and see Deke. I should have done it, but I never did it. But Pete went over and talked with him. It seems to me the announcement in the meeting of me and Owen and Jack [as a crew for Skylab] was a sur­prise to me, or maybe Deke phoned me and said this is what is going to be announced. But he didn’t consult me about Owen and Jack. It turned out great. We ended up with the best crew, no doubt about it.”

After Apollo 12 the three members of its crew were sent by nasa on a good­will tour of the world, and upon returning Bean and Conrad transferred from Apollo to Skylab. In addition to their common background as moon­walking spaceflight veterans, the first two Skylab commanders shared anoth­er trait as well. Each has been described by members of their Skylab crew as being one of the most motivated men in the astronaut corps. In Conrad’s case a lifelong drive to succeed had been increased by his rejection from the Mercury astronaut selection. “Pete was rejected, and the basis for his rejec­tion was a psychiatric evaluation that he was psychologically unsuited for long-duration space missions,” Kerwin recalled in an oral history inter­view for Johnson Space Center in 2000. “So here’s Conrad; he’s gone to the moon, he’s up here in Skylab with us on the first-ever long-duration space station mission, and he’s saying, ‘I’ll show that son of a gun who’s psycho­logically unsuited for what!’

“So he was very motivated to do a great job on Skylab. Just the kind of commander you want. He exercised more than we did and kept us all up to a very high level, even coming home. He said, ‘Guys, we’re going to walk out of this spacecraft. There’s going to be none of this carrying us out on stretchers stuff. . . . When that hatch opens, I’m outta here, and I want you guys to follow me.’” Bean’s drive was an extremely important factor in the direction the second Skylab mission took. Owen Garriott said that a major reason for the incredibly high productivity of his crew was that “We had one guy that was better motivated than anybody in the astronaut office.”

Despite having accomplished things as a Navy test pilot and astronaut that many other people only aspire to, Bean continually pushed himself further. Even during his days in the astronaut corps, Bean was a devotee of motivational tapes. Three decades after the time of Skylab, Bean contin­ues to listen to the tapes, still working to motivate himself to accomplish all he can, to be the best he can. When his spaceflight days were behind him, Bean channeled that drive into his devotion to capture in his paintings the emotional aspects of his unique experiences. “I’ve always had a point of view that you don’t have to be the smartest person, or the healthiest, or the brightest person to really do good work,” Bean said. “I’ve never felt like I was that, but I always felt like I could do good work. Like these paintings, I never was the best artist in class, but I can do better art than anybody that was ever in any of my classes because I just keep doing it.”

Dick Gordon, who flew with both men on the Apollo 12 mission, declined to speculate as to which was the more motivated, saying only that each was very motivated in his own way and that each had his own distinctive lead­ership style. He added, “If the space program doesn’t motivate you, you’re in the wrong place.”

Each of the three Skylab crews also included one of the members of NASA’s first group of scientist astronauts, selected in June 1965. Six men had been selected in the group of scientists: Owen Garriott, Ed Gibson, Duane Grav­eline, Joe Kerwin, Curtis Michel, and Harrison Schmitt.

By 1962 the recommendation had been made to NASA that it should add scientists to the crews it would be sending to the moon. It was argued they would be able to more effectively conduct research there than the pilots that then made up the corps. The idea that scientists should be included in the first lunar landing crew was soundly rejected by management who argued that spaceflight to another world was a challenging prospect, requiring the skills of expert pilots. Including a scientist on the crew to conduct research on the lunar surface would be of no use if they were unable to reach the sur­face safely to begin with.

However, the agency conceded that there would be benefits to recruiting scientists into the astronaut corps for future missions and in 1964 partnered with the National Academy of Sciences to open its first scientist astronaut application process.

To be eligible to apply, candidates had to have been born no earlier than 1 August 1930 and be no more than six feet tall. Applicants had to be U. S. citi­zens and most importantly for this round had to hold a doctor of philosophy

5- Members of the second Skylab crew: (from left) Owen Garriott, Jack Lousma, and Alan Bean.

degree (PhD) or equivalent in natural sciences, medicine, or engineering. While no flight experience was required, it would count in an applicant’s favor.

Within two and a half months of announcing the selection process, NASA had received 1,351 applications. The agency screened those applications and submitted 400 of them to the Academy of Sciences for review. Hoping to bring roughly ten to twenty new candidates into astronaut training at the end of the process (to ensure enough made it through the training), NASA asked the academy to select fifty finalists from which it could pick its candidates.

After its review though, the National Academy of Sciences only felt that sixteen of the applicants were sufficiently qualified to recommend to NASA. The agency then put those finalists through its selection process of medical and psychological testing and interviews and ended up with only six men it found worthy of bringing in as astronauts. “For nine months NASA and the National Academy of Sciences screened over thirteen hundred appli­cants and, as I joked at the time, in all of the U. S., NASA could find only six healthy scientists,” recalled Ed Gibson.

One of the six, Duane Graveline, left the corps very shortly after reporting for duty because of concerns over publicity concerning his wife’s decision to

file for divorce. Kerwin and Michel were already jet qualified, but the other three began their astronaut careers by going through flight training at Wil­liams Air Force Base in Arizona. “Two of our group had pilot wings from the military,” Gibson said. “nasa sent the remaining four of us off to flight school to get Air Force wings. We all did reasonably well. I was second in my class of forty-two; I would have been first but I screwed up an aerody­namics exam. It was very embarrassing for a guy with a PhD that includ­ed a lot of theoretical aerodynamics. Since then I acquired 2,200 hours of flight time in the T-38 and additional hours in other aircraft including heli­copters. I felt that in a flash my lab stool had been ripped out from under me and replaced by a T-38 ejection seat.”

Much had been made of the role of the scientist astronauts within the astronaut corps. Certainly the members of Group 4 were treated different­ly by management than their pilot counterparts, but with reason: they were different. Some of the scientist astronauts, particularly in the next group selected, chafed at a treatment they saw as relegating them to second-class – citizen status within the corps. Others believed that it made sense that the two types of astronauts would perform different functions and did not mind the role they’d been assigned. Yet others fell somewhere in the middle.

Joe Kerwin recalled: “There was a pilots’ meeting in the office confer­ence room every Monday morning at eight o’clock. At my first one I sat in the back of the room while Al Shepard told the group that we were here. Then he said, ‘Headquarters has agreed that we can select another group to report next year.’ Dick Gordon asked, ‘Are they gonna be pilots?’ Al said, ‘I certainly hope so.’

“A couple of weeks later Shepard said, ‘We’ll be putting together crews for the last three Gemini flights soon. Any volunteers? (a pause) Put your hand down, Kerwin.’ We both smiled. It was clear that these were not the flights they had in mind for us. Nor was I ready for a flight.”

Whatever their relationship to the powers that be, the scientist astronauts’ personal relationships with their fellow astronauts was generally positive. “In my case, one of the latest [Group 5 astronauts], Joe Engle, was my neighbor on the right, while another, Al Worden, was my neighbor to the left at our homes in Nassau Bay,” Garriott said. “My relationship with them and oth­ers in the office has always been excellent.”

Kerwin explained that while their classmates were in flight training, he and Michel were in a sort of limbo status while awaiting the return of the others and the selection of Group 5 so their official training could begin. “I was given a nice, big office and shared a secretary with about three other astronauts,” he said. “It was explained that training for the two of us would have to wait until the arrival of the next group to be selected, the ‘Original Nineteen’ as they would call themselves, in the spring of 1966. So I was left pretty free to roam the center, learning what I could on my own. The oth­er astronauts were always friendly, but they didn’t pay much attention to us (and Curt spent a lot of time back at Rice University). Only two, Charlie Bassett and Neil Armstrong, made it a point to drop by my office, welcome me aboard, and offer to answer any questions I had. But two was enough. That was a great morale booster.

“I thought about spending some time in the clinic, keeping my medical skills fresh, and asked Captain Shepard for his concurrence,” Kerwin said. “Al thought about it for a minute then said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. We’ll have a lot of other things for you to do.’ I accepted that as a dual mes­sage. One, my first priority had to be to learn, contribute, and prove myself as astronaut material. Two, maybe it wasn’t a great idea to spend too much time with the doctors. And there was some sense to that; I might put myself into a conflict of interest situation treating fellow astronauts or their dependents.

“It wasn’t long before Jim Lovell, who’d been in my squadron at Cecil Field, Florida, before he came to Houston, dropped by and asked me to help design him a primitive exercise program. He was training to fly with Frank Borman on the longest spaceflight planned to date—Gemini 7, which would orbit the Earth for fourteen days. The cockpit was about the size of the front seat of a Volkswagen Beetle, so Frank and Jim would get pretty well acquainted during the flight, and they had very little room for exercise gear. They’d selected an Exergenie—a compact device consisting of ropes passed through a core where the pull friction could be set. You looped two ropes over your feet and pulled on wooden handles at the other ends with your hands against the resistance. I sat down with Rita Rapp, a NASA physi­ologist and a wonderful worker, and together we designed a routine for Frank and Jim to use to stretch those unused back and leg muscles.

“At that time and for a long time thereafter, the astronauts considered exer­cise in flight to be their prerogative—an operational activity, not a medical one. So supplying their own hardware and protocol was business as usual to them. But Dr. Chuck Berry, the chief flight surgeon at msc, thought other­wise. He considered the fourteen-day Gemini flight to be NASA’s one oppor­tunity to certify humans for the upcoming flights to the moon and wanted control of and data from exercise. I was called to Chuck’s office on the eighth floor of the main building at msc (it was Building 2 then), and he told me that meddling in medical business without his concurrence could adverse­ly affect my career. I said ‘Yes, sir,’ and walked down to the other end of the hall where Deke Slayton, Al Shepard’s boss, was located. Deke listened to my story thoughtfully and responded with five words: ‘Keep doing what you’re doing.’ I did. And from then on, I got a lot of assignments to go to meetings and participate in teams where medicine and operations met and sometimes clashed. It was a lot of fun, and most of the time we all got along famously. I was accepted as a loyal member of the astronaut corps, and I had an opportunity to learn a lot about life-support systems, spacesuits, bends, and exercise that was valuable later on.”

Alan Bean recalled that he and the others already in the corps were uncer­tain what to make of the new arrivals when they were brought in. “I guess it would have to be said that we were kind of wait and see,” he said. “You tend to not want any other people to come in because you want to take all the flights. So any time some new group of anybody shows up, even though you know you have to have younger people, you still haven’t had your fill.

“And of course, scientists. We’re all test pilots; we’re saying I don’t know if those guys can cut it. But they don’t show up; they go off to flight train­ing. By the time they come, we’re aware that they’ve gone through military flight training. We also know their grades and stuff, sort of. So we’re then changing our attitude a little. They got through flight training, and some of those guys were better than we were, and that’s good. And, of course, then we started to fly with them, and our attitude began to change even more.” The use of the term “scientist astronaut” surely affected the corps’ ini­tial perception of its newest members. “I still think the word scientist wasn’t a good word,” Bean said, explaining that it likely prompted a “knee-jerk reaction” among the pilot astronauts. “Over time, though, that distinction lessened as their flying proficiency was recognized and some even quali­fied as ‘instructor-pilots’ in a T-38 jet. Then too their contributions to their assigned crews in geology, medical, or solar science training became very positive points in their relationships to other pilots. Although members of Group 4 may have come in as ‘scientists’ rather than ‘pilots,’ well before flight their complementary talents earned them both acceptance and respect from their peers.

“And so by the time we worked together, and they were assigned, I thought of Owen as a scientist when we did science, but as far as flying airplanes, we thought of him as just as good as we were. So it was more like, there was nev­er any flying thing that I would have said ‘I’d better do that, or Jack should do it, but not Owen.’”

By the time of Skylab, there remained only three unflown members of Group 4 as it rather nicely worked out, one for each of the three missions. Michel, realizing that an assignment on one of the Apollo flights was unlikely and unsure when another mission would be available, had decided about two months after the Apollo 11 mission to leave the corps and return to teaching and research.

Schmitt, considered the best fit of Group 4 for a lunar mission by merit of his background as a geologist, was assigned to Apollo 17 as Lunar Module pilot and walked on the moon in December 1972. That left Garriott, Gibson, and Kerwin to fill the role of science pilot for the three Skylab crews.

Owen Garriott said, “Occasionally I’m asked if I was disappointed in not having a chance to go to the moon—only into orbit around the Earth (even though [the flight was] many times longer than a lunar flight). In fact, the answer is ‘no,’ and if given the choice of only one or the other, I would pick two months on Skylab. Why?

“There are several reasons. First, that is where my background training (electrical engineering, physical science research on the Earth’s ionosphere) can be of most use. In fact, all scientist astronauts have found that regard­less of their backgrounds, what the scientist astronaut job most requires is the skills of a scientist-generalist, someone who thinks like a researcher and has broad enough knowledge and experience to interpret what he sees. I would like to think that I fit the role of the generalist placed in a position to work with world authorities in several disciplines in the conduct of their research.

“Secondly, all of us in the astronaut office had a marvelous opportuni­ty to travel the globe with world-class geologists studying (principally) vol­canic regions thought to resemble conditions on the moon. We all greatly enjoyed these ‘geology field trips.’ I also soon realized that the pilot astro­nauts with whom we traveled were excellent observers and keenly interested in the research objectives of our instructors. For the three nongeologist sci­entist astronauts, I believe we would have been hard pressed to do any bet­ter job than the pilots while on the moon’s surface, whereas we might have had (arguably, I must admit) a modest advantage in Earth orbit with many disciplines to represent.

“And finally, there is the issue of personal satisfaction. World-record dura­tions, working in several fascinating disciplines more suited to my back­ground, more time for reflection, and camaraderie all make a Skylab mis­sion the first choice for me.”

Owen Garriott’s path to the astronaut corps began at the dawn of the space age. Garriott was born in Enid, Oklahoma, in 1930 and received a bachelor of science (bs) degree in electrical engineering from the Universi­ty of Oklahoma in 1953. He had earned the degree on a Naval rotc schol­arship, and so he served from 1953 until 1956 as an electronics officer in the U. S. Navy. After completing his obligation, Garriott continued his educa­tion, earning a master of science (ms) degree and a PhD from Stanford Uni­versity in electrical engineering in 1957 and i960, respectively.

After completing his master’s degree in 1957, Garriott was working on choosing a research topic for his PhD. Inspiration came in the form of the “beep-beep” heard ’round the world. After Sputnik was launched on 4 Octo­ber, almost all of the graduate students and professors in the Radio Propa­gation Laboratory went out to the equipment set up at the field site and lis­tened to the signal sent back by the Soviet satellite as it orbited the Earth. Garriott selected his topic: propagation of signals from orbiting satellites through the planet’s ionosphere.

After earning his PhD, Garriott stayed on at Stanford, teaching and con­ducting research, eventually becoming an associate professor. He continued to follow the space program, and his interest grew when, after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, he realized that there might be a need for astronauts with research backgrounds in the future. Looking ahead to what might make a candidate more appealing if that were to come about, Garriott acted on a long-held ambition to earn a pilot’s license.

When NASA decided to seek applications for scientist astronauts, Gar­riott was ready and waiting. “In May of 1965, I was waiting hopefully for a decision from NASA as to whether my life (and my family’s) might under­go a major reorientation,” Garriott recalls. “I was teaching a class at Stan­ford University and coming up on the end of the quarter when a call arrived from NASA wanting to verify that I would be available for a telephone call later that day. ‘Yes, of course!’

“But I also had a lecture scheduled later in the afternoon. So I asked the secretary to whom the call should come to be alert for a call from NASA and to be sure and let me know about it. But if I was giving a lecture, just to come to the door and signal hand to ear that a call had arrived. Naturally, the call came in the middle of the lecture, Sally signaled as planned, and I decided to complete all (or most) of the lecture and call them back. Not knowing who for sure was calling and not knowing what the decision might be was more than the usual distraction!

“But I returned the call in fifteen minutes or so and apologized profuse­ly for being unable to come to the phone immediately. Al Shepard did not seem concerned and provided the hoped-for question—‘Would you like to come to work for NASA as a scientist astronaut?’ Again ‘Yes, of course,’ start­ed the brief exchange. A quick telephone call home alerted the wife, and we waited for an official announcement because I never felt certain of selection until nasa had made some public commitment.”

“I started out being president of my first grade class two years in a row,” joked Ed Gibson, in a NASA oral history interview, of his inauspicious aca­demic beginnings. Self-described as “not a good student” in elementary school, Gibson said the only subjects that really captured his interest were science and astronomy. He recalls, as a young child, drawing pictures of the solar system. Though Gibson, born in 1936 in Buffalo, New York, improved his academic performance in high school, the interest in science remained. After high school he earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering at the Uni­versity of Rochester. The choice was inspired by his father, who wanted his son to work at his marking-devices company and thought engineering skills would be a valuable addition to the business.

A desire to fly for the Air Force was shot down by a bone condition that was then a disqualification for being a pilot. Unable to fly planes, he decid­ed to pursue building them. Rather than joining his father’s business after earning his bachelor’s degree, Gibson went on to earn a master’s and then a doctorate in engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

His childhood interest in astronomy and space never went away, and while in graduate school, he followed the Mercury and Gemini programs with great fascination, “never thinking [he’d] have a chance to be involved in them.” After completing graduate school, he took a job as a senior research scientist with the Applied Research Laboratories of Philco Corporation at Newport Beach, California. It was while he was working there that his wife, Julie, read him an article at breakfast one morning saying that NASA was looking for scientists who wanted to fly in space. “I thought long and hard about it, and 8 o’clock that morning, applied,” Gibson joked. “I had no qualms, whatsoever.”

Of the four scientists astronauts who ended up flying, Joe Kerwin’s path had the most in common with that of the first groups selected—it involved many hours in the cockpit of a military jet.

Born in 1932, Kerwin is a native of Oak Park, Illinois. After earning a bach­elor’s degree in philosophy from Holy Cross, followed by his doctor of med­icine degree from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago in 1957, Kerwin completed an internship at the District of Columbia General Hospital. At that point, under the Berry Plan, which allowed medical stu­dents to be exempted from the draft while completing their school or intern­ships, Kerwin was called up for service. Among the options he was offered was the last seat in flight surgeon training at the U. S. Navy School of Avia­tion Medicine in Pensacola, Florida. Though it would mean an additional six months of service, Kerwin was intrigued by the prospect of getting some flying time and signed up. After flight surgeon training, he was assigned to the Marine Corps Air Station at Cherry Point, North Carolina.

During his tour, the Marines with whom he was assigned would allow him to start their fighters and taxi them around. “The bug really bit me,” Kerwin said, and he applied for a Navy program in which a select number of flight surgeons were trained to become naval aviators with the idea that it would provide them a better background for performing their duties. He was accepted to the program and transferred from the naval reserve to the regular Navy. While assigned to an air wing at Cecil Field, Florida, a cou­ple of friends he had made among the aviators asked him for a favor—help filling out the medical portion of their applications to become astronauts. Those two pilots were Alan Bean and Jim Lovell.

When the scientist astronaut program was announced in 1964, his wife asked him whether he wanted to try for it. He was skeptical of his chances but finally submitted his application, and the combination of a physician with two thousand hours of jet flight time proved too good to pass up. Garriott recalled, “At our first meeting for the ten-day physical examinations at the School for Aerospace Medicine leading up to scientist astronaut selection, I had a ‘funny’ in one electroencephalogram test. The physicians required that I stay up all night—as an extra stressor—for a repeat test the next morning. New acquaintance and probable competitor Joe Kerwin graciously offered to stay awake about half the night with me just to help me avoid falling asleep. He ended up staying until 5:30 in the morning. It worked, and we were both selected. But those gestures are never forgotten!”

Of all of the groups of astronauts, the fifth—jokingly self-dubbed “The Orig­inal Nineteen” in a nod to the Mercury “Original Seven”—had the most diverse fates when it came to their eventual spaceflight assignments. Nine of them would make their first flights during the Apollo program (Charles Duke, Ronald Evans, Fred Haise, James Irwin, T. K. Mattingly, Edgar Mitchell, Stuart Roosa, John Swigert, and Alfred Worden), with three of them (Duke, Irwin, and Mitchell) walking on the moon. Four would make their rookie flights during the Skylab program (Jerry Carr, Jack Lousma, Bill Pogue, and Paul Weitz); one during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (astp) (Vance Brand); and three would not fly into orbit until the Space Shuttle began operations (Joe Engle, Don Lind, and Bruce McCandless; Engle had flown to the edge of space on the experimental x-15 plane before joining the astronaut corps). One of the members, Ed Givens, died before flying a mis­sion, and another, John Bull, developed a medical condition that disquali­fied him from flight status.

Group 5 member Paul Weitz, who made his first flight as part of the first Skylab crew, said that he does not remember any indication being made when his class joined the corps what their role would be, which he said he could live with: “I can’t speak for anyone else, but I just wanted to get an opportunity to fly in space.”

Even if no formal promise regarding their role had been made, some mem­bers of the group had some expectations. “When we were brought onboard, there was no end at Apollo 20,” Jack Lousma said. “We were going to land on the moon before the end of the decade, and we’re going to explore the moon. And there was no end to the number of Saturn missions there was going to

6. Members of the third Skylab crew: (from left) Jerry Carr, Ed Gibson, and Bill Pogue.

be, the number of Saturn flights, Saturn vs, or the number of landings on the moon. It was going to start with the landing, and then it was going to be increased duration, staying on the moon up to a month. And they were going to orbit the moon for two months; I guess that was more of a recon­naissance type of thing.”

The members of the Original Nineteen were competing for missions both with one other and with their predecessors still in the corps, a compe­tition made even tighter by the cancellation of Apollo missions 18 though 20. “I was very much disappointed that the last three missions to the moon were canceled—I thought I had a chance of making one of those missions,” Weitz said.

While there may not have been much overt competition among the Group 5 astronauts for the remaining Apollo berths, Weitz said, “It became obvious that some of the folks were doing their best to position themselves to punch the right cards to be considered for early flights. But everyone wanted to fly as soon as possible, and I think that no one was consciously considering giv­ing up on Apollo-era flights so that they might get an early Shuttle flight.”

Though he had been disappointed with the cancellation of the last three Apollo missions, Weitz said that he was pleased with his eventual rookie assignment. “I really enjoyed flying Skylab with Pete and Joe, and I thought we did our part to further the benefits of human space research.”

Jack Lousma said, “I was a little naive. I wasn’t a politician; I’d never been in a political organization. I just figured, the harder I work, the better I do. That wasn’t good for this particular system, but I wasn’t smart enough to know that. Moreover, I didn’t know anybody when I came. A lot of the oth­er guys had worked with each other on different projects in the Air Force and things, and I was just kind of a lone ranger. And I was the youngest guy selected, most junior, least experienced. So it seemed as though the people that had more experience, were a little bit older, or had done differ­ent things than I had were selected before me. Like Fred Haise was selected for the Lunar Module. Ed Mitchell worked on that. They were senior guys. And Fred was such a competent guy in aviation. So I was just going to do my best and work as hard as I could and see what happened, and if it came to a point where I had to be more overt about this, I would have felt that I’d earned the right to speak up.

“There was some amount of politics to the system of selection, but for the most part I felt that Deke Slayton was a fair guy, and I thought he selected the right people for the right job. I felt that everybody there was qualified to handle any mission that would come their way, but I felt that the selec­tions as Deke made them were fair. He would come in and assign maybe two crews for a couple of Apollo flights, assign a backup crew, make a few guys happy and a lot of guys mad. But he would always say, ‘And if you don’t like that, I’ll be glad to change places with you.’ And nobody could refute that. ’Cause poor old Deke, he still hadn’t flown at all.”

Lousma was one of the members of Group 5 who reached a point where he was confident the moon was within his grasp, only to have it snatched away. Upon joining the corps he had originally been put on a different track as one of the first members of his class to be assigned to Apollo Applica­tions rather than to Apollo. Even before he had completed his initial astro­naut training, Lousma was tapped to work on an instrument for one of the lunar-orbit aap flights that was planned at the time. Lousma had come to the astronaut corps from a background in military reconnaissance, and so was a perfect fit for the project, which involved using a classified Air Force high-resolution reconnaissance camera attached to an orbiting Apollo cap­sule to study the surface of the moon.

After Lousma had spent a year working on that project, however, the planned mission was canceled, and he was back to square one. It seemed, though, that fortune was smiling on him. Fred Haise, who had been the corps’ lead for Lunar Module testing and checkout, had been assigned to the backup crew for Apollo 11, which meant he would then be rotating up to prime a few flights later. (Under the standard rotation, Haise would have been Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 14, but Alan Shepard’s return to active flight status bumped the original 14 crew up to Apollo 13.) The corps need­ed someone to take the Lunar Module assignment that Haise had vacat­ed, and at the same time Lousma needed a new ground assignment. The fit was perfect.

While serving as Lunar Module support crew for Apollo 9 and 10, Lous – ma was also scrounging time in the lander simulator whenever he could. “By the time all of that was said and done, I had seven hundred hours in the Lunar Module simulator, plus all the knowledge that went with the systems of how the lunar module worked,” Lousma said. “Al Bean, when he flew, wanted the Lunar Module malfunction procedures revised, so I did that for him. I knew how this thing worked. So I figured I was probably destined for a Lunar Module mission.

“Before they canceled the last three missions, as I recall there was a cadre of fifteen guys that all worked together to somehow populate the last three missions; and some of them were guys that had flown already, and some of them weren’t. Once it got to this cadre of fifteen guys, I don’t remember there being any politics there. I wasn’t involved if there was. I was just real­ly focused on doing the best I could and qualifying on my own. I felt I was ready to do it. I was not a political person. I don’t think Deke was much of a political person at all. He was somewhat predictable in that the guys who had been there the longest were going to fly first. And in that group of peo­ple, probably the guys that were going to fly first were a little bit more senior, militarily speaking, and I was a junior guy; I was twenty-nine years old.

“That’s the way Deke worked. I think Jerry Carr would have flown to the moon before me. Jerry was senior to me in the Marines, so I’m not going to fly before him. The way it worked out on Skylab was I ended up flying before Jerry. And to offset that, Deke assigned Jerry to be the command­er, not just the ride-along guy on the third Skylab mission. That’s the way his mind worked. So to some extent, he was kind of predictable for people who were coming up through the ranks. He was kind of unpredictable for guys who had already flown. So there was probably more politics between those guys than there was between me and my friends. Deke never wanted much politics, I don’t think.

“I don’t know if I’d have been going to the moon or not, but there were three flights there for which I was eligible, and I was a Lunar Module-trained guy, so I thought I was definitely going on one of them.”

But, of course, it was not to be. The final three planned Apollo missions were canceled and with them went the hopes of Lousma and the others that they might reach the moon. With those missions canceled, Skylab became the next possible ticket to space for the unflown members of Group 5 (and their Group 4 predecessors). But even after the nine Skylab astronauts were told they had been assigned to the flights, some still had a sense of uncer­tainty, particularly in the wake of the cancellation of the last three Apol­lo flights.

“The Skylab missions were always threatened to not fly for a long long time,” Lousma said. “It was never sure until the last six months or a year that the Skylab was going to get to fly. There were those that said, ‘Let’s save the money and put it in the Shuttle.’ So I always felt like I could lose that Sky – lab mission, even when I was training for it.

“Somehow I found out that there was probably going to be a flight with the Russians and probably Tom Stafford was going to command that. May­be it was common knowledge, maybe it wasn’t. But I decided that if Sky – lab doesn’t fly, I’m going to be ready for the next thing. So I went while I was training for Skylab and took a one-semester course in the Russian lan­guage, took the exams and documented it and all that sort of thing, turned it in with my records, and said, ‘Here you go, Deke, in case you’re looking for a guy to go on the Russian flight, well, I’ve got a little head start on the language thing.’ It turns out that before we went on the Skylab mission I knew I was going to be on the backup crew for the Russian flight. It didn’t matter then, because Skylab was going, so backup was okay. But I remem­ber being concerned about Skylab not flying.”

Lousma said he is frequently asked if he felt that Skylab was a poor conso­lation prize for the lunar flight he missed out on. “ ‘Going on a space station mission instead of going to the moon, did you feel bad about it?’ Heck no, I didn’t,” he said. “I thought any ride was a good ride. And I felt that there weren’t that many rides to go around, so this was going to be all right. But moreover, we were doing things that hadn’t been done before. This is what I

think the lure was for most of our guys, to do things that hadn’t been done. All the things that Apollo did, we became operationally competent in.

“We knew we could fly in space. The question was, could we survive in space for long periods of time in weightlessness, and moreover could we do useful work. [Skylab] proved that this could be done, and it also demon­strated that evas in zero-gravity were doable if you were properly trained and had the right equipment and had been properly prepared. And we didn’t really know that either.”

The term “zero-G” is frequently used to indicate when things appear to be “weightless.” When flying in space, crewmembers do feel weightless, and they really are, but not because there isn’t any gravity at their altitude, about 435 km (270 miles) above the Earth for Skylab. In fact, the force of Earth’s gravity is about 87 percent as strong there as it is on the ground. The essential difference is that on Skylab the crews were in what physicists call “free-fall,” meaning that there was nothing to support their weight, like the ground or a chair. Instead, they were falling freely toward the center of the Earth, our “center of gravity,” just like a diver or a gymnast does until they hit water or the ground. So to be more precise, the free-fall toward the Earth’s cen­ter is the source of the apparent weightlessness in space. Space flyers do not hit the Earth because they are traveling so fast that their orbit just matches the curvature of the Earth and the Earth’s surface drops away from beneath them just as quickly as they fall toward it. When “zero-g” is used to mean weightlessness, this is what the correct explanation should be.

While in-space evas had been carried out successfully in the final Gemi­ni flights and then in Apollo, Lousma noted that they were nothing like the spacewalks performed during Skylab. The Skylab spacewalks were much longer and, unlike the earlier carefully planned and prepared spacewalks, involved responding to situations as they occurred.

“We were the first real test of whether you could have a useful space lab­oratory, and you could do scientific experiments of all sorts that we never did in Apollo, and get useful data back, and investigate things that had not been investigated before,” Lousma said. “I didn’t get to go to the moon, but I got to do something which was one-of-a-kind, first of a kind, to demon­strate all of those things that we were wanting to know and had to learn to go to the next step, and that’s the one that we’re going to take in the next couple of decades. From that point of view, I think Skylab is NASA’s best –

kept secret. We learned so many things that we didn’t know, and we did so many things for the first time.”

Like most of the members of the early groups of astronauts, Jerry Carr’s path to becoming an astronaut began with a love of aeronautics developed in his youth. For Carr, who was born in 1932 and raised in Santa Ana, Califor­nia, that interest was first spurred during World War 11, when he would spot airplanes, including experimental aircraft flying overhead through the south­ern California sky. He and a friend would ride bicycles fourteen miles to the airport on Saturdays, where they would spend the entire morning washing airplanes. In compensation for his efforts, he would be paid with a twenty – minute flight. During his senior year in high school, he became involved in the Naval Reserve. He was assigned to a fighter jet and was given the respon­sibility of keeping it clean and checking the fuel and fluid levels.

After high school Carr attended the University of Southern California through the Naval rotc and earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engi­neering in 1954. Following his graduation, Carr became a Marine aviator. After five years of service, he was selected for the Naval Postgraduate School, where he earned a second bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering in 1961. Carr was then sent to Princeton University and earned a master’s degree in the same field a year later.

Three years later, he saw the announcement that NASA was seeking can­didates for its fifth group of astronauts. He made the decision to apply on a whim. He was friends with C. C. Williams, who had been selected in the third group of astronauts in 1963. Carr figured if Williams could make it, he was curious to see how far through the process he could go. On April Fool’s Day in 1966, Carr learned just how far he had gone when he received a call from Capt. Alan Shepard informing him that he had been selected to the astronaut corps.

Jack Lousma wasn’t always going to be a pilot. Sure, Lousma, who was born in 1936 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, loved airplanes as a kid, building mod­els and going out to watch them land and take off. And he had two cousins who were pilots and still remembers the time one of them flew a jet over his farm so low “I could almost see his eyeballs,” as he recalled in a NASA oral his­tory interview. But Lousma wasn’t always going to be a pilot. Through high school and into college, he planned to be a businessman. However, during his sophomore year, he says, he decided he just couldn’t figure the business classes out and decided to get into engineering. And as long as he was going into engineering, he did love airplanes, and the University of Michigan did have a great aeronautical engineering program.

While completing his bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, though, he saw a lot of movie footage of fast-flying jet airplanes. And so he decided the best thing for an engineer who planned to design planes to do would be to learn to fly them. After being turned down by the Air Force and Navy because he was married, he found out that the Marines not only had air­planes, they had a program that would take married people. After complet­ing his training and deciding he wanted to make a career of the Marines, he went on to attend the Naval Postgraduate School, earning a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering.

Lousma had reached the point where he was starting to look for new chal­lenges when he heard that NASA was selecting its fifth group of astronauts, and he decided that fit the bill perfectly. His application process was near­ly cut short, however, by a requirement that candidates not be over six feet tall. According to his last flight physical, Lousma was 6 feet i. The Marines Corps, which screened his astronaut application, agreed to give him a “spe­cial measurement” by his flight surgeon. This one came out to 5 feet, 11 7/8 inches. “I was really 5 foot, 13 inches, but I didn’t tell anybody,” he joked.

Garriott notes that at the time of their Skylab flight, Lousma had only had nine birthdays, having been born on 29 February. “But ‘the Marine’ acts in a much more mature manner, and if there ever was a true ‘All Amer­ican Boy’ in a quite positive sense, this is your man,” he said.

Bill Pogue also was fascinated by airplanes in his youth but like Lousma had plans for his life that did not include being a pilot. Fate, however, had other plans, and Pogue ended up thrust into following his childhood fasci­nation. Born in 1930 in Okemah, Oklahoma, Pogue planned during high school and college to be a high-school math or physics teacher, following in his father’s schoolteacher footsteps. Pogue earned a bachelor’s degree in edu­cation at Oklahoma Baptist University. After the Korean War broke out, though, Pogue decided it looked like he was going to be drafted and enlist­ed in the Air Force. He was sent to flight-training school and then to Korea, where he was a fighter bomber pilot. In the six weeks before the armistice, he flew a total of forty-three missions, bombing trains and providing air support for troops.

An assignment to leave Korea to serve as a gunnery instructor at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Arizona, proved to be fortuitous when after two years there he was asked to join a recently formed group based at Luke—the Thunderbirds air demonstration unit.

When he left the Thunderbirds, Pogue was given his choice of assignment, and he asked to be allowed to earn his master’s degree. He was reassigned to Oklahoma State University, where he earned his master’s in mathematics. About halfway through a five-year tour of duty as a math instructor at the Air Force Academy, he successfully petitioned to be allowed to work toward a goal of becoming an astronaut. He attended the Empire Test Pilot School in England. After completing that, he spent a couple more years there and then transferred to Edwards Air Force Base. Before he even moved there, however, he learned that NASA was selecting a new group of astronauts, and from his first day at Edwards, he was already working to leave Edwards to join NASA.

Unlike Lousma and Pogue, Paul Weitz did always want to be a pilot. Spe­cifically, Weitz, born in 1932 in Erie, Pennsylvania, wanted to be a pilot for the Navy. His father was a chief petty officer in the Navy and during World War II was in the Battle of Midway and the Battle of Coral Sea. That made a deep impression on Weitz, and by the time he was around eleven, he had decided he was going to be a naval aviator.

Toward that end he attended Penn State on a Navy rotc scholarship, completing his time there with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engi­neering and a commission as an ensign. An instructor there advised Weitz that if he wanted to make the Navy a career, he should begin by going to sea, so he spent a year and a half on a destroyer before going to flight train­ing. From there he spent four years with a squadron in Jacksonville, Flori­da, where he met Alan Bean.

The next few years of Weitz’s life were not necessarily as he would have planned them. After initially being turned down for test-pilot school, he was accepted for the next class but not until he had already been ordered across the country for an air development squadron. Since the Navy had just moved him from one coast to the other, they refused to move him back for test-pilot school. At last after two years he received unsolicited orders to attend the Naval Postgraduate School, where he was in the same group as Jack Lous – ma and Ron Evans, who went on to be the Command Module pilot for the Apollo 17 mission. Further complicating the situation, Weitz found him­self allowed only two years at a school where a master’s degree was a three – year program. With the aid of sympathetic professors, he was able to earn his master’s in aeronautical engineering in the two years he had.

The next year, he made a combat tour in Vietnam. While in the west­ern Pacific, he got a message from the Bureau of Naval Personnel asking if he would like to apply to be an astronaut. Though Weitz had never given the matter any thought before, he decided that he would, indeed, like to be an astronaut.

Those nine men would make up the crews of the three Skylab missions. Pete Conrad and Al Bean, the two veteran astronauts, became the commanders of the first two Skylab crews. Conrad was joined by pilot Paul Weitz and science pilot Joe Kerwin. Bean’s crew consisted of himself, pilot Jack Lous – ma, and science pilot Owen Garriott. Rookie Jerry Carr was assigned as the commander for the third crew, joined by pilot Bill Pogue and science pilot Ed Gibson.

One veteran and five rookies made up the backup crews for the three Skylab missions. Rusty Schweickart, the Lunar Module pilot for the Earth – orbit Apollo 9 mission, was the commander of the backup crew for the first mission, joined by pilot Bruce McCandless and science pilot Story Mus – grave. Commander Vance Brand, pilot Don Lind and science pilot Bill Lenoir (Lenoir and Musgrave were members of the second group of scien­tist astronauts NASA selected) served as the backup crew for both the second and third Skylab missions.

The first crew chose for their mission patch an image depicting the Earth eclipsing the sun, with a “top-down” view of a silhouetted Skylab in the fore­ground. The patch was designed by science-fiction artist Kelly Freas.

The second crew’s patch, with a red, white, and blue color scheme, fea­tured Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man drawing of the human form in front of a circle, half of which showed the western hemisphere of the Earth, and the other half depicted the sun, complete with solar flares. The patch reflected the three main goals of their mission—biomedical research, Earth observation, and solar astronomy.

7- (Clockwisefrom top left) The Skylab i mission patch, the Skylab 11 patch, the Skylab 11 “wives’ patch,” and the Skylab ill patch.

The third crew’s patch featured a prominent digit “3” with a rainbow semi­circle joining it to enclose three round areas. In those three areas were depic­tions of a human silhouette, a tree, and a hydrogen atom. The imagery on the patch symbolized man’s role in the balance of technology and nature.

There was one other Skylab “mission patch,” a companion to the second crew’s patch. The wives of the three Skylab 11 astronauts had been involved in the creation of that mission’s patch, and decided they wanted to do some­thing a little extra. Working with local artist Ardis Settle, who had contrib­uted to the official patch, and French space correspondent Jacques Tiziou, they created their own Skylab 11 “wives’ patch.” The central male nude fig­ure drawn by Leonardo had been replaced with a similar but much more attractive female nude and the crew names altered to Sue, Helen Mary, and Gratia.

“One of our first tasks when reaching orbit was to unpack our ‘flight data file,’ carried up in our csm [Command Service Module],” Garriott said. “What we did not expect to see when we unpacked our individual ‘small change sheets’ and ‘check lists’ was a new crew patch with a much more memorable female nude in the center!”

It is important to note that there are two different systems of nomenclature for the Skylab flights. During the planning phase for the program, there was debate as to whether the unmanned launch of the Skylab workshop should be numbered as one of the flights or whether only the three crewed missions should be counted. Ultimately, it was decided that the launch of the station would be numbered; it would be Skylab i, and the three manned flights would be 2, 3, and 4.

That decision, however, had not yet been made at the time that the crew patches were designed and ordered, so the flight suits were produced bear­ing patches marking the three manned missions as Skylab 1, 11, and ill. As a result, both numbering systems were used in different places. Frequently, the former system is written using Arabic numerals, and sometimes with the two-letter mission abbreviation used for Skylab, thus sl-i through SL-4. The latter system is generally written with roman numerals and almost exclusive­ly with Skylab written out, thus Skylab 1 through Skylab ill.

For the purposes of this book, we abide by the conventions of using Arabic numerals, and generally the “sl” abbreviation, when using the former system and of using roman numerals for the latter system. However, to the greatest extent possible, we have avoided using either, referring to the missions with less-ambiguous terminology (“the first crew’s mission,” for example).

Pogue explained the numbering system for their mission: “When the Skylab crews were announced in 1971, the prime crews set about designing their mission insignia or ‘patch’ as it was usually called. The missions were officially designated as Skylab 1, for the unmanned launch of Skylab on the Saturn v, and Skylabs 2, 3, and 4 for the three manned visits, which were launched on Saturn IBs.

“That seemed simple enough, but mischief was not long in coming. We began receiving flight training and procedures documents labeled slm-i, slm-2, and SLM-3 for the three Skylab manned missions. Other documents were labeled sl-2, SL-3, and SL-4, which conformed to the official mission designations. We began receiving mail and documents clearly meant for one of the other crews and the astronaut office mailroom became as bewildered, confused, and uncertain as the rest of us.

“In the meantime we had designed our mission patches incorporating the official numeric designations of Skylab 2, 3, and 4. During a visit by the NASA headquarters director of the Skylab Program, Pete Conrad asked him, “Are we i, 2, and 3 or are we 2, 3, and 4”? He said, “You are i, 2, and 3”. All of us went back to designing new patches to incorporate the numerals i, 2, and 3. Skylab і and 2 used Roman numerals and Jerry, Ed, and I used the Ara­bic numeral 3. The designs were rendered by artists and sent to NASA head­quarters for approval. The whole process took several months, and the art­work didn’t arrive at NASA headquarters until about six months before the scheduled launch of the Skylab.

“The associate administrator for Manned Space Flight took one look at the artwork and disapproved the design because he said the official flight designations, ‘2, 3, and 4’ were to be used. Thus informed, we dug out our original designs (2, 3, and 4) and were in the process of getting the artwork done when we were informed by headquarters “not to bother.” We could use the designs for i, 2, and 3. Then we found out why the change of heart.

“The people who had manufactured the Skylab flight clothing (to be worn onboard) had already completed their work several weeks earlier in order to get the clothes packaged and shipped to the Cape to meet their deadline for stowage onboard Skylab, which was already in prelaunch pro­cessing. Furthermore, they had already used the designs submitted earli­er for the mission patches. They didn’t have time in their schedule to wait for official approval. The designs using the numeric designation i, 2, and 3 became approved by default because items with these patches were already manufactured and stowed in Skylab lockers at the Cape. Removing them for patch change-out was considered much too expensive and disruptive during launch preparations.

“So, although officially designated as Skylab 2, 3, and 4, the mission insig­nias bear the numeric designations as follows: Skylab 2 (Roman numeral i), Skylab 3 (Roman numeral ii), and Skylab 4 (Arabic numeral 3). When trav­eling in Afghanistan in 1975, I presented some Afghan VIPs with our Skylab

4 mission patch. One lady looked thoroughly confused and asked about the numeral 3 on the Skylab 4 patch. I gave her this long-winded explanation, and by the time I finished, the Afghans were roaring with laughter.

“Today it is especially confusing to autograph collectors who still scratch their heads trying to sort out their trophies.”

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.”