Category HOMESTEADING SPACE

The foundations that would eventually lead to the launch of Skylab in May 1973 had been laid much earlier. The idea of building a space station was noth­ing new. Not only did it predate Skylab, it predated manned spaceflight.

The first serious proposal for a manned space station was published in 1923 by German rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth in his work, The Rocket into Interplanetary Space. In that work Oberth wrote, “Such a station could serve as a basis for Earth observations, as a weather forecasting satellite, as a communications satellite, and as a refueling station for extraterrestrial vehi­cles launched from orbit.”

A few decades later the concept of the space station was familiar not only in the spaceflight community but also to the public at large. It hit the main­stream in a major way when it was explained by Wernher von Braun and others in a series of Walt Disney-produced television specials in the latter half of the 1950 s. In a series of three Tomorrowland specials, the space sta­tion was presented not only as a place where humans would live and work in Earth orbit but also as a way station to other worlds. As a special-effects – laden enactment demonstrated, an orbital space station would be a key ele­ment in sending humans to the moon. The specials were based on concepts von Braun had presented at the First Symposium on Space Flight in October 1951, selected papers from which were published in Collier’s Magazine under the title “Man Will Conquer Space Soon.” Von Braun laid out what he saw as a logical progression for space exploration, beginning with simple orbit­al missions, moving on to the construction of a space station, which in turn would be used to support missions to the moon in the year 2000.

It was not to be. Two decisions sealed the fate of the idea of the space sta­tion as a steppingstone to the moon. Even before an American had been in orbit, the nation’s space program was focused on a single goal. On 25 May 1961, less than three weeks after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, President John F. Kennedy issued the challenge to Congress that was to define the nascent human spaceflight programs of two nations for years to come: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” Billions of dollars, and more than eight years, were to go into making the dream a reality. Every spaceflight made during that time was dedicated to bringing the goal another step closer.

That decision effectively made any thoughts of a space station for its own merits a much lower priority and created a major stumbling block to the idea of using a space station to get to the moon. Von Braun’s logical progression of infrastructure development required time that was a luxury that NASA could not afford in trying to meet Kennedy’s deadline.

The second shoe dropped the next year with the decision to use the lunar – orbit rendezvous mission profile for the moon landings rather than the Earth-orbit rendezvous profile von Braun had outlined in the Disney spe­cials. Lunar-orbit rendezvous involved sending two spacecraft to the moon instead of just one. While one descended to the lunar surface, the other remained in lunar orbit with the fuel that would be necessary to return to Earth. This technique made it possible for less mass to be sent to the moon. A lander that had to carry its Earth-return fuel to the surface would require even more fuel to lift that fuel back into space. Leaving the fuel for return

to Earth on an orbiting spacecraft eliminated that need. As a result, both lunar-rendezvous spacecraft together were smaller than the one craft that would have been sent to the moon on an Earth-rendezvous mission. That meant they both could be launched on one Saturn v, unlike the larger craft that would have been launched on separate boosters and assembled in orbit. The lunar-rendezvous technique gave NASA a quick path to the moon but at the cost of a space station.

Kennedy’s decision to pursue a bold fast-tracked lunar-landing program resulted in the most ambitious period in the history of space exploration and accelerated the achievement of the first human footsteps on another world. However, Mueller believes that in the long term human spaceflight would have been better served without that deadline. While it sped up the accom­plishments of Apollo, he argues that haste was possible only by sacrificing the development of an infrastructure that would have supported continued exploration. “It’s sort of unfortunate that the decision was made to go to the moon ‘in this decade,’ because that precluded the development of a real transportation system,” Mueller said. “It never really got the sort of atten­tion that it should have gotten, because it really, in my view, was the point in time when we had the opportunity to begin a true space civilization, a space evolution. In retrospect we would have been better off if we’d concen­trated on a transportation system.”

In an ideal situation, Mueller said, a combination of lunar orbit rendez­vous and Earth orbit rendezvous would have been used for moon landing missions, creating a system in which the bulk of the spacecraft used to fly crews from the Earth to the moon and back would have remained travel­ing in a loop between the two, while smaller transfer vehicles carried astro­nauts to and from the surfaces of the two worlds. Such a system not only would have supported ongoing exploration of the moon, but it also would have helped develop techniques and infrastructure that later could have been used for human missions to Mars.

Though development of a space station had been placed on the back burn­er following the decisions of 1961 and 1962, it had not been abandoned, and several NASA centers continued to work on ideas for space stations. Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, was working on the Manned Orbit­al Research Laboratory, which would support a crew of four to six astronauts for up to a year. The Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston was developing plans for Project Olympus, a large station that would remain in orbit for five years, where twelve to twenty-four crewmembers could live. Marshall, of course, was the home of von Braun, who had been outspoken about his own ideas for a space station. “There were a lot of concepts,” Mueller said of the early space station discussions in NASA in the early-to mid-1960 s. “Everybody was working on one. I’m afraid that a lot of them were just ideas.”

“Launch day arrived, ready or not, as days do,” Joe Kerwin said. “It was a beautiful, quiet morning at the Cape. We went through our checks and soon were standing on the platform at Pad 39B, waiting for ingress and looking out over the peaceful ocean, with sea birds flying below us. The Cape was practically deserted; all the guests had long since gone home. The families would see this launch on television.

“I was the last crewmember to be inserted into the Command Module because I had the center couch and would be in the way of the others. There was plenty of help strapping in and making the oxygen and communica­tions connections. And a friendly handshake and pat on the shoulder, and the hatch was closed. Communications check. Countdown continues; here’s the right place in the checklist. Pete’s on the left, in charge; he has the abort handle. Paul’s on the right, the Command Service Module systems expert. I’m in the middle, computer backup and navigation. We’ve done all this a million times (two million for Pete), and it’s all going well.

“About ten minutes before launch, Pete said on the intercom, ‘Guys, Mis­sion Control needs something to cheer them up. What can we say at liftoff that’ll do the trick?’ We discussed it a little bit and Pete made up his mind. Liftoff came, and amidst the noise and shaking, as the tail of the Saturn IB rose above the level of the launch gantry, Pete made his first voice call: ‘Lift­off. And the clock is running.’ And his second: ‘Clear the tower. And Hous­ton, Skylab Two, We Fix Anything, got a pitch and a roll program.’

“One of the longest, busiest days of our lives was underway.”

Mission Control had reason for needing cheering up on the first crew’s launch day, 25 May 1973. The team felt the clear need to get the astronauts to Skylab before it was too late to save it. There were launch constraints: one was that calling a hold too late in the count required detanking then refueling the booster, making a launch the next day impossible. And a new

23. The “milkstool” used to raise the Saturn ib boosters for launch on the Saturn v—fitted launch pad is visible in this photo of the sl-2 launch.

problem had cropped up. The mission operations computer began experi­encing overload problems. When that happened it needed to be taken offline and reinitialized. It must not be offline during launch. And the cause of the overloads was unknown.

The launch flight director, Phil Shaffer, had several intense conversations with his computer supervisor, who assured him that he could bring the com­puter online for liftoff and that it would stay online throughout launch. Phil had a decision to make. He recalled: “At T minus six minutes the launch

director at the Cape came to me for a ‘Go for Launch.’ At that time the mis­sion operations computer was down and being brought up. The last status check was at T minus three, and if we went down, then it would preclude a next-day launch. I gave a ‘Go’ to the Cape. And then the computer did come online, and it performed nominally ’til the end of the first stage burn. At staging the computer overload problem just disappeared.”

A similar problem would occur at the end of the last mission when because of memory problems the mission operations computer was dropping out every ten to twenty minutes. Mission Control found that they could rein­itialize between station passes and keep coverage seamless that way, and it worked. It provided a pair of bookends for Skylab: two problems assessed and overcome by the flight control team.

Despite having been through the launch procedure countless times in simulation, the two astronauts making their first spaceflight found the real thing rather exciting. “The liftoff and ascent were of course quite an expe­rience for us newbies,” Paul Weitz said. “There is a programmed activity with the booster’s first stage called ‘Propellant Utilization Shift.’ When we got the pu Shift, the thrust dropped off dramatically as far as I was con­cerned — my first thought was that we had lost an engine. Pete, of course, said something to the effect ‘Cool it, rookie.’”

They reached orbit without incident, and gloves and helmets came off. Kerwin, who had “average” susceptibility to seasickness, took a planned sco – polamine/Dexedrine capsule before leaving his couch; Conrad and Weitz pressed ahead with rendezvous. They were due to arrive at Skylab in about eight hours, and there was a lot to do. The space beneath the crew couches was a sight to behold, a sea of brown cloth and rope securing all the strange equipment that made up the Skylab repair kit. That under-the-couch vol­ume was normally kept clear for launch. In case of a very early abort, the Command Module would be pulled away from the booster by its Launch Escape Tower, and the parachutes would deploy and land the spacecraft off­shore. If the winds were unfavorable, a landing on the beach was possible, a hard landing, which would cause the couches to “stroke”; that is, to crush compressible aluminum material inside their struts and move down a foot or so, cushioning the shock to the crew. But that space was needed for the three sunshades and all the poles and cutters that were selected for repair. So NASA just made sure the east wind at altitude was not strong enough to blow the vehicle back onto the beach.

Upon reaching orbit, Kerwin disconnected his center couch and slid it underneath Conrad’s. Then he spent much of the eight hours before ren­dezvous untying and rearranging all the gear to check it out and have at hand what might be needed on Mission Day 1. After a series of maneuvers, Conrad spotted Skylab out the window and expertly executed the braking maneuvers that brought the Command Module beside it.

Once in place, Pete flew the Apollo spacecraft slowly around Skylab. It all looked pretty much as expected, but the sight of all that gold-colored Mylar where the heat shield was supposed to be—already turning a dis­colored brown in spots from the intense ultraviolet sunlight—was a little alarming. It looked hot.

“After orbital insertion, we started our catch-up with the ows [Orbital Workshop],” Paul Weitz said. “Joe got the first look at it through the tele­scope. After rendezvous we did an inspection fly around. The atm and its solar array had deployed normally. One solar wing on the ows was miss­ing —it was cleanly gone, with no apparent damage to the ows. Broken wires, cables, and mechanical attachments protruded from the base of the array like tendons on a broken turkey wing. The other array was partially deployed but was held close to the ows’s surface by a piece of debris from the missing meteoroid/heat shield that had wrapped itself up over the top of the solar array wing. All the rest of the meteoroid shield was gone. We took photos and downlinked TV to the ground.

“It was a frustrating time for me because my job was to take the pho­tos with a thirty-five millimeter camera with a telephoto lens, and to get the TV imagery. Well, both of these devices had relatively long lenses, and there was not much clearance between the window and the couch support structure. It was difficult in zero-G to get a good stable picture, but I guess it turned out ok.”

After completing the fly around, Pete maneuvered to the Multiple Dock­ing Adapter’s centerline docking port and performed a trouble-free soft dock. The Apollo docking system had two parts. The Command Module had a probe, a device that looked like a diamond-shaped metal-frame skel­eton of a box standing on one corner with a cluster of small latches at the opposite corner—the capture latches. The four corners in the middle of this box were hinged and motorized. Commanding the motors to straight­en those corners, would make the probe get longer and skinnier—it would

extend—and commanding the motors to bend the corners would retract the probe, pulling the capture latches in. In the Multiple Docking Adapt­er’s docking port was the other half of the mechanism, the drogue—a con­cave metal cone with a hole at its apex just big enough to allow the three capture latches to push in, then snap out like door latches. The procedure was to extend the probe, then drive the vehicles together until the capture latches engaged the hole in the drogue, retract the probe, pulling the two spacecraft together until the twelve big main latches touched, engaged, and made an airtight seal.

For this interlude Pete engaged the capture latches but didn’t retract the probe; the Command Service Module just swung lazily in place by the end of the probe while the crew had a bite to eat and planned the evening’s activ­ities with Houston. A full hard dock wasn’t desirable at this point because of the likelihood that they’d undock again shortly. The docking system need­ed to be dismantled and reset after a hard dock.

The team agreed that an eva would be done that day. It looked as though there was a chance that if the crew pulled on the stuck solar panel cover, it might come free. They had a tool in their kit with which to make the attempt—a curved metal “shepherd’s crook,” which they could attach to a five-foot aluminum pole. Everyone felt fine, no motion sickness; and NASA had not yet passed the mission rule prohibiting evas (except in an emergen­cy) until the fourth day of a mission to allow time to adjust to weightless­ness —just to make sure astronauts don’t vomit into their helmets. So they prepared the shepherd’s crook, put their helmets and gloves back on, and Pete retracted the capture latches and undocked.

The next step was to let the air out of the Command Module. Pete suf­fered an ear block during that depressurization but insisted the crew keep going. He flew back around to the offending solar panel cover, and Paul opened the side hatch. Paul got to be the shepherd; he glided halfway out the hatch, crook in hand. Joe’s job was to hang on to his legs to keep him from going out all the way. He maneuvered the crook into the gap between the solar panel cover and the side of the Orbital Workshop and pulled with all his strength.

“I positioned the crook under the end of the wing and gave a mighty heave.” Weitz recalled. “The wing did not move, but it pulled the csm toward the ows. Now, the hatch opened to the left, which blocked half of Pete’s field of view. So I am yanking on the pole; the csm is being pulled in; and much to my amazement, in zero-g I was even moving the one-hundred-ton lab. I could see the cold gas thrusters on the ows firing to maintain attitude, and Pete is mumbling and cursing in his attempts to maintain some semblance of station-keeping.

“Pete decided to give up on the shepherd’s crook and to try the branch loppers. Joe changed out the end equipment, and I tried to cut through the material that was holding the wing down. We could not get a satisfactory grip on the debris that would allow me to cut through it, so we in exasper­ation decided to call it a day.”

After the unsuccessful attempt, Kerwin helped Weitz get the pole and himself back into the spacecraft. They closed the hatch and headed back to the station’s axial docking port to dock with Skylab again, this time for the long haul.

Joe Kerwin recalled the docking: “Fate had another bear trap to fling in our path. When Pete approached the docking port to soft dock, the cap­ture latches would not engage. He tried it again, with a slower approach. Then he tried it with a faster approach. He tried the first backup docking procedure in the checklist. No joy. Then the second backup docking pro­cedure. Still no joy. Suddenly there was a grimmer problem than the solar panel. If we couldn’t dock, we would have to come home. With nothing accomplished.

“Pete backed off and kept station with Skylab and talked it over with Hous­ton. It was close to midnight back home, and the crew had been awake for twenty-one hours, but Pete’s flying was as smooth as ever. And there was one more procedure in the book, labeled laconically: final docking attempt. It required what amounted to a second spacewalk. Could we do it?

“Back up three months. We’re in the Command Module trainer, going over a few procedures with our instructor, Jake Smith. We’d finished every­thing on the list and were ready to go home. Jake said, ‘Guys, there’s this third backup docking procedure we’ve never gone through. It’s never been used. Why don’t I just talk you through it once, so you can see which wires to cut.’ We were ok with that, and fifteen minutes later we had filled that training square. God bless you, Jake!”

Gloves and helmets went back on. Once more they brought the Com­mand Module down to vacuum. Pete’s ear was still blocked but was not too painful. This time they removed the hatch to the docking tunnel. Joe made the changes to the docking probe per the checklist, put the hatch back in place, and they repressurized. Paul then did the rewiring in the right – hand equipment bay. The idea of this procedure was to remove the elec­trical interlock that prevented the main latches from actuating unless the capture latches were secure. Pete would drive the csm into the drogue and just keep thrusting while he commanded the probe to retract. Then if the crew were lucky, the main latches would close on contact with the Skylab half of the tunnel.

Everything was checked. Pete stood in for the last attempt. The check­list said it would work in ten seconds or never. He closed in and made con­tact and kept the forward thrusters firing. Probe to “Retract.” “We counted, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two—and a machine gun went off in our faces,” Kerwin said. “That explosive rattle was the main latches engaging. We were staying!”

As he checked the tunnel between the two spacecraft, Weitz discovered that eleven of the twelve latches had captured during the hard dock. The last one engaged manually with no problem. “There was a great collective sigh of relief onboard and in Mission Control,” Kerwin said. “We equalized pressure, opened the tunnel hatch, snacked again, used the waste manage­ment system, and so to bed. And we slept like babies. No one had time to even think about space motion sickness.”

Reflecting concerns that the equipment issues that had caused problems for docking could also cause further complications later, Pete’s final com­ment as the crew went to sleep in the Command Module at 1:30 a. m. had been, “Now that we’re docked, I’m not sure how we get ««docked.”

On Day 2, Houston’s first call came at eight minutes after nine. The first words from Skylab were, “We’re all healthy, Houston.” Whether they were likely to stay healthy would be determined by a couple of tests scheduled after breakfast. The issue was whether the atmosphere in Skylab was safe to breathe.

The walls of the workshop, originally built to contain liquid hydrogen, were insulated with a thick layer of polyurethane foam covered with fiber­glass. The foam was manufactured with toluene diisocyanate, a toxic mate­rial. Testing showed that the polyurethane would begin to break down from heat at a temperature of about 390 degrees, releasing toluene and other nasty products into the air. Had that happened? The estimated temperature the foam had reached was 350 degrees on the skin side and 160 degrees on the interior. But that was just an estimate.

Dr. Chuck Ross, the Skylab 1 crew surgeon, recalled: “This was one of our biggest concerns about Skylab’s condition—that breakdown of the insu­lation would release a ‘toxic soup’ of poisonous gases into the atmosphere. We worked the problem hard under the leadership of our chief toxicologist, Elliott Harris. We identified and procured gas-sampling tubes which would measure the levels of toluene and adapted them to suck gas through Skylab’s hatch equalization valves. That was so that we could do a ‘sniff test’ before anyone entered Skylab. We procured two activated-charcoal [filter] masks for the crew to use while first entering the ows. And we prevailed upon the control team to evacuate all the gas out of Skylab and refill it—I think they did that twice before the crew arrived.”

Now was the time to conduct those tests. First the crew verified that pres­sure had held steady in the short tunnel between the Command Module and the Multiple Docking Adapter. Then the Command Module hatch was opened, and the docking probe removed and carefully set aside for future investigation. Next Paul Weitz broke out a sniff-test sampling tube and drew a sample of air from the Multiple Docking Adapter to test for toluene. The test was negative as was a previously planned test for carbon monox­ide (a routine precaution that would be repeated periodically throughout the Skylab missions). At about 11:30 a. m. Paul removed the second hatch and moved into the Multiple Docking Adapter, eagerly followed by the rest of the crew. This was the crew’s first exposure to moving around in a large volume—and about ten minutes after entry Pete said to the Capcom, “Tell the docs we didn’t need our motion sickness pills.”

Pete did a thorough inspection of the docking probe and drogue. Hous­ton made several suggestions about what to look for. Pete replied, “All right. And what’s your opinion on if we had to undock, how’d we go about doing it? Do you think we could get the capture latches to cock?” Houston said they were thinking about that.

Removal of the probe showed that two of the three capture latches had opened but the third was stuck down. Pete also noted a scrape along the side of the drogue, probably due to one of his more forceful docking attempts. After cycling the latches several times and noting that the same one hung up repeatedly, Pete stowed the probe for the time being.

While Joe started activating Apollo Telescope Mount systems, Pete and Paul worked on starting up power and ventilation to the workshop. Paul had the first fans turned on by 1:30 p. m. Wearing a charcoal mask, he made a quick trip into the workshop to check the airflow gauges and general con­dition and turn on the rest of the fans. The air recirculation system con­tained charcoal filters that would absorb toluene if it was present. Return­ing to the Multiple Docking Adapter, he told Houston, “Okay, on our fairly quick inspection the ows appears to be in good shape. It feels a little bit warm, as you might expect. From the three to five minutes I spent in there I would say subjectively it’s about—it’s a dry heat. I guess it feels like 90 to 100 degrees in the desert. Hank, I could feel heat radiating from all around me. . . . I had the soft shoes and the gloves on, and nothing I touched felt hot to me.”

Power was a major consideration (and would remain so for the next two weeks).

Houston: “. . . and to help our power situation, I guess we’d like to get the ows entry lights turned off there while we’re eating lunch—after you complete the sniff.”

Paul: “I thought I turned them off when I came out, Hank.”

Houston: “Okay, you may have.”

Pete: “Yes, he did.”

Paul: “You think I’m not power conscious?”

The toluene sniff test was now repeated for the workshop and was neg­ative. The crew floated back into the Command Module to eat lunch, and at about a quarter past four Pete and Paul entered the workshop again, this time without masks, to prepare to deploy the parasol.

Pete: “How do you read, Houston?”

Capcom: “I’m reading you loud and clear, Pete.”

Pete: “Okay; I got you on the speaker box—ow. Yes, I got my hot gloves back on again. The speaker box is about 130 degrees.”

The parasol had been packed in a rectangular aluminum experiment con­tainer about one foot square and five feet long. Now Pete and Paul carried it from the Command Module down to the Scientific Airlock on the sun­ny side of the workshop, the same side of the cluster as the Apollo Telescope Mount and so normally always pointed at the sun. This location was a lucky

24- The parasol deployment mechanism fitted to the solar airlock.

one for it was centered on the side of the workshop that needed to be shad­ed. (It wasn’t so lucky for a couple of experiments designed to use it.)

One end of the container was inserted and locked into the airlock to make an airtight seal. Then the metal Scientific Airlock outer door was cranked open, exposing the parasol to vacuum. At this point, Pete and Paul retreat­ed to the Multiple Docking Adapter for a cooling-off break and a drink of water. Meanwhile Joe was in the Command Module setting up a TV camera to catch a glimpse of the deployment looking aft through a window down the length of the cluster.

Now a series of seven metal rods were inserted one at a time through a seal in the free end of the container and slowly pushed, carrying the apex of the folded-up parasol out into space. To the parasol’s apex were connected four fishing rods to which in turn the nylon parasol material was fastened. The rods had been telescoped; as they extended fully, each section locked in place. Then the crew released a brake holding springs designed to push the fishing rods out and down until they opened fully and locked into place, covering the workshop.

Considering the haste in which this rig had been designed, built, tested, and loaded into the Command Module for flight, it’s a wonder it worked at all. It did work, but it required a lot of sweat and some ingenuity to get it laid out flat.

Pete (at four minutes after 8:oo p. m.): “ok, Houston, we had a clean deployment as far as rods clearing and everything, but it’s not laid out the way it’s supposed to be. . . . The problem seems to be that the folds in the material have taken too much of a set. . . . We’re open for suggestions.”

Capcom: “Roger. First off, we’d like to get Joe to tell us what he saw out the window. We’d like to know if all the rods are approximately the same plane.”

Joe: “Well, we don’t think so, Houston. . . . The front legs, that is the for­ward ones closest to the Command Module, came out smartly. . . . It looks as if they actually went over center a little bit, then bounced back. The back ones did not come out, it looked like, all the way—didn’t come to ninety degrees. They went slowly, and they just kind of drifted to a stop.”

Capcom: “Okay. What kind of an angle do you think they made with the plane of the first two rods?”

Joe: “It’s your guess, but I guess thirty degrees, something like that.”

Capcom: “ok. We would like for the cdr and plt to go back in the work­shop and pull her in, and we want you to complete the procedure down to Step 43 so you’ve done a full retraction.”

Paul and Pete got the parasol pulled in, and noted that the rods that had been exposed to vacuum were nice and cool as they came back in.

Paul: “Rod B is gathering frost as it lays here in the fiery workshop.”

Finally, they pushed it out a couple of feet and immediately pulled it in again. That straightened out the aft rods pretty well.

Houston: “We’re looking at two flight plans tomorrow. We’re taking a tentative look at one that doesn’t consider anything in the Workshop. The alternative is going as planned. We’d like to get your opinion on this. . . .”

Pete: “. . . we spent the better part of two or three hours down there; and every time we’d get hot, we’d come up and take a rest. Now, if the temper­atures are coming down, I would like to stick with our original flight plan, and we’ll start activating it down there.”

Houston: “Okay. Our best estimate, Pete, is we’ll be below ioo degrees in there by tomorrow morning.”

2$. The sun-shield parasol, as deployed by the first crew of Skylab.

Pete: “Well, what do you think it was in there today?”

Houston: “We guess about 125.”

It was going to be pretty hot work. But the Multiple Docking Adapter was about sixty degrees — jacket weather. And the crew knew they’d be eat­ing, sleeping, and cooling off “upstairs” for the next several days.

Now Houston’s priority was to get Skylab back into solar inertial atti­tude —with the Apollo Telescope Mount pointing directly at the sun. This was both the coolest attitude, assuming the parasol worked, and by far the best for generating electricity from the Apollo Telescope Mount’s solar pan­els. Skylab had a very accurate system for pointing directly at the sun. It had a cluster of Fine Sun Sensors, which could measure the difference between Skylab’s attitude and the sun line within a tenth of a degree. But the error had to be less than ten degrees to start with; outside of that, the sun sensors themselves couldn’t find the sun. Houston was struggling now to get the cluster pointed within that ten-degree cone.

Houston, at 9:40 p. m.: “We’re going to take a look at the temperatures, and we think they’re coming down. We’re prepared to command solar iner­tial here over Hawaii.”

At 9:45 p. m., Houston: “Skylab, Houston. You’re on your way to solar inertial now.”

At 11:15, Paul: “We’re not in solar inertial, you know.”

Houston: “Roger. We assumed that we should be close to solar inertial attitude. We’re not solar inertial mode; we’ll be working that ourselves.”

Paul: “Well, you’re not even very close. . . . Do you know where to go?”

Houston (laughter): “Probably not.”

Pete: “Well. I’m looking out the window, and it looks as if you need a plus rotation about Y and a plus about x. And I’m not sure of the magnitude, but about 10 degrees or more.”

Houston: “Okay, what we’re going to do is put in a plus Y rotation of for­ty degrees, and a plus x rotation of fifteen degrees. If we don’t hack it this time, we’ll probably suggest turning it over to you. . . .”

Kerwin recalled: “Well, to make a long story short, they did turn it over to us, and we got it done. Pete and Paul looked out the sun-side window in the aft portion of the Multiple Docking Adapter, and when they agreed on an attitude correction, I’d put half of it in the Apollo Telescope Mount’s computer, and it would execute the maneuver. That way we got closer and closer without overshooting. When we all agreed we were well within ten degrees, we switched the mode to solar inertial. The atm said, in comput­er language, ‘Oh, there you are, sun!’ and finished the job. When all was steady, we built our final ‘how to find the sun again’ tool. When we were pointed precisely at the sun, the sun-facing window threw a bright oblong spot of sunlight on the opposite wall. We just carefully surrounded that spot with gray duct tape and went to bed. To my knowledge, no one ever had to use it again. But it was there if they did!”

On Mission Day 3, bedtime having been three hours late, wake-up was an hour and a half behind the preflight schedule—still behind and with a lot of activation challenges ahead, but getting closer.

7:24 a. m., Pete: “Hey, what time would we’ve gotten up this morning, if it was a normal wakeup?”

Houston: “Okay, we had you scheduled for about 1500 Zulu” [11:00 a. m. Houston time].

Pete: “I meant—we should have gotten up at 1100, right?”

Houston: “Roger, that’s the nominal time, Pete. But we were going to let you sleep late, since you didn’t get to bed until late last night.”

Pete: “Okay. Well, we’re slowly trying to work our way back to the nor­mal schedule. . . . Say, what’s your cooling look like?”

Houston: “Looks like we’ve been dropping about a degree an hour. We’ve got a lot of our measurements back on scale now. We’re showing some duct temperatures around ninety-five, ninety-eight degrees. . . .”

Breakfast was in the Command Module again. The wardroom hadn’t been activated yet, and it was too hot anyway. But they were eating well and enjoying it.

Pete: “I’m feeling pretty spunky. Got a good night’s sleep, just had a lit­tle sausage, a little scrambled eggs, and I’m working on my jam and bread, with a little coffee, goes pretty well this morning.”

Houston: “That sounds good to me. I haven’t had my breakfast yet.” Pete: “Sorry about that.”

As the crew began to get serious about workshop activation, little prob­lems and confusions popped up. The crew had their heads down trying to get the tasks done, and Houston was starved for information about where they were on the timeline—and in the vehicle. And all this was complicat­ed by the sporadic nature of communications.

Houston: “Skylab, Houston through Honeysuckle for six minutes. cdr, are you in the Command Module now?”

Pete: “No, sir. I’m in the wardroom.”

Houston: “Okay. . . .”

Pete: “What do you need?”

Houston: “Well, we’ve got a couple of things we’d like to get done up there, if it’s convenient for you to take a break.”

Pete: “Yes, I’m on my way. I’ll be there in a flash.”

And here’s Pete later in the day:

Pete: “The other thing we just finished spending a little time on was—we thought we had the urine system all rigged up and it wouldn’t work. I was the test subject and I had a big failure. And we went back and regrouped on it and we’ve concluded that you have to have a fecal bag in the thing. You have to have the fecal bag in a certain way or you just don’t get enough vac­uum through the urine system, enough flow, to pull urine down the urine tube. But the other two guys have been working on that down there for a while. They say it works ok.”

Houston: “Roger. Copy.”

And later.

Houston: “Skylab, Houston. We’ve got a dump maneuver starting now. You’re going to have to wait on that star tracker procedure. Wait until next daylight.”

Pete: “Okay, Henry. Nobody was quite sure who was supposed to do it, so it didn’t get done.”

Houston: “No sweat, don’t worry about it.”

Temperature reports were frequent throughout the day.

Pete (at 11:00 a. m.): “Hey, Houston. The biggest thing I can notice is the grid floor is beginning to cool compared to yesterday. Some of those oth­er lockers are bigger heat sources, but everything generally seems cooler in here, although still reading off scale high on the ows temp gauge.”

Paul: “Henry, as Pete mentioned this morning, it’s hot over by water tank one on that side of the Scientific Airlock. And just for information, there’s a lot of the metal-to-metal fittings that don’t fit too well at 130 degrees, like they did at 70. Had a pretty tough time getting the wardroom hose on water tank one, which is still hotter than a two-dollar pistol. . . .”

Paul (at 1:00 a. m., just before bedtime): “Tonight we dug out the per­sonal hygiene kit spares container and found that every tube of Keri hand cream in there had ruptured. I don’t know why. . . . Also, about two-thirds of the toothpaste has burst. And some of it has been cooked to the point where it is very, very thick and unusable any more. . . .”

But not everything was troublesome. As Pete had implied the previous evening, getting around the huge Skylab cluster was proving to be a joy.

Pete (at 11:17): “Hey, I’ll tell you there is no problem adapting, and you can go anywhere you want. You may get out of control a little bit en route, but you don’t bang into anything hard. And if you just take your time push­ing off, you can go anywhere you want in the vehicle. Just super fast!”

A few days later, Pete dislocated a finger while doing acrobatics around the ring lockers, but it slipped back into place easily. Dr. Kerwin applied a tongue depressor splint for the day, but Pete removed it after a couple of hours, and all was well. They mentioned it to Dr. Ross as a nonevent.

Pete’s evening report, delivered at about 9:00 p. m., showed that they were making progress toward blessed routine but were still behind the plan. Here’s a sample:

Pete: “. . . Today, Day 3, let me give you the urine volumes—cdr 210 ml, spt 160, plt 200. [Those volumes were for a partial day.] Today, we have no body mass for you. We have no exercise to give you. We’ll cover item Echo [medical status] on the private comm. tonight—although there isn’t anything to report. We’re in good health. And let me read you today’s food log. ‘The cdr ate everything today except corn. The reason for that was that the bag failed when inflating with water, and I got corn all over every­where. Now for yesterday, Joe calculated that I should have taken—and I did take—two calcium pills.’”

He repeated the food items skipped and supplements taken for Paul and Joe.

Houston: “Okay. We’d like to talk about the Flight Plan. How we saw things was perhaps—the first thing tomorrow is to just pick up where we left off and work on through, with a couple of exceptions. There will be a press conference tomorrow. . . and there will be a trim burn at about 01:07 [Greenwich Mean Time] — about a twenty-nine second burn time.”

Pete: “Okay, twenty-nine seconds, roughly.”

Houston: “That’s affirmative.”

Pete: “I figured I pushed so hard trying to dock the other night I almost deorbited the thing.”

Houston (laughter in background): “It’s still there.”

And so began the tradition of evening status report, always friendly, relaxed, and informative, just keeping everybody floating in the same direc­tion. The food and water data allowed the doctors to calculate supplement pill needs and have the information to the crew in the morning; the crew had a glance at tomorrow’s plans; and Houston could appraise where the crew was and how they felt about it.

So ended the third day.

Mission Day 4, 28 May, was a day of firsts:

First time the men were up on schedule—at 6:oo a. m. Houston time.

First breakfast in the wardroom.

First time for Joe to draw blood (theirs and his own), centrifuge it and freeze it for return.

First runs of the major medical experiments, lower body negative pressure (experiment number M092) and exercise tolerance on the bicycle ergometer (number M171).

Last, and maybe least, the first mention by Houston of the India­napolis 500 to Pete, a racecar driver himself and a big fan.

Houston: “Skylab, Houston. We’ve got you stateside for 16V2 minutes. Good morning.”

Paul: “Hi there. Our hands are full of bloody medical equipment, but we’ll recover, I think.”

Pete: “Hey, Bill. Joe just drew all three of us. That went very smoothly. . . cdr just finished shaving. Breakfast is cooking, and I think with a little luck at all, we might get on to a good routine. This is our first real crack at the post-sleep checklist, so we’ll get a good chance to see how long it takes us. . . . If it weren’t for the fact that we have such a spectacular view out the wardroom window, which we didn’t open until yesterday evening, late, I’d think we were back in Houston simming.”

Back on Earth, Rusty Schweickart and his backup crew were working on a spacewalk to pry loose Solar Panel 1. For several days they were still gath­ering information and comparing notes and opinions; a firm plan hadn’t yet taken shape. On the evening of Day 3, Paul had made a lengthy record­ing on Skylab’s tape recorder answering questions about the standup space­walk he’d done on Day 1. Rusty and the engineers wanted to get a very clear idea of how the strap was dug into the Solar Array System (sas) beam fair­ing so they could duplicate it on the underwater mockup and come up with a solution.

Later that day Rusty had a lengthy air-to-ground conversation with the crew. Pete opined that if a guy “had a crowbar he could pry with his feet against the Solar Array System beam and pry it right off of there. . . . Paul got that claw under it, but he couldn’t provide enough leverage. The claw is so short and the pole was so whippy that he couldn’t provide enough lever­age to pry it off of there. . .”

Rusty: “Roger. Copy. Do you think that you could have gotten the cut­ter (the limb lopper) around that strap down at the base, or did you try to get it around the strap?”

Pete: “No. I don’t think that cutter would have done it. . . . I’ll tell you what’s in the back of my mind right now. We have a pry bar in one of these tools, and I’m going to figure out a way to tether a crewman so when we go out and do our thing on Day 26, it’s worth our while to see if we can’t whin­ny around there.”

At this point, Conrad was still planning on attempting to free the stuck solar panel during the film-retrieval spacewalk scheduled at the end of the crew’s mission.

Rusty: “Roger, Pete. For your information we’re already working in the water tank trying to see what we can do along those lines. We’ve looked at the pictures—and we have determined that the tool we have on board will cut that strap. And we’re trying to determine if there is a place that you can get at the strap with the cutting tool. . . . If the strap is cut loose, do you believe that there’s anything else holding the beam down?”

Pete: “Not from the outside, Rusty, but. . . .”

A lengthy technical discussion followed. In summary, the answer was “maybe.”

Another item that would probably hold the solar panel cover (the Solar Array System beam) down even if the strap were cut was an internal damp­er, part of the hinge mechanism designed to prevent the sas beam from deploying too quickly. The wing’s designers were pretty sure that the cold temperatures aloft would have frozen the damper, and that somehow con­siderable pulling force was going to have to be exerted on the Solar Array System to break it free. Rusty’s team went away for four days after that talk and worked hard on a procedure. The crew would start working it again when the ground had a proposed solution. In the meantime, life had to con­tinue on the injured space station.

Living in Skylab was already generating a lot of trash. But Skylab had a very convenient place to put the trash and an elegant way of getting it there. At the bottom of the lower deck of the workshop was the Trash Airlock (tal), which was used to put trash into the s-ivb stage’s large liquid oxygen tank. To use it, a crewman opened the upper door and inserted a filled trash bag.

Then he closed and locked the upper door and opened the lower door into the liquid oxygen tank. Air in the Trash Airlock escaped immediately, but the bag had to be pushed out with a plunger. Once that was done, the lower

door could be closed and the Trash Airlock refilled with air, ready for reuse. Jamming of the Trash Airlock would be a huge problem: there just wasn’t any other place to put all the food waste, packaging, used urine bags, and so forth. It couldn’t happen. But it nearly happened.

Pete: “We almost thought we’d jammed the trash airlock yesterday. The bag that had the uctas [worn under the spacesuits on launch day] in it real­ly expanded. And we were just flat lucky to get that one out of there.”

Houston: “Don’t scare us like that.”

Pete: “Listen, don’t scare you: it scared us worse than it scared anybody else. So we’re taping our plastic urine bags. Just as a rule, I think we’ll tape things, and we’re only going to use about half the volume of the TAL, just to be on the safe side.”

At ten minutes before 2:00 p. m., Houston called.

Houston: “Skylab, Houston for the cdr.”

Joe: “Go ahead, Houston. He’s listening.”

Houston: “Thought he might be interested to know that the Indy race is in a hold for rain. However, the sun has come out and it looks like they might get a race off about fifteen past the hour. We show you’ll be going pretty close to Indy in about seven minutes. Why don’t you take a look at the clouds? If it looks good, drop the flag on them.”

Pete: “If I don’t get a chance to see it, then you all pass my word up there that I wish them all the best of luck—to all my friends that are driving.”

Temperatures in the workshop were still about ninety-five degrees as the crew prepared for the first major medical runs. And Lower Body Negative Pressure was expected to be a bit stressful. It was a clever simulation of gravi­ty’s effect on blood distribution and thus on how hard the heart had to work to maintain blood pressure. Here’s how it worked: the subject inserted him­self feet first into a metal cylinder (think of a slender garbage can) up to the waist, wrapping an airtight rubberized cloth seal around his waist. Then air was pulled out of the can, reducing the pressure around the legs and low­er abdomen. This would cause blood to pool in the lower half of the body, as though the subject were standing erect in gravity. (A familiar example of the effect would be “parade ground faint.”) Blood pressure and heart rate would be monitored to see how the heart responded to this loss of available blood. This would be an indirect test of whether the astronaut subject was going to have trouble after return to Earth at the end of the mission. Since the amount of blood in circulation was known to decrease in space, it was thought that a gradual decrease in tolerance might be seen.

Kerwin, in view of the high temperatures, recommended that on the first run only the smallest increment of pressure be tested—30 millimeters of mercury, about V2 pound per square inch, and that the exercise experiment likewise be restricted only to the first and second levels. Houston concurred with restricting Lower Body Negative Pressure but asked that Paul Weitz, the first subject, try to go the full protocol on the ergometer. At 7:00 p. m. Kerwin reported how things had gone.

Joe: “Okay. [Lower Body Negative Pressure] was interesting. We ran the whole run, 30, 40, 50, because the numbers looked okay as we went. He had at least twice the increase in leg volume that I’ve ever seen before, but his figures [blood pressure and heart rate] were normal.

“Then we went to [the exercise experiment], and as a lot of us had suspect­ed, we’ve got a significant mechanical efficiency problem in riding the bike.

. . . We terminated the run with a little under three minutes to go, both for that reason and because of an obvious thermal problem. It’s just too hot in there to go 200 watts on the bicycle. And while we will run M17K, pending resolution of the. . . problems, I’m going to strongly recommend against running at the top step.”

The design of the ergometer had received a lot of attention. How did one ride a bicycle in zero-G? Your feet wouldn’t stay on the pedals, and your behind wouldn’t stay on the seat. Without restraints of some kind, you’d float away whenever you pushed. The first insight was to use special shoes to attach the feet to the pedals. And since Skylab’s triangular grid pattern was already being used for foot restraints, that design was adopted for the pedals. It worked well.

To restrain the rest of the body called for a more complex device. The astro­nauts had asked Dr. Story Musgrave, Kerwin’s backup as Skylab 1 science pilot, to tackle the problem. Story had worked with the ergometer designers at Marshall and come up with a sophisticated answer: a padded waist belt with adjustable straps to attach it to the floor and a shoulder harness with adjustable straps as well. There were also adjustments available for the han­dlebar, the seat height, and the seat’s fore and aft position—like the driver’s seat on a modern car. All the crewmen had worked out with this harness and found their favorite adjustments, and a large cue card was created with each person’s numbers. What could possibly go wrong?

A lot. At the lowest workload things went pretty well. But when Paul increased the resistance and pushed harder, the waist belt’s straps began to dig into his thighs, cutting off circulation to the legs. Restrained by the har­ness, he couldn’t rise up off the seat like you do on Earth when you’re ped­aling rapidly. His legs hurt too much to finish the run.

At day’s end, Pete reported to Mission Control that they were still not caught up.

Pete (8:18 p. m.) : “We’ve been running pretty full blower. And all these extra goodies have been coming up. . . . So we need to do some catching up. . . . And it looks like, one of these days, we are going to have to halt for about a couple of hours anyway to gi the place if we’re going to keep it clean.” [“gi” was slang for soldier.]

A little later, he asked Houston to set up a private communication the next day between himself, the flight director, Chris Kraft, and Deke Slay­ton. He said, “It’s not anything other than I want to just talk to them. It’s no emergency or anything like that.” And it wasn’t. Pete just liked direct con­tact with the bosses to make sure they knew we were ok and to give them his slant on the mission. He was a great communicator.

He was good at relaxing too—better in this case than the somewhat har­ried science pilot:

Pete (8:30 p. m.): “Hey, Joe, do you know where the binoculars are?”

Joe: “They were in A-9 last time I looked.”

Pete: “We’re catching up with some satellite down here. You ought to come down and look out the window at it.”

Joe: “I’m busy.”

Pete: “ok.”

Mission Day 5 was the day the Apollo Telescope Mount experiments got

powered up for the first time. Kerwin saw the first beautiful, sharp images from the н-alpha camera, the extreme ultraviolet camera, and the camera that showed continuously what humans had before seen only during rare total eclipses—the solar corona. Still to come were x-ray images. He record­ed video, used the TV downlink to show the ground real-time images, and began the slow process of learning how to use the views to recognize and interpret active regions, to spot flares early in their brief violent lifetimes, and to watch for other solar phenomena. The real solar physicists on Earth envied him this visual feast.

Pete at lunchtime: “Hey, we’re all congregated in the head, all for differ­ent reasons. Why don’t you go ahead and slip us the news?”

Houston did—mostly who was making what speeches on Memorial Day.

This afternoon both Conrad and Kerwin got to tackle the bike and the Lower Body Negative Pressure. Pete tried the hardest—he was determined to come back from this mission in good shape—and his heart rate exceed­ed 180 as he tried to ride his three minutes at 75 percent of maximum. He couldn’t do it, and he experienced a couple of irregular heartbeats—prema­ture ventricular contractions—while he was trying. Kerwin couldn’t do it either. The harness problem was not going to go away; it was time for an onboard campaign to solve it. As to the Lower Body Negative Pressure, the heart rates, and symptoms on both Pete and Joe didn’t look all that differ­ent from preflight—yet.

While the crew was pondering the harness problem, the doctors in Hous­ton were seriously concerned. They had committed to twenty-eight days in orbit—despite the Biosatellite monkey’s fate and the disconcerting death of the cosmonauts — on the basis that exercise tolerance and Lower Body Neg­ative Pressure testing on orbit would show that the crew remained fit and able to deal with reentry and landing. But already the crew seemed unable to reach the desired exercise levels. Conferences were held. The medical peo­ple didn’t see Pete’s irregular heartbeats until Day 8, due to the complexities of getting experiment data sent to the ground and distributed. When they did, their concerns went up another notch.

Meanwhile the crew pressed on. Power conservation still came first.

Pete (7:30 p. m.): “Hey Joe, did you say we can’t use the event timer [on the Apollo Telescope Mount]?”

Joe: “That’s right.”

Pete: “Is that for power considerations only, or is there something wrong with it?”

Joe: “The power.”

Pete: “ok.”

Joe (9:00 p. m.): “Weitz, you left your blower on.” [In the waste manage­ment compartment.]

Paul: “How could I?”

Joe: “Well. . . .”

Paul: “What can I say, dear? I’ll try harder. . . .”

They increased their skill in zero-G operations:

Pete (9:05 p. m.): “We have put to bed, once and for all, the question of ‘Can you run around the water ring lockers?’ I have just made ten trips around the water ring lockers, and the spt has made five; which means he owes Ed Gibson a steak dinner, and Dr. Faget was right.” [Max Faget, the brilliant engineer who had designed the blunt reentry shape of the Com­mand Module, had bet the crew could do it.]

And they began to get personal with the onboard voice recorder:

Joe (10:18 p. m.): “Hey, sweet, lovely в Channel. Your lonely spt, who is hungering for human companionship, would like to report the serial num­bers of the—damn!—tubes for tomorrow’s blood letting.”

Pete and Joe: (Laughter)

At evening status report, Houston gave the crew a thermal forecast.

Houston: “The average internal temperature has shown a 5-degree drop over the last 24 hours. The magnitude of the drop per day is slowing down. . . . There may be a small portion—less than 10% of the parasol that is not doing its job as a radiator. We will probably stabilize out in the neighbor­hood of 80 degrees. . . .”

Pete: “Okay. I know where that 10% is. You can run your hands around the wall and find it real easy.”

Houston: “Be advised—Indianapolis—you guys are going to be overhead at 12:36 Zulu, almost right overhead. That’s 7:36 in the morning local, so if the weather’s clear you ought to be able to look straight down and watch the cars warming up.”

Mission Day 6 began following the first night all three slept in their sleep compartments. They said it was still a little warm, but they slept well and felt spunky. Houston read up the news, including these bits:

And the Texas legislature has voted to restore the death penalty in certain cases

The engagement of Princess Anne, daughter of Queen Elizabeth II, was announced today in England. The Princess will marry a commoner, Cavalry officer Lieutenant Martin Phillips….

Again the Indianapolis yoo was postponed until hopefully this morning.. ..

People in nearby Dallas are concerned with a mysterious ooze called ‘the blob ’ which first appeared about two weeks ago, up through a suburban back yard.

There was going to be good news and some more trouble for Skylab this day. The good news came with the first run of the M131 Vestibular Function experiment at 9:30 a. m.

M131 was not a crew favorite. It was a complex medical experiment designed to explore the function of the balance system in weightlessness. The princi­pal investigator was Dr. Ashton Graybiel of the Navy’s School of Aerospace Medicine in Pensacola, Florida—a distinguished, experienced scientist and a wonderfully gracious gentleman. A couple of times, he even lent his red convertible to crewmembers who’d come to Pensacola for testing.

Several tests were part of M131, and most of them were easy and interest­ing. But one of the tests was designed to find out what happened to people’s susceptibility to motion sickness in space. And to do that, he had to — well, make them sick. The subject would strap himself into a rotating chair and put on a tiny blindfold consisting of two small eye cups on an elastic band (the crew called it “Minnie’s Bra,” referring to Minnie Mouse). Then the observer would start the chair rotating at a rate selected before flight, and the subject would begin to move his head slowly forward and back and side to side at a steady pace. On the ground, this action would result in unpleas­ant symptoms after about seventy head movements. Graybiel had defined a symptom complex called “Malaise ill” — which meant you usually threw up. The crew objected violently to this, and he backed off to “Malaise iia,” which meant pallor, sweating, stomach awareness, then nausea. If you stopped right away you wouldn’t throw up, but it was not fun. Minnie’s bra had to be small so that the observer could detect the subject turning pale.

It was agreed that this was an important test. There’d been quite a bit of motion sickness reported in the Russian space program. (Second crew sci­ence pilot Owen Garriott recalled: “We were told that the Russians were beginning to wonder why only they experienced space sickness, when Amer­icans were apparently immune! There are several reasons, probably related to the volume available for crew mobility, but that’s another story.”) There were also several suspected cases in NASA’s Apollo program, including most notably Apollo 9’s Rusty Schweickart.

The Space Shuttle was already being debated in Congress; it called for an astronaut to land the orbiter manually, a task involving considerable skill; no one wanted to trust it to a motion-sick pilot. NASA was even slightly averse to using the term. The researchers had begun to call it “Space Adaptation Syndrome.” The crew still called it dsms for “Dreaded Space Motion Sick­ness.” And the Skylab crew didn’t want to compromise their safety either. For the first mission, they requested that the commander, Pete Conrad, be excused from the Motion Sickness Susceptibility test. That way he’d always be ready to fly home if an emergency took place aboard Skylab. Management readily agreed, and so did the ever-cooperative Dr. Graybiel.

Today would be the first test. Paul Weitz, the lucky one, was scheduled to be the subject, Kerwin the observer. Paul had not had motion sickness in the first days of the flight, and he didn’t relish getting it now — even though the first series of head movements would be made with no rotation. He passed with flying colors. He made 150 head movements, the maximum allowed, with none of the symptoms of motion sickness. He had some sensation of rotation, “as if my gyros were being tumbled,” but felt fine.

What was going on? On Day 7, Kerwin underwent the test with rotation, (seven and one-half revolutions per minute was his number), and went 150 head movements with no symptoms. It was decided to increase the revolu­tions in steps. On Days 12, 16, 20, and 24, Joe and Paul were tested, until they were spinning at the maximum safe value of thirty revolutions per minute. No symptoms occurred. Both the crew and investigators were amazed. Pete had been let off the hook for nothing. It seemed that in zero-G, once you were adapted, you were immune to space motion sickness. This was pretty good news for the Shuttle program.

The other big Day 6 event was the first “erep Pass.” erep stood for “Earth Resources Experiment Package,” Skylab’s complex of cameras designed to take multispectral, high-resolution, three-dimensional photographs of ground

and ocean locations of scientific interest. The crew would call them “tar­gets,” but some NASA folks thought that sounded too military.

Skylab normally pointed its upper side, and the Apollo Telescope Mount solar experiments, directly at the sun. It retained this attitude on both the day and night sides of the orbit for two reasons: it required minimum fuel, and it also kept the solar panels perpendicular to the sun whenever the spacecraft was in sunlight—for maximum electrical power. Since at that point Skylab had only the Apollo Telescope Mount solar panels, energy was marginal.

What did this have to do with Earth Resources? In order to point those Earth cameras directly at the planet, Skylab had to maneuver out of solar inertial attitude into local vertical. In local vertical mode, the side of Skylab opposite the atm was pointed straight down at the Earth at dawn. Then a gentle pitch rate was begun, which rotated Skylab gently nose down, keep­ing the cameras pointed directly at the Earth for most of one day-side half orbit.

As the locations of interest passed beneath the spacecraft, the various cam­eras would be operated, often in conjunction with low-altitude photography by aircraft and sometimes observations by scientists on the surface. That done, Skylab would rotate back to solar inertial attitude.

The pass was scheduled for between 3:00 and 4:00 p. m. — daylight over the United States. The local vertical maneuver was initiated a little after three, and by 3:30 Pete and Paul were busily photographing sites.

Pete: “Ready—do mode auto.”

Paul: “I found it. How about that? Looking through a little hole in the clouds.”

Pete: “What did you find?”

Paul: “I found the site. . . . Okay. On White Sands and Tracking.”

Skylab sliced rapidly across the United States from northwest to south­east at four miles a second. With a lot of good film in the can, they shut the cameras down and returned to solar inertial attitude about 4:00 p. m. As they did, the crew noticed a battery charge light that shouldn’t have been on. The bad news was about to happen.

Houston (5:40 p. m.): “cdr, Houston. . . Could you do a little favor for us? We’d like to get regulators 6, 7, 8 and 16 off the line.”

Pete: “Okay.”

Houston: “Roger, copy. And also, for information, we’re going to be pow­ering down the epc [the atm’s Experiment Pointing Control system] to con­serve power. And we’ll also be turning down the airlock module’s second­ary coolant loop.”

Pete: “Okay. What’d we do, run lots more [power] than you thought?”

Houston: “Negative. . . but a few of the batteries went down. . . .”

Houston (5:45 p. m.): “Skylab, Houston, we’d like to hold up on the M131 run ’til we get into daylight.”

Paul: “What for, Hank? We’re halfway through the ogi [Oculogyral Illu­sion, one of the vestibular system tests] Mode now.”

Houston: “Well, we’ve got—we’ve got a power problem here.”

They sure did. What had happened was that several batteries reached a state of charge of less than 45 percent during the Earth Resources pass, and their controllers took them off the line—they weren’t recharging. The next hour was spent turning things off and trying to get the batteries to recharge. By 6:50 Houston was able to report, “As we go over the hill here, it looks like the electrical power system is at least stable now. The batter­ies are coming up. So we’ll see you at Vanguard. . . . And Pete, the Indy’s over now. It got stopped by rain in 130 something laps, and Gordy John – cock was the winner.”

Even as NASA strove to keep the fast-paced schedule necessary to meet Ken­nedy’s deadline and beat the Soviet Union, there were those who realized that NASA needed to look past that mandate to the future. Since Apollo was a program with an established and concrete goal, Mueller and others believed that NASA needed to begin thinking about what the agency would do after the moon landing was achieved. In order to keep the space program going after the goal of Apollo was reached, NASA would need to begin planning years in advance to preserve continuity. Any new space program, any new missions, would need years of preparation. However, with around 5 per­cent of the national budget being funneled into NASA at the height of Apol­lo spending, they knew it would be difficult to win approval for another simultaneous space program. Basing that program around already-designed hardware would reduce the funding needed and would also make it easier to win support for the program. In July 1963 NASA headquarters commis­sioned a study by aircraft manufacturer North American Aviation of extend­ed flight possibilities, including modifications to an Apollo Command and Service Module to support longer duration flights, creation of a small work – area module that could be used in connection with the Apollo capsule, and development of an independent laboratory module.

In 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson asked NASA to report to him on its plans for the post-Apollo era. NASA administrator James Webb created a Future Programs Task Group to prepare a response to the president’s request. The group’s conclusion was that the agency should continue studies leading to flying extended Apollo missions by 1968 and continue long-range plan­ning for space stations and human Mars missions in the 1970 s.

While Webb was pleased by the report, others, including many in Con­gress, were not. It was criticized as insufficiently detailed and insufficient­ly ambitious. Mueller worked to address those concerns with the creation in August 1965 of the Saturn-Apollo Applications Program office at NASA headquarters. The office was to take the ideas generated during Extend­ed Apollo research and use those as the foundation for a concrete program, including the development of a space station. The program name was short­ened to the Apollo Applications Program (aap), and the effort to find new uses for lunar-mission hardware began.

Mueller realized that he needed to act quickly to preserve the incredi­ble team that was making it possible to reach the moon. In the latter half of the i960 s, while the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston was still very much in the midst of the Apollo program, many of the engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center were completing their part of the Apollo pro­gram — the mighty Saturn v moon rocket. Unless something could be done to find new tasks for the team, NASA risked beginning to lose the expertise that had made the Saturn boosters possible. As other teams completed their Apollo duties as well, they would be in the same situation. But at Marshall the critical point was already rapidly approaching.

That difference in timetable was to be a key factor in the development of the orbital workshop, according to George Hardy, who was the chief of Pro­gram Engineering and Integration at Marshall and later the center’s direc­tor of operations. “As time went on, and the idea of a follow-on to Apollo came up, I think von Braun and Mueller spent a lot of time together. [The Manned Spacecraft Center] was still busy with the lunar missions, and Mar­shall had pretty much delivered all their hardware, and certainly complet­ed all the development work. And because of that, and I think also because von Braun’s vision of the space station had been there for many, many, many years, Mueller and von Braun sort of collaborated on some of the early con­cepts of what could be done.”

Mueller had one other goal in mind for Apollo Applications. For many within NASA, there was no question what the next major step should be after the flag had been planted on the moon. However, Mueller knew that before a flag could be planted in the red terrain of Mars, there were things that needed to be done. Apollo Applications would be the tool that would provide NASA with the knowledge and experience needed to forge onward to the Red Planet.

“The evolution really started with building something to go to the moon, and then, having built it, what do we do with it besides go to the moon,” Mueller said. “We wanted to really lay the foundation for the future of space activities and really look at whether we can use that hardware to develop an understanding of what the next generation needs. So we looked at almost everything we can do in space. And one of the things that meant was the development of the space station.”

The challenge of building a program around the Apollo equipment was made easier by the great potential that the hardware presented. Three major components made up the Apollo architecture. Of those the Lunar Module was the component most specifically designed for its Apollo task, landing men on the moon. Its thin, lightweight body was not designed for opera­tions on Earth or for flight within the planet’s atmosphere, and its propul­sion system was engineered for the task of landing on and taking off from the surface of the moon. Despite the fact that its design was the most task – focused of the three major components, alternative uses for the Lunar Mod­ule were considered in the Apollo Applications Program.

Also developed specifically for Apollo but more easily lending itself to applications beyond carrying men to the moon was the Command and Ser­vice Module. Though relatively small compared to the American spacecraft that followed it, the Apollo capsule was downright roomy compared to its predecessors, the one-man Mercury vehicle and the two-seat Gemini. In addition to the three couches in which the crew members sat, the spacecraft featured a lower equipment bay that provided room for the astronauts to get out of their seats and move around. Attached to the rear of the Command Module was the cylindrical Service Module, which housed the spacecraft’s primary propulsion system and four “quads” of maneuvering thrusters, each consisting of four thrusters at right angles to each other.

Rounding out these three components was the only one to predate, in concept at least, the Apollo program. More accurately, though, the final item was actually two—the Saturn IB and Saturn v launch vehicles. Work on the Saturn rockets had begun in the late 1950 s, years before Kennedy had issued his challenge to Congress. So rather than designing them specifical­ly to send men to the moon, von Braun had a broader goal in mind for the powerful launch vehicles: these would be the rockets that would open up the solar system for exploration. Mueller knew that the Saturns as well as the other hardware that had been developed for the Apollo program would lend themselves to a variety of applications beyond their original purpose.

Under Apollo Applications, the space station was given a new lease on life. The orbital workshop fit perfectly with several goals of the program. With

its large volume and ability to remain in orbit for an extended period of time, such a workshop would be an ideal test bed for learning more about the effects of long-duration spaceflight and conducting microgravity science experiments. In addition, thanks to a concept that had been floating around NASA for several years, it was an excellent fit for another reason.

Well before Apollo Applications was created to find new uses for the hard­ware developed to go to the moon, that same idea had already occurred to Douglas Aircraft, the contractor responsible for the construction of the s-ivb, used as the upper stage of both the Saturn v and the smaller Saturn IB boost­er. The company suggested that the rocket stage they manufactured could be modified for use as a space station. While NASA would latch onto the Apollo Applications concept as an affordable means of developing new programs, Douglas of course proposed the idea in hopes of increasing business.

“That came from Douglas,” Mueller said. “They were the ones that were pushing that. They had the s-ivb stage, and they were trying to figure out how to use it in the future.” As early as 1959 von Braun had also advocated the spent-stage station concept. Many in the agency, including Mueller, sup­ported the idea, which provided solutions to two major challenges in devel­oping a space station. The proposal not only solved the issue of how to con­struct a facility with a large volume where astronauts could live and work, it also provided a convenient way for launching the structure by integrating it into the booster that would carry it.

The space station would also play an important part in pursuing Muel­ler’s other goal for Apollo Applications, preparing the way to Mars. Muel­ler realized that an immediate post-Apollo manned flight to Mars would be impossible. There was yet too much to be learned before such a mission could be mounted since it would involve astronauts living away from Earth for months or even years. At the end of Apollo, NASA’s longest spaceflight was the fourteen days astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell had spent aboard Gemini 7 in December 1965, a record at the time but extremely brief when compared with the time needed to travel to a neighboring planet. NASA needed two things before it could even consider sending missions to the Red Planet. The agency would have to have long-duration spaceflight experi­ence, and it would need a space transportation infrastructure. A space sta­tion would easily accomplish the former and would lay important ground­work for the latter.

“The decision back then was to get ready to go to Mars,” Mueller said of NASA’s response to a 1964 mandate by President Lyndon B. Johnson that the agency reveal its plans for the future. “All of this was really aimed at eventual Martian spaceflight. That was the real purpose of Skylab—to learn how to live in space for a year. That was really the drive behind Skylab, and really is the drive behind the Space Station. It’s the only reason to build a space sta­tion, as a way-point, or to prove that you can live in space, or to find out how to live in space.” While there were a few voices in the agency that wanted to press on to Mars immediately after Apollo, Mueller said that most realized that the agency would not be ready, that more experience would be needed before that goal would be attainable. “I don’t know if there was any serious talk [of going straight to Mars] anywhere else, but there wasn’t in Manned Space Flight,” he said. “There was a great deal of concern in our scientif­ic community dealing with human life, whether or not man could in fact operate and live and return safely from a trip to Mars. And that was really the incentive for the development of the Skylab program.”

Working in the shadow of Apollo was to have advantages to go along with the disadvantages. The fact that the public and the powers that be were focused on aap’s older and sexier sibling often meant that support, both polit­ical and financial, could be hard to come by. But it also gave those involved in the program an opportunity rare in the world of government projects: the freedom to develop the program the way they felt it should be developed, largely free of bureaucratic involvement.

George Hardy, chief of Program Engineering and Integration at Marshall explained, “I always referred to Skylab initially as the little redheaded bas­tard out behind the barn because there were obvious political overtones to starting a new program. Skylab got started as a utilization of existing hard­ware as opposed to a congressionally endorsed program. That brought it a little more legitimacy, with people recognizing this makes a lot of sense.

“It was an evolutionary thing. It was something talked about, and con­cept studies were done. Compared to the way they do things today—with a lot of formal study, with various contractors competing, with different ideas, which is good, I’m not criticizing that—this was all done principally by the government, by Marshall and msc. Studies were made, but it evolved. I can’t tell you a single time, beyond [one], where there was some official direc­tion. The program just evolved into doing it that way. It was different from programs before that or even programs after that. It was a program that was put together by people that were working on it as opposed to oral direction coming down from on high with a long set of objectives.

“This is somewhat of an exaggeration, but it was almost like, ‘Look, we’ve got all this hardware and stuff here, we ought to figure out something to do with it.’ And of course that’s what they did, but they figured out something to do with it that was quite impressive.

“Once we got a program that was out in the open, so to speak, on Sky – lab, we were able to implement it because it was still not the primary focus of the space program for this country. The lunar landings were still occur­ring, and that obviously was the primary focus. The initial implementation of Skylab was what I felt was an absolute ideal situation. We had support of Mueller and others, the three manned space centers, but at the same time we had a lot of flexibility that other programs didn’t have.”

The next day’s erep pass was canceled. Houston realized that there would be no more full passes until and unless the workshop solar wing was freed. Work on that continued with determination. But morale remained high.

Houston (8:30 p. m.): “. . . One of the things we were wondering is, have you learned to ride the portable fan yet?”

Pete: “No, that’s next. We’ve got to master the front and back flips while running on the water ring lockers.”

Mission Day 7 started out on a relaxed note.

Houston: “Skylab, Houston. I’ve got some sad news in this morning’s paper that the blob is dead. I’m sure that Joe will be glad to hear that. And they killed it with nicotine. (Laughter.)”

Joe: “I’d like to be the blob.”

Houston: “Getting to feel it now, huh?” [Not smoking.]

Joe: “You guys are all going nuts down there.”

Paul: “We’re going nuts up here too; the cdr thinks he can fly.”

Houston: “The Astros won a game yesterday, 4 to 1.”

Joe: “Hurray! Are the Cubs still in first place?”

That morning Pete took the Sound Pressure Level Meter out of stowage and toured Skylab, taking measurements. It was a quiet spacecraft. The lev­els in the workshop averaged between forty-five and fifty decibels. The Mul­tiple Docking Adapter returned a reading of fifty-three (the level of a quiet office), and the noisiest compartment was its aft end, the so-called Struc­tural Transition Section leading into the Airlock Module, where the pumps and fans registered sixty-two.

The other noise characteristic of Skylab was due to its atmospheric pres­sure, five pounds per square inch, one-third of an atmosphere. Maybe you’ve hiked high enough on a mountain to notice that up there where the air is thin, sounds are diminished. Skylab was at the equivalent altitude of Mount McKinley, above twenty thousand feet; the silence was eerie. One had to raise one’s voice to be heard by someone ten feet away. Between the work­shop and the Multiple Docking Adapter voice communication was impos­sible; the crew used speaker/intercom boxes to communicate. The good side was that you could play your own music at, say, the Apollo Telescope Mount control panel (each man had his own cassette tape player) and not interfere with the music down in the medical experiment area, where by agreement the subject got to pick the tape.

All three crewmen tried and tried again during their daily exercise peri­ods to conquer the bicycle ergometer — adjusting the harness tighter or loos­er, changing the angle of the floor straps, raising or lowering the seat. Noth­ing worked. Weitz attempted M171 again on Day 7, but the problem hadn’t been solved.

It was still taking too long to do things; the crew was still behind the timeline. Calibrating the Body Mass Measurement Device had Kerwin an hour and a half behind by noon. Houston wanted Weitz to reinstall an experiment. He said, “Okay. Is that in my flight plan?” Houston said yes and Paul said, “Oh, Okay. I hadn’t read that far ahead yet. I’m still trying to catch up. Sorry.”

Pete expressed their frustration this evening:

Pete (6:30 p. m.): . . You guys are slipping things into the pre and post

sleep activities every day, without adding the time. We’ve already given up shaving in the mornings, and we do it at night after 0300 [ 10:00 p. m.]. And your time estimates for small activation tasks have turned out to be com­pletely wrong. . . . Handovers take time. . . . I had alarm clocks going off in my pocket, and if you’ll look back over my plan, I’ve been whistling all over this spacecraft today.”

Neither crew nor schedulers had yet caught on to the secret. The first time you did something complicated in weightlessness, it took twice as long (or longer) than it had in training. The second time was faster. By the third or fourth repetition, you were back to the preflight estimate. But things were getting better. And the next day was Day 8, the first scheduled “day off.”

Pete (8:13 p. m.): “I would like to add one thing, Dick. I think tomorrow, rather than a day off, it’s going to be a field day. We’ve got an awful lot of cleaning up to do in here.”

Later, Paul had a request. “Say, Dick, awhile ago we asked for the coordi­nates of the Pyramids . . . and tomorrow’s our day off. I’d also like the coor­dinates of Mt. Kilimanjaro, if you can find them.”

Houston said ok and good night.

Pete: “Yes, we’re all shaved and we’re leaving for the party. . . . Good night, Dick!”

Unburdened by medical or solar physics duties, the crew did spend much of Day 8 (Friday, 1 June) cleaning up and restowing. They also did some sightseeing out the window, three noses pressed to the glass, three pairs of legs out in different directions. As an aid to where they were, they had a map of the world marked with latitude and longitude lines and pasted onto both sides of a big piece of stiff cardboard with slick plastic rollers at each end. Stretched over the map was a continuous piece of clear plastic, marked with a curved line representing Skylab’s orbit, inclined fifty degrees to the equator; and on the line, short cross markings at intervals of how far Sky – lab would travel in ten minutes.

On request, Houston would give them the exact time and longitude where Skylab had last crossed the equator from south to north—its ascending node. They’d slide the plastic overlay to match, and following the line from there in ten-minute increments, they’d see where they were and what was ahead. For example, set the slider to cross the equator at 160 degrees west longitude, due south of Hawaii. The orbit line showed that Skylab would cross the U. S. west coast at San Francisco, speed over southern Canada north of Montreal, leave America between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, fly southeast over Spain and right down the African continent out into the Indian Ocean east of the Malagasy Republic, up into the Pacific between Australia and New Zealand, and back close over Hawaii—all in ninety-three minutes.

During that hour and a half, the Earth would have rotated one-and-a- half twenty-fourths of 360 degrees, or twenty-two and a half degrees, which at the equator is about 1,350 miles eastward. So the ground under Skylab’s windows would be different each revolution. So would the time of day, the lighting and the weather—a thousand permutations to look for, and the greatest world tour imaginable. Hundreds of frames of film were used on clouds, ocean, islands, mountains, hometowns.

Paul (11:30 a. m.): “Hey, pass on to the people that we are sure glad we came up with this big Earth slider map we’ve got. It’s been the most used single piece of gear on board.”

But a good deal of thought was also going into a TV special for Houston and America. At ten after two:

Houston: “Skylab, Houston, with you for about fifteen minutes.”

Joe: “Okay. Let us know when you get the picture.”

Houston: “It’s good now.”

Weitz cranked up the volume on his cassette recorder, and the strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss—the theme from the movie 2001—filled the air. Pete, Paul, and Joe floated up from the experiment com­partment into the upper workshop doing their best imitations of swimmer and movie star Esther Williams. They twisted and rolled; they flew from wall to wall; and as the climax of their show they ran around those ring lock­ers in an exercise they dubbed—what else—the “Skylab 500.”

Joe: “Pete’s got a couple of free style maneuvers here. The difficulty of that one was a 1.6. Here’s a 2.2 (laughter). He didn’t get many points for that one. . . that was a new one even on us. That’s it. Can we show you anything?”

Houston: “Story wants to know if you’ve gotten around to a handball game yet.

Joe: “No, not yet.”

Houston: “We’ve just had offers from Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey and Kubrick both, if you can bring that show down to Earth and do it.”

Pete: “Everybody’s adapted super well. We all got to talking about what’s going to happen to us when we get back to Earth, because the first thing we’re going to do is dive out of our beds in the morning and crash on the floor.”

On the afternoon of Day 8, the crew had a surprise call about the stuck solar panel from Deke Slayton, the Mercury astronaut who was the corps’ “big boss.”

Deke: “Okay, Pete, this is Deke. I’m sort of playing the middle man between you and Rusty. He’s over at Marshall trying to work some procedures on this thing, and he has a couple of questions. . . . As a starter we’d like to know if there’s any daylight anywhere between that strap and the beam.”

Pete: “. . . I’d say a half to three-quarters of an inch.”

Deke (after more conversation): “Okay. We’ll keep working the prob­lem down here and keep you advised. You guys are doing great work. Hope you’re having a nice day.”

Pete said they were. It’s always nice when the boss is happy with your work.

Deke: “When you have another spare minute you might pull out that wire bone saw—that’s Rusty’s favorite tool. And try it on something around there; you’d be surprised how well that beauty works. And I guess that’s still his favorite choice to solve your problem.”

Pete: “Okay; we’ll do that. We also talked about the possibility of us put­ting the suits on inside the vehicle and seeing how much purchase we can get on—something around here like a food box, you know. . . and see how well we could hang on. . . .”

Deke said ok and signed off.

The field day gave both crew and Mission Control teams a chance to catch up and apply some lessons learned. At 7:30 p. m. the crew reported that once again, most of the coffee on the menu wasn’t drunk. “Coffee isn’t going over too well in the subtropical climate, you can see,” remarked Paul. Later, Pete had another first to report.

Pete (9:05 p. m.): “We’ve had one through the shower, one in the shower and one waiting for the shower.”

Houston: “What does the one that went through it think of the shower?”

Pete: “He’s clean and sweet and smelling good right now. That’s Com­mander Weitz. [One might notice the crew usually got Weitz to try some­thing first.] And we’ve got Joe in there right now, and we’re timing him to see how long it takes. It takes quite a while to sop the water back up again.”

And so to bed.

Saturday, 2 June, Day 9, was Conrad’s birthday (his forty-third), and he talked briefly with his wife and children that morning.

The crew’s increasing efficiency and Mission Control’s increasing expe­rience with scheduling finally dovetailed; the crew finished on time. In the evening report, Pete said, “There were no flight plan deviations today. And we thought today’s flight plan was excellent.” Did the crew’s performance have anything to do with adaptation? Kerwin thought it did. He remarked, after the flight: “I didn’t get motion sick early, just a little less appetite. But Day 8 was the first time I woke up in the morning and said to myself, ‘I real­ly feel great today.’”

A little extra time for Earth gazing was appreciated:

Pete: “I just got some good pictures of Bermuda with the 300 millime­ter camera for the guys in the tracking stations down there. . . . And it’s a lovely day down there. And with the 300 millimeter, the girls look very nice on the beach.”

Houston: “Come on, Pete, you haven’t been up there that long. Your eyes aren’t that sharp yet.”

Joe: “He even thinks Weitz looks good.”

That evening Houston gave an update on the eva plan. “There’s a big management meeting scheduled on Monday to evaluate all the work that Rusty’s been doing down in the tank and to formulate several options. And we’ll send up the results to you for your evaluation. Then we’ll mutually settle on an eva plan and go from there. There is no eva planned for Tues­day.” Pete said ok. They were getting closer.

One more modest first was recorded that evening:

Pete (10:00 p. m.): “We broke out the first ball tonight about 20 minutes ago. We had a little pitch game going, the three of us. And then we turned it into a kind of football game—ricocheting off the walls and throwing a few passes. So we’re working up a few dynamics and orbital mechanics for the ball.”

Houston: “I can’t say I’ve really got a little bet going, but there has been a discussion going as to whether you can really throw the ball straight the first time. Did you?”

Pete: “Yes, it goes straight as an arrow.”

Houston: “Amazing. We always thought you’d throw it high without the gravity there.”

Sunday, 3 June could truthfully be described as a normal working day in space—with the overtone of increasing attention to the forthcoming eva.

Houston (6:15 a. m.): “Skylab, Houston. Do we happen to have anybody in the area of the STS [Structural Transition Section] panel?”

Joe: “Don’t be coy, Houston. What do you need?” [They wanted a switch position checked.]

Houston (7:20 a. m.): “And for the cdr, I’m informed that you now hold the record for more time in space than any other man around, name­ly Shakey.”

Pete: “Holy Christmas! You mean I finally passed Captain Shakey? I can’t believe it.”

Houston: “I think you’ve got him beat by a long way before this thing’s over.”

Pete: “Send him my regards while he’s off on his tugboat.” [“Shakey” was Jim Lovell, an old friend of Pete’s and commander of Apollo 13.]

At 9:00 a. m. Joe played the Navy “Church Call” from his tape cassette for Houston. And later, he recorded on в Channel his evaluation of hand­holds: “Okay, the Workshop dome and wall handholds are adequate for their jobs, maybe even give them a ‘very good.’ Their job is not to hand­over-hand it—you never do that around this place, unless you are carrying a large package. You ordinarily fly from one location to the next, and all you need when you get there is something to grab onto.” The science pilot was obviously getting used to flying; a couple of weeks later he wrote his wife a poem about it.

On Sunday evening, the Capcom was Story Musgrave, Kerwin’s backup and very good in a spacesuit.

Story: “We’re planning on an eva this coming week to deploy sas panel number one. . . . Next evening we’ll send up some procedures for you and also talk them over with you real time to a limited extent tomorrow. Tuesday evening we’ll have maybe two or three revs [orbits, more or less] discussing the procedures with you, including probably a TV conference. . . .”

Pete: “A TV conference. ok. You guys happy you worked something out over there, huh Story?”

Story: “Yes, it’s looking pretty good. . . . It’s basically a five-pole extension with a cutting tool on the end of it and grabbing hold of the strip on the end of the sas wing, tying down the near end to the fixed airlock shroud, and this will give you an eva trail going out there.”

Pete: “Very good. We aim to please. We’re more than happy to do any­thing we can.”

To make it easier to follow the story as it unfolds, here’s an overview of the eva plan Rusty’s team had developed: Once the airlock’s eva hatch was open, Conrad (outside) and Kerwin (inside) would assemble five five-foot – long aluminum poles into one twenty-five-foot pole—long enough to reach from the nearest accessible point (the A-frame) to the sas cover and the strap that held it down. On the business end of the pole would be a telephone com­pany limb lopper (referred to by the crew as the “cutter”). Two ropes from the cutter’s handles (pulling one closed the jaws, the other opened them) would be strung back along the pole to the near end. Kerwin would egress the airlock and proceed around to the A-frame; Conrad would hand him the pole, then follow him around.

Kerwin would maneuver the pole so that the cutter’s jaws slipped over the offending strap, then pull the right rope to close the jaws. The jaws would bite into the strap but not yet cut it. Kerwin would tie the near end of the pole to a nearby strut, forming an “eva trail” down to the sas. Now Con­rad would move down the pole, hand over hand, until reaching the sas. He would carry another rope, known as the “bet” (short for “beam erection tether”), which had two hooks on its end. Kerwin would hold on to the oth­er end of the bet.

Being careful to avoid cutting his suit on sharp edges, Conrad would fas­ten the two hooks into ventilation openings on the sas, down past its hinge.

2.6. From Skylab’s airlock (A, hidden in this picture behind the Fixed Airlock Shroud, the black band at the far end of the workshop), an EVA—path provided access to the sun end of the atm (B). However, there were no translation aids going toward the solar array (C).

Kerwin would then tie his end of the bet to a beam as tightly as possible, so that it would lie nearly flat along the surface of the ows. Kerwin would close the cutter’s jaws all the way, severing the strap.

Conrad would then wriggle his body between the bet and the workshop surface and “stand up.” Kerwin would try to do the same up at his end. Together they would put tension on the bet, exerting a pull force on the sas beam. The engineers figured it would take a couple hundred pounds of force to break the frozen hinge and free the solar panel.

On Mission Day 11 the crew produced a swing and a miss and a home run. The swing and miss occurred during another Earth Resources pass — not with the full maneuver so as to preserve precious battery charge—but a valu­able pass, and it went well. The only problem was that after the pass, Pete, reading the checklist, told Paul, “Close the S190 window cover.” And Paul

said, “It’s already closed.” And then both of them said, “Oh, dear, [or some word like that] — we forgot to open it.” The S190 experiment included a set of six cameras which used a high-quality optical window. To keep the win­dow pristine, it was protected by a cover at all times except during a pass. On this pass those cameras took photos of the back of the door instead of the Earth.

They immediately confessed to Houston and constructed a new cue card written in big black letters with that and other key steps on it and posted it over the Earth Resources switch panel. Its title was “Skylab 1 erep Dumbs—t Checklist.” They never forgot again.

The home run was the breakthrough on how to ride a bike in space. On Days 9 through 11, the crew perfected the secret to riding the bike. The secret was taking the harness, wrapping it into a bundle, and throwing it away. Then they just hung on and pedaled. The body tended to pitch for­ward because the handlebars didn’t extend back far enough, so some arm fatigue resulted. They found that letting their rear ends float away from the seat and their heads press against a couple of towels duct-taped to the ceil­ing as a headrest helped ease the strain on their arms. And they didn’t actu­ally put the restraint harness down the Trash Airlock. They were tempt­ed but ended up returning it to its stowage locker, where it would come in handy in a different role on the third mission. The breakthrough was com­plete; exercise to full capacity was now possible.

But on the ground, medical management was coming to some very conser­vative decisions. Dr. Chuck Ross, the crew Flight Surgeon said, “The Skylab medical team was conditioned to be concerned about irregular heartbeats in space because of their occurrence on a couple of Apollo missions. On Apol­lo 15 isolated premature ventricular beats had been observed on both lunar surface crewmen [Dave Scott and Jim Irwin], and Jim had had a series of coupled irregular beats during return from the moon. There was little the doctors could do during the flight. Postflight analysis led to the conclusion that loss of fluids and electrolytes during the strenuous lunar surface evas had caused the problem. [There was a suspicion that the men’s habit of tak­ing long runs on the beach before launch had also cost them some elec­trolytes.] Extra potassium was added to the Tang for the next flight [John Young, the commander, complained about the taste] and several drugs were added to the medical kit to treat severe heart rhythm disturbances if they occurred. None did.

“But when, on Day 8, the team saw Pete’s premature ventricular contrac­tions from his Day 5 M171 run, their concern increased. The Skylab 1 med­ical team was headed by Dr. Royce Hawkins, a ‘by the numbers’ man with little tolerance for risk and a stickler for procedure. Dr. Chuck Berry, the chief astronauts’ physician for the Apollo program, had left for a headquar­ters assignment and was not involved day-to-day in Skylab. And the senior physician at jsc, the very well qualified Dr. Larry Dietlein, was ill.

“During the day both Pete and Joe had described the modification to the ergometer to Houston; and Joe recommended letting the crew run the exer­cise experiment again at the flight-plan levels. But Royce decided that he could not risk a serious arrhythmia occurring in an unmonitored crewman during exercise. And he was prepared to give a no-go for the upcoming eva unless he received assurance that the crew could exercise safely. That was the background when I was directed to relay Royce’s decisions to the crew.”

Late on Day 10, the crew had received a teleprinter message directing them to eliminate the top levels on their bicycle ergometer exercise runs. The teleprinter was a typing device with heat-sensitive printing on a three – inch strip of paper that could be up to thirty feet long. Messages arrived every morning with the day’s plan for each crewman, procedural changes, instrument settings, and so forth. And at the Day 11 medical conference, the crew flight surgeon, Dr. Chuck Ross, reluctantly relayed another deci­sion to the crew. From now on, no free exercise was allowed. All use of the ergometer was to be fully instrumented with the twelve-lead electrocardio­gram and had to take place when Skylab was flying over the United States, so that the surgeon could watch the heartbeats in real time. This procedure would make it much harder to schedule exercise and less would be accom­plished, but the doctors were not going to take a chance. And Pete’s per­mission to perform the eva was to be conditional, depending on his ergom­eter run on Day 12.

Conrad took immediate action. He requested another private telecon­ference with Dr. Kraft and told Chris in the most positive terms that the ergometer modifications had solved the problem and the crew had to have free exercise. He got the decision changed, as long as the ergometer run on Day 12 with him as the subject went well. It did. That reversal and its result removed a potential roadblock to the imminent spacewalk and had a lot to do with allowing Skylab 11 and ill to proceed to set new duration records.

Why was Conrad so passionate about exercise? Kerwin explains: “Both before and during the mission, Pete told us the story of his first try at join­ing the astronaut corps, along with the Original Seven. During medical test­ing at the Lovelace Clinic, he received a surgical examination that he con­sidered to be unnecessarily rough and brusque—and called the offending doctor on it that evening at the Kirtland Air Force Base Officers’ Club bar. Pete was disqualified medically from that selection as being ‘not psycholog­ically adapted for long duration space missions.’ He was selected with the second group, and you could say that his subsequent astronaut career had as at least one of its goals to prove that doctor wrong. He wanted Skylab to be a success, and he wanted to walk off that spacecraft after twenty-eight days in good shape. It was, and he did.”

Houston was true to its word. At 9:33 and 25 seconds on Monday evening, Rusty started his discussion. Three sets of data came up that night on the teleprinter while the crew slept, to review Tuesday and a lengthy, detailed discussion took place Tuesday evening. The crew went through a dry run in the workshop Wednesday morning with TV coverage of part of it so they could show their equipment to the folks on the ground and discuss how to use it. Wednesday evening, the crew would start the eva prep, getting all the setup tasks they could out of the way—so that they could get a nice ear­ly start Thursday on the spacewalk. And Rusty assured them that if they needed more time, delaying until Friday was ok too.

Rusty then went into a detailed walk-through of the plan, using a dia­gram of the workshop previously sent up on the teleprinter. The crew most­ly listened. When Rusty got to the part about standing up under the rope to break the damper and pull the beam hinge free, Pete remarked, “ок. I hope it don’t pull too hard, or we’re going to get swatted like by a fly swat­ter.” Rusty replied, “No — we’ve done it a lot, Pete, and it’s kind of fun as a matter of fact. You’ll enjoy watching it come up.”

The astronauts didn’t go outside cold. They had a very detailed discus­sion Tuesday evening with Rusty and Ed Gibson and then stayed up late preparing the equipment. On Wednesday morning, they did an “eva Sim” in the workshop, the best dress rehearsal they could do inside of what they were going to do outside. They cut and spliced lengths of rope, sewed cloth containers (“Pete did the sewing; he was a real sailor,” Kerwin noted), con­nected aluminum poles together with the cutters on one end and a place to tighten the rope on the other. Kerwin put his spacesuit on — minus the hel – met—and practiced moving the twenty-five-foot pole around and grabbing

something with the cutters. (The floor triangle grid was used as a test tar­get.) The dress rehearsal was as they say Broadway dress rehearsals often are—messy and filled with surprises but very productive. They discussed the details on the air to ground.

Joe: “Can we use the discone antenna as a handhold?” [That was a large radio antenna which stuck straight out from the workshop near the astro­nauts’ work area.]

Capcom: “You can put something like—four feet up—forty pounds or so. Okay, we also—I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to practice with the bone saw, but we’ve got identified for you a piece of 7075 aluminum inside, and that was the launch support bracket. Feel free to cut through it. The only precaution is—you want to have a vacuum cleaner sitting right on top of it, so you don’t end up with aluminum chips.”

Pete: “ok.”

Rusty: “Pete, let me continue on the strap. . . after you cut the strap, we expect, because of the frozen damper situation, that the beam may rise about four degrees before you really put any tension in the bet. . . also, a recommendation after cutting the strap and when you get down there to play the human gym pole game, getting under the bet to push up on it. . . it’s very important that when the beam first starts to give, and you can feel it in the bet, you want to slack off so as not to put any additional energy into the beam coming up.”

Pete: “ok.”

Rusty: “Just for safety reasons, it’s a good idea, when you feel something break, to just stand back and let it go.”

Rusty: “We see the doctor getting into his suit. We wonder if he’s going to try to go out today?”

Joe: “No. I want to get a halfway feel for the difficulties of handling that 25-foot pole.”

Rusty: “Okay. We think that’s a good idea, Joe.”

Pete: “Tell me another thing. Just how do you get yourself under the

BET?”

Rusty: “Okay. . . after the beam is free, what you do is, using that rope as a trail, you just move back above the hinge line and just work your way underneath the line. It’s not that tight. There really is no problem. And as soon as you get underneath it, as you begin to raise up, you put compression

on yourself. And so it’s quite natural to be able to stand up and the rope holds you down nicely against the beam fairing.”

Pete: “ok. Now the pin by the discone antenna. If you are looking aft, minus x, the discone antenna is on the right about nine inches away, sitting in an angled channel, isn’t it?”

Rusty: “That’s very good, Pete.”

Pete: “Okay; we can see it from the window — the STS window.” [The Structural Transition Section—the lower portion of the mda—had four small windows.]

Rusty: “Ah, that’s great. We never even thought about that. . . . A pre­caution. . . at the base of the discone antenna there are two coax connec­tors which provide the signal path, and Joe wants to be careful not to mash those connectors.”

Joe: “Okay, about those connectors. It’s obvious that there’s a risk that they’ll be damaged or broken off. . . .”

Rusty: “We recognize that, and all we’re asking for is reasonable prudence on your part, Mr. spt. . . . One thing for you, Pete. The folks down here have looked at the optimum place to put the vise grips on a flange of the pcu [the spacesuit’s Pressure Control Unit in the chest area of the suit]. . . .”

Pete: “Joe and I figured we’d put them on the blue hose.”

Rusty: “Okay. We really didn’t have any use for those vise grips out there, Pete. We figured they were just a pretty generally useful tool. . . .”

Pete: “Yes, we agree.”

And back and forth for nearly three hours. From the transcript, it’s clear that they felt a little skeptical about their chances. Near the end of the sim, Joe said: “That’s right. I guess we’ll know better when we see it, but our ini­tial impression is that we’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of pulling it off. And then even if we don’t, we’ll have a fine reconnaissance for you and some real good words on techniques and possibilities for another try later on.”

Rusty: “Right, that’s just the way we figure it except we’ll give you a high­er probability.”

Pete: “Yes, well. Just let me caution you. There is no doubt in my mind, as you mentioned, that we could get involved like we did in Gemini 11. And if we do a lot of flailing around out there, I’m sure that we can run out of gas pretty easy. So I think you’d better figure if we’re unsuccessful in the first

hour and a half we’re probably not going to get the job done. . . but we’ll give her a go tomorrow. I’m pretty sure we understand everything. We’re going back and smoke them over and talk about it some more. And I think the biggest thing depends on Joe being able to get the pole hooked on to something. There’s number one, and two—either cutting it or me cutting it or however that works. And let’s hope there isn’t something else holding it besides that strap.”

Rusty: “Yes, sir. . . .”

The day proceeded with normal activities, eva preps and last-minute decisions. Pete decided not to try bringing the TV camera outside on the eva—too much complexity, another long cable to contend with. (As a result, there are no good pictures of the eva.) The doctors on the ground let Ker – win take the night off from wearing his electroencephalograph sleep cap, so he’d get a good night’s sleep before the eva. Everybody— on Skylab and in Mission Control—went over all the checklists one more time with the usual last-minute changes. Pete’s comment: “You got 500 guys down there keeping three of us busy.” And a little later: “It’s like the night before Christ­mas up here. The suits are hung by the fireplace with their pcus in place, just waiting to go.”

Power was important. The additional power load imposed by the eva had to be balanced by turning things off. Here’s how Houston summed it up:

Houston: “And all this [the shutoffs] comes to 1,100 watts. And then the things that are required for your eva—all your lights, sus [Suit Umbilical System] pumps, tape recorder and converter, primary coolant loop and pcu power, comes out to about 887, and then vtr [videotape recorder] is anoth­er 125 for a total of 1,012.”

Joe (petulantly): “ok. We noticed that little note not to use the food heat­ers for lunch tomorrow. I’ll have you know that we’ve only been using the food heaters for one food each day, and that’s the evening frozen item.”

And here’s a sample of the news for that day, 6 June, as read up to the crew by Capcom:

I’ll start off by saying on this day in history, 1944, we landed in Normandy. Pres­ident Nixon’s made several new appointments this week. . . . General Alexan­der Haig will retire from the Army to become Nixon’s assistant in charge of the

White House staff. Haig, as you recall, was former assistant to Henry Kissing­er. . . . Vice President Spiro Agnew spoke to the U. S. Governors at the Nation­al Governors Conference at Stateline, Nevada. Agnew told the audience that he was ‘available for consultation.’… In Paris, Henry Kissinger resumed secret talks with Le Duc Tho, Politburo member from Hanoi. The two representatives are seeking ways to halt continued violations ofthe ceasefire in Viet Nam. The Senate Watergate hearings continue to be televised during the daylight hours. .

.. A bill has passed the House to raise the minimum wage from $1.60 an hour to $2.20 an hour next year…. Brigette Bardot announced that she will retire from film making. “I have had enough,"she was quoted as saying. Some baseball scores from yesterday: Philadelphia 4, Houston 0, Dodgers 10, Chicago 1. . . .

Talking about Watergate on the air-to-ground was a sensitive business for the Capcoms. Weitz said, “Good sense of proportion. Good night, you all.”

“The day of the crucial spacewalk dawned bright and clear,” according to Kerwin. “But since we had a bright, clear dawn approximately every ninety – three minutes in Skylab, there was nothing special about the way this one looked. There was a slight air of unreality again—sort of like launch day; you know what to do, but you don’t know what’s going to happen. Both the spacecraft and the control room were quiet and businesslike. There wasn’t any hurry. We had the checklists and were methodically working them off, staying a half hour early.”

Pete: “Houston, CDR.”

Houston: “Go ahead.”

Pete: “Oh my gosh, is this Rusty?”

Rusty: “That’s affirmative.”

Pete: “You better give us—what’s the earliest time we can start, Rusty?”

Rusty: “Okay. You’ve got a sunset right around 1410. Hold on, I’ll get an exact time.”

Pete: “Okay. I’m not sure that we’ll make that but there’s—we’ve kind of got a leg up on things and just depends how fast it goes. Otherwise we’ll cool it to the right time.”

Rusty: “Okay, we understand. And we’re sort of semi-prepared for that. Let me give you an exact time here, Pete. Okay. The prior sunset time is about 1403. And Pete, for positive id purposes we’d like just a word of con­firmation that you’ll be playing the role of ev-i today and that Dr. Kerwin will be playing the role of ev-2.”

Pete: “That’s Charlie.” [Playing off the commonly used “Roger” confirmation.]

Rusty: “Charlie, Pete Conrad.”

The crew didn’t make the one-rev-early start time for the eva; there were problems with the coolant loops aboard Skylab that kept Paul occupied and held the two eva astronauts back. But they had time.

Joe Kerwin said, “Paul helped us don the suits. It seemed harder than usu­al to get snugged in and the zipper zipped. On the ground we were usually able to zip it ourselves; up here much pulling and tugging was required. It wasn’t till much later that Dr. Thornton explained to us we’d grown a cou­ple of inches taller.

“Helmets and gloves were secured with a series of satisfying clicks, and checked. The oxygen we were now breathing smelt cold, metallic, and good. Moving to the airlock had been a terrifyingly clumsy task when we practiced it in the big Huntsville water tank. Here it was easy, pleasant, a cakewalk. We’d pulled our long umbilicals out of their storage spheres in the airlock, ‘down’ to the workshop where the suits were stowed for donning. Now we carefully pulled the excess behind us as we floated ‘up’ and in; everything had to fit in those tight quarters.”

Paul went ahead of them. The Skylab airlock was right in the middle of the cluster’s layout. Aft was a hatch into the main workshop; forward were the Multiple Docking Adapter and, right on the end, their Apollo Com­mand Service Module taxicab. Paul had to move to the forward side of the airlock; once it was depressurized there’d be a vacuum between the work­shop and the safety of the Apollo, and no way for him to cross it. Before he left his two crewmates, he made sure they had all the gear they’d need: pole sections, cable cutters, ropes, and spare tethers. Gray-taped to the front of Joe’s suit was Rusty’s favorite tool, the wire bone saw from the dental kit in its cloth container, just in case. Suit integrity checks were performed, and at a quarter past ten it was time to get on with it. It was Pete’s prerogative to open the depressurization valve and let the air out of the airlock. Even that wasn’t routine:

27. A rare photograph from the solar array deployment spacewalk.

Pete: “Houston, you may be interested in knowing that on the airlock dump valve, a large block of ice is growing, on the screen [a small mesh screen to keep debris out of the depressurization valve].”

Houston: “That on the inside, Pete, or on the outside?”

Pete: “On the inside. Must have enough moisture in the air, Rusty, that as it hit the screen, it froze. That’s what’s making the lock take so long to dump down.”

Pete finally scraped off some of the ice with his wrist tether hook, the air­lock got down to 0.2 psi, and the hatch was opened at twenty-three min­utes after ten.

Pete went out first and got his boots into the foot restraints just outside the hatch. Joe started assembling the twenty-five-foot pole, pushing it out

to Pete as he did so. At 10:47 Houston was back in communication, and Pete gave them a status report: “We have five poles rigged swinging on the hook. And we’re just intrepidly peering around out here deciding how far around Joe can get in the dark. Now, the pole assembly went super slick. I had a lit­tle juggling problem getting the last longie with the tool on it. . . but she’s all rigged and ready to go hanging on the hook here.”

Inside Paul was having trouble getting a source of cooling water to his suit. (He was suited just in case Pete and Joe, when finished and back inside, couldn’t close the hatch.)

Paul: “Hey, Pete?” [To Don Peterson, the Capcom.]

Don: “Go ahead, Paul.”

Paul: “Yes, I’m ready to start working on getting some cooling water, if you think you got a way.”

Don: “ok, P. J., we do have a way to do that for you. Are you ready to copy?”

Paul (who is suited, helmet off): “No, I’m not. Can you just tell me?”

Don: “Yes, okay, forget that. Are you ready to listen?”

Paul: “Yes.”

But, outside, Pete and Joe were admiring the view.

Pete: “Look, there’s half a moon—”

Joe: “You can see the lights, you can see the moonlight on the clouds.”

Pete: “Oh, I can see the cities, yes.”

Joe: “Horizon to horizon.”

Don: “Hey, can you guys stop lollygagging for just a minute so we can get a word to Paul?”

The next ten minutes were a medley of Pete and Joe pulling out fifty-five feet of umbilical for each and solving the resulting tangles, interspersed with Paul talking to Houston about cooling pumps.

The route to the solar panel was uncharted territory. To get there, the crew­men would have to move underneath the Apollo Telescope Mount struts to reach a point at the edge of the Fixed Airlock Shroud where those struts were anchored, a point the crew called the “A-frame.” From there they could look straight aft at the stuck Solar Panel 1. And that was as close as they could get. There were no handholds, no lighting, no eva accessories out there.

Pete: “I tell you, you’re going to get worn out doing the things that require you to go there. Do it. Well, that’s a big snarl down there. I hope it all comes out right.”

Joe: “Now I suggest you take that loop in your hand and put it up over your head.”

Pete: “No. How did we do that? . . . Okay. That all right?”

Joe: “Yes. And it all goes behind you.”

Houston: “Joe, are you going through the trusses or up over the top? You should be going through them.”

Joe: “Through, through. I’m right on the mda surface.”

Houston: “ok.”

Joe: “I’m looking at Paul through the window right now. The other win­dow, Paul. Hi there. I’ve got one hand on the handrail, one hand on the vent duct, and I’m looking at the discone antenna.”

Pete: “Do you see the pin?”

Joe: “I’ll tell you—no, the base of the antenna is pretty dark.”

Houston: “The next thing you’ll be doing when you get enough light is to go up and hook your chest tether into the pin.”

Joe: “Understand.”

Houston: “And for your information, you’ve got seven minutes to sunrise.”

Skylab sailed out of communications range at eleven minutes past eleven. When Houston regained contact over the United States at nearly 11:30, Pete and Joe were well into daylight. Their struggle with the aluminum strap, the twenty-five-foot pole, and Newton’s third law had begun.

Getting into position had been easy. Kerwin was floating beside the dis­cone antenna, loosely tethered to the pin at its base (an eye bolt shaped like an upside-down u). He held the twenty-five-foot pole in both hands and had it pointed aft, right down the left edge of the Solar Array System, with the cutter’s jaws tantalizingly close to the plainly visible villain of the piece, the aluminum strap. Conrad was just above and behind Kerwin, holding with one hand to one of the sturdy beams that supported the Apollo Telescope Mount. All Kerwin had to do was move the jaws (each about four inches long) over the strap and clamp them tight.

When Houston came back into communications range over the United States fifteen minutes later, Conrad and Kerwin were still struggling. Here are some excerpts:

Pete: “Okay, Houston, we’re out there. We have the debris in sight. There looks like enough room to get the cutter in, and I’m trying to help Joe sta­bilize. And Joe, you’re way past it, it looks like.”

Joe: “I don’t think I am.”

Pete: “Yes you are. Come—come towards me.”

Joe: “. . . See, I’ve got it tethered, and that prevents me—”

Pete: “You’re battling the tether. [The tether securing the pole to the structure, to prevent them losing it if they lost their grip.] . . . I’ll re-tether it for you. Can you hold the pole?”

Joe: “I’ve got the pole.”

Pete: “Got it. Now you’re in business.”

Joe: “I’ll tell you, holding that on there is going to be a chore. Goldang it. Wait a minute. . . . If you could hold one foot, man, I could use both hands on this.” [Whenever NASA uses a word like “goldang” in an official tran­script, the actual word used may have been a different one.]

Rusty: “Okay, we’re reading you. Understand you’re having trouble main­taining your position in order to hook it on the strap. Can you give us a lit­tle more detail?”

Pete: “. . . We’re working the problem. Bunch of wires in the way. Gosh, that prevented you from getting it that time.”

Rusty: “Okay. The only thing I can say is that in the water tank we stood almost parallel with the discone with our feet down by the base, and used the discone as a handhold.”

Joe: “Yes, I’m doing that. It’s not a handhold I need, Rusty, it’s a foothold.”

Pete: “I tell you, Rusty, it looks like if we ever get it on the strap we’ve got it made. Because I can see the rest of the meteoroid panel, and most of it’s underneath and looks relatively clear.”

The pair kept on struggling. But when Houston went out of contact at 11:44, they still hadn’t clamped the strap. They called a halt for rest and thinking. And while he was resting, Kerwin looked down at the base of the discone antenna, at the eye bolt where his chest tether was fastened. And he had an idea.

The chest tether was six feet long and adjustable. Kerwin said, “What if I just double the tether? Instead of hooking it on the eye bolt, I run it through the eye bolt and back to my chest? And tighten it a little so I can stand up against the tension, sort of a three-legged chair, two feet and the tether?”

Pete helped run the tether through; Joe clicked it onto the ring on his chest and stood up. He was as stable as a rock. Three minutes later the jaws were closed on the strap. Houston came back at 11:54.

Rusty: “Skylab, Houston, we’ve got you through Vanguard here. Sounds like you got it hooked on somewhere.”

Pete: “Yes we do, and now all we’re trying to do is straighten out the umbilical mess before I go out.”

Rusty: “Great.”

Pete: “I don’t think we’ll have to move the cutter. We’ve got it in the thin­nest spot. All right, you ready?”

Joe stabilized the pole and Pete went out hand over hand, his legs out sideways to the left, his end of the Beam Erection Tether tethered to his right wrist.

Pete: “Let it come over the end first. Don’t pull it all loose. That a boy. Bye.”

Joe: “Take your time; I want to feed this rope behind you.”

Pete: “I’m going to tighten the nuts on these pole sections on the way. . . . Every single one of them has backed off.” And there was a lot of straighten­ing of umbilicals. Houston unfortunately was going out of communications range again—with things looking up, but the issue still in doubt.

Rusty: “Okay. . . we’re going to have an hour dropout before we pick you up again at Goldstone. That’ll be at 1803 [three minutes after one Hous­ton time.] And you have about thirteen minutes of daylight left. And no big sweat.”

For a moment it appeared Pete’s umbilical, now pulled out to its full sixty feet, wasn’t long enough. But he and Joe straightened it out and it was. Pete could only get one of the two hooks on the bet fastened to the Solar Array System beam; the opening for the other was just too far away to reach. Joe tightened and tied the near end of the bet; it now stretched from the hook on the sas beam to the A-frame strut. Pete carefully inspected the jaws of the cutter; they were perfectly positioned.

Now Joe positioned his body parallel to the pole and pulled on the jaw­

closing rope with all his might. The jaws closed, the strap was cut, and Pete was a bit startled as the sas beam jumped out a few inches, then stopped. This was just as predicted. Pete inspected the area; the beam was free, the damper was frozen, and the hinge would have to be pulled open.

Pete carefully backed away, six feet or so toward Joe. Carefully, the umbil – icals were pulled back and straightened, with care to make sure that one didn’t get pinched. Carefully, both men moved their bodies under the bet, feet toward the solar panel, face toward the workshop surface.

Kerwin recalled, “Pete gave the word and we both pushed away with our hands and got our feet under us. We pushed and straightened up. Sudden­ly —I almost remember hearing a ‘pop,’ but I know I couldn’t have heard one. I guess I felt the pop. The rope was loose, and we were free in space, tumbling head over heels and floating away. Then I got hold of my umbili­cal, and pulled myself back down till I could grab a strut and turn around. And so did Pete. And we saw the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen—well, almost. That solar panel cover was fully upright—ninety degrees from the workshop — and steady — and you could see the three solar panels inside it beginning to unfold. Touchdown! When I think about it now, thirty years later, I can still feel that glow.”

Rusty (three minutes after one): “Hello there. We’re listening to you. You’re coming in loud and clear. And we see sas amps.”

Pete: “All right. I’ll tell you where we are. We’ve got the wing out and locked, the outboard panel and the middle panel are out about the same amount, and the third one is not quite. Got the main job done.”

Conrad and Kerwin spent quite a while inspecting the area, tidying up their ropes and discussing everything with Houston. Back at the hatch, they stopped to push Pete’s umbilical back into its sphere inside the air­lock —about the most physical work they’d done on the eva. Then Joe got a reward. He got to move up the eva trail to the sun end of the Apollo Tele­scope Mount to inspect the doors, pin one open, and replace film in one of the cameras. It was a treat to work where handholds and footholds were plentiful—and a real treat to stand up above the atm with sun overhead and the Earth spread out below, beautiful as ever, its roundness apparent. It was a “king of the hill” feeling.

The hatch was closed a little under four hours after egress.

Rusty: “Okay, I got some good news for you. First of all, everybody down here is shaking hands, and we wish we could reach up there and shake yours. That was a dandy job and everybody was very pleased. And secondly, we’re saying press on with the normal Post eva Checklist where it says ‘eat.’ Go ahead and have a nice one and just cool it.”

Pete: “Yes, roger. When we have time this afternoon we’ll debrief the eva. I can tell you where the differences are between the water tank and up here. That’s why it took us longer.”

Rusty: “You got the job done. We don’t care.”

Pete: “Well, we got the job done only for one reason, and that’s because Joe asked for the end of the long tether to double it up to get himself anchored. If he hadn’t been able to anchor himself we wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

Later in the afternoon, this exchange took place.

Houston: “Skylab, Houston, how do you read?”

Joe: “Well, the plt is shaving and the cdr went by and said, ‘You’ve been a good boy this week, Paul; you can have the Command Module tonight.’” [The orbital equivalent of a paternal loan of an automobile to reward a teen­age son.]

Houston: “Roger, copy. Everyone listening up?”

Paul: “Yes.”

Houston: “Okay, I got a message I’d like to read up to you. It’s to Sky – lab Commander Conrad. ‘On behalf of the American people, I congratu­late and commend you and your crew on the successful effort to repair the world’s first true space station. In the two weeks since you left the Earth, you have more than fulfilled the prophecy of your parting words, ‘We can fix anything.’ All of us have a new courage now that man can work in space to control his environment, improve his circumstances and exert his will, even as he does on Earth. Signed, Richard Nixon.’”

And that is one of the legacies of Skylab.

The crew thought their day was over, but it wasn’t. At about 8:oo p. m., when they were doing final cleanup chores and looking out the window, Houston had cheerful news: “We’re showing them [the solar panels] all three ioo percent, and we’re starting to command you back to solar iner­tial at this time.”

But an hour later, there was this call:

Houston: “Okay, let me get with you guys on a problem we’ve been watch­ing here, which is the secondary coolant loop. [It] got very cool during your eva, and we can’t seem to get the devil warmed back up. . . . As you know, the primary loop we can’t use because of the stuck valve. . . what we’re look­ing into now is what critical items we can turn off tonight so that we don’t have to be waking you up.”

The crew rogered, and signed off as usual at about 10:00 p. m. The men were tired. There wasn’t much window gazing this night, just quick trips to the bathroom and a few minutes’ reading in “bed.”

But they were just getting into deep sleep when Houston was back.

Houston: “Hey, sorry to bother you guys, but this coolant loop is getting away from us. It’s down to two degrees below freezing now. And we’re going to have to get you up and work on it until we can get the thing warmed up. . . . It may freeze up in the condensing heat exchanger, and that’s an intol­erable situation. Sorry to do this to you guys. . . .”

Pete: “No, we want to keep the show running, pal. Don’t worry about that.”

It was an ironic situation; in a spacecraft plagued by heat, an essential system was threatening to freeze. And what saved the situation were those warm workshop walls that the parasol didn’t quite cover.

Here’s what was happening. The airlock coolant loop consisted of two cir­culating “loops” of fluid driven by pumps. In the interior loop the fluid was water. It flowed through pipes in metal “cold plates” to which electrically pow­ered devices were attached, cooling them, and during spacewalks, through the eva umbilicals to the crew’s suits and into plastic tubes in their under­garments. After being warmed by the astronaut’s bodies, it flowed through a heat exchanger where its channels were in contact with those of the exterior loop. The exterior loop contained a water/glycol mixture, antifreeze, with a low freezing point. It warmed up in the heat exchanger, taking heat from the water, then radiated the heat to space in an external radiator.

The problem was that the airlock and Multiple Docking Adapter had been cold throughout the mission, and much of the electrical equipment had been turned off because of the power shortage. When Pete and Paul did their spacewalk even more equipment had been turned off, enough to cool

the loop further despite the heat transferred from the astronauts. The exter­nal loop’s temperature dropped dangerously. If it dropped below the freez­ing point of water, the glycol wouldn’t freeze but the water would, ruptur­ing the heat exchanger and making the loop inoperative.

The crew scurried into the workshop, found umbilicals and two of the liquid cooling garments (lcgs) normally worn under their spacesuits to cir­culate cold water around their bodies and hooked them into the coolant loop. Then they taped the lcgs to the warmest part of the workshop wall they could find, near Water Tank i. They turned on the pumps, flowing water into the loop, warming it. They covered the lcgs with clothing to prevent heat from being lost into the atmosphere. They and Houston pow­ered up every piece of equipment on that loop. They were thankful for the power newly available.

And it worked. Temperature at the heat exchanger rose to forty-one degrees in just under an hour. The crew stayed up until midnight, to make sure Houston had it under control, then went back to sleep, weariness mixed with relief. Houston promised not to wake them until 8:oo a. m.

The coolant loop emergency marked the transition between the first and second halves of the Skylab I mission. With reveille on Day 15, both crew and team were relaxed and confident, schooled in their roles and determined to “get back on the timeline.”

Systems were powered up. There was hot water for the coffee. Hot show­ers began to appear on the flight plan (but only once a week). Skylab talked to Houston about the possibility of scheduling another spacewalk to erect a better sunshade, the so-called “Marshall Sail.” They decided to leave that to the second mission; but the crew unanimously made the decision to sub­stitute Weitz for Kerwin for the end-of-mission film retrieval eva on Day 26. All three had trained, and spreading the experience around would be good for the astronaut cadre.

Suddenly it was the second half of man’s longest space mission; every­one was now thinking ahead to its conclusion. Houston negotiated a plan to shift the crew’s workday several hours earlier, starting with Day 21. The big shift was made necessary by a nominal landing at dawn in the Pacific, and crew and ground agreed it would be easier to take it in little steps. The steps weren’t that little. They shifted earlier by two hours on Mission Days 21 and 22, then by four and a half hours on Day 28, their last night aboard

Skylab. Pete and Paul each took a Dalmane sleeping pill that “night,” but nobody got much sleep.

Days settled into a routine. Had there been a murder on Skylab, and had Hercule Poirot wanted to check everyone’s whereabouts on the crucial day, he’d need only to refer to the air-to-ground conversations and the telemetry data showing what was on or off. Medical experiments were “down below,” and the subject got to pick which music tape to play. More busy passes at the atm, including usually an evening pass. Earth Resources passes dai­ly for six straight days. Somehow the crew started keeping up and getting ahead. On Day 17, Pete actually settled into his sleep compartment at 9:30 with a book. “Yes,” he told Houston, “We ran out of things to do.” Hous­ton answered, “You better be careful, Pete. I saw three guys reach for 482s [a task form] down here to start scheduling.”

They began to look for activities not in the flight plan.

Kerwin, on Day 18: “I have my hobby up here. I have my do-it-yourself real doctor kit. Right now I’m staining slides.”

Conrad: “He’s working on my throat culture or something.”

Pete invented new games involving the blue rubber ball.

Pete: “We’re working on a new game up here, Houston. It’s called ‘get the rubber ball back to you.’ Try it off the water ring lockers first.”

Houston: “Which ball you using, Pete?”

Pete: “The blue rubber one, but—it gives up energy awful fast. It kind of poops out after four or five bounces. What we really need is one of those super balls.”

Paul, on Day 19: “Roger, Houston. We’re pretty busy right now. The cdr is trying to break the plt’s world record of thirteen bounces around the ring lockers. . . . Don’t ask for the rules. It’s extremely complicated, involves orbit­al mechanics and everything.”

Houston: “Just be sure it’s only the world’s record that you break.”

On the evening of Mission Day 22, the crew gathered around the ward­room table for ice cream and strawberries around bedtime, and somebody said, “It’s been Day Twenty-two up here forever!” Now that routine had taken over, just a little boredom had crept in. They were starting to think about coming home.

The very next day, Houston discussed with the crew the possibility of their staying aboard one extra week, to complete additional experiment runs. Of course Conrad said, “You betcha, Houston—we’re ready!” But all three were just a bit relieved when the idea was dropped, as NASA gained confi­dence that the second and third missions would take place. This crew was ready to smell the sea air.

As the flight went on, Pete developed an unfortunate addiction to the butter cookies. He was exercising hard and needed the extra calories. And the butter cookies were “homemade” — done in a NASA kitchen to the recipe of Rita Rapp, a wonderful food system specialist. It got so bad that on Day 23 he asked Houston specifically to assure that there were plenty of butter cookies aboard Ticonderoga, the recovery aircraft carrier.

One evening the three decided to check out what it felt like to navigate around a big spacecraft in absolute darkness. They turned off every light in the workshop and covered the big wardroom window, then waited for the spacecraft to fly into night.

“It was really different!” Kerwin recalled. “I never had a sensation of fall­ing till we did that. But you were absolutely clueless about where you were and where anything else was. It was scary. I just clutched my handhold and didn’t want to move. It was my first real sensation of fear in space. And oth­ers have reported similar feelings. I remember Ken Mattingly talking about emerging from the Command Module hatch on the way home from the moon on Apollo 16, to retrieve film from a camera in the Service Module. Neither the Earth nor the moon was in sight; space looked like an infinite­ly deep black hole. He just wanted to hold on to something.”

All three crewmen had their twentieth college reunions going on. All of them asked that greetings be relayed to their classmates.

Most evenings the Capcom would have time after the evening report to give the crew a brief news report. There was plenty of unrest on planet Earth:

Houston: “The Texas wheat crop is expected to be the third largest in his­tory, but it’s in danger because of our fuel crisis. . . . They’re limiting gas at lots of places to ten gallons per fill-up. . . . Nixon is proposing a new Cabinet level Department of Energy and Resources. . . . There was a partial brown­out of all Federal Buildings in Washington DC. . . . Nixon has established a price freeze for sixty days, and is considering a profit rollback. The markets didn’t like it; the dollar was down and gold was up.”

“There were seven inches of rain in Houston yesterday. . . . Dr. Kraft [the

28. Kerwin performs a medical examination of Conrad.

center director, who lived a few miles west of the center in Friendswood] is spending the night at the Nassau Bay Motel.

“President Sadat visited Libya to discuss the planned merger of Egypt and Libya. . . . General Francisco Franco, now 80 and ruler of Spain for 35 years, is turning part of his duties over. . . . The war in Viet Nam may be nearing an end. . . .”

“A Soviet TU-144 crashed at the Paris Air Show yesterday. There were many deaths. . . .”

“In case you’re going to South Padre Island, Texas, they have just elected a new sheriff who’s a 27-year-old redheaded mother of two. She says, ‘I’m a mean redhead, and if they ever call me ‘pig’ they had better be careful.’”

Paul: “I think we’ll stay up here, Houston.”

Houston: “Come to think of it, maybe you people are well off where you are.”

Also on Day 22, there was “The Flare.” For days, the sun had been tan­talizing the crew with hints of increased activity. The crew got daily brief­ings on what was happening. They sounded like this: “Active Region 37 has rotated onto the disc. . . as a large spot group. And we had a subnormal flare there which began at 8:35. . . .”

The briefers hoped to alert the Apollo Telescope Mount operators (and all three crewmen shared that duty) to where a flare might occur. It was the Holy Grail of solar physics to capture a flare—especially the first crucial minutes of rise—with the variety of instruments onboard Skylab. It would be histor­ic data. Each of the Skylab solar experiments had its own team of investiga­tors. But since just one astronaut would operate all of them during a single fifty-minute sunrise-to-sunset “pass,” the investigators had gotten together to plan a large number of Joint Observing Programs—jops—designed to handle all their various data needs during all levels of solar activity. And the granddaddy of jops was the infamous jop 13, the routine for a solar flare. It required quickly and accurately pointing the Apollo Telescope Mount can­ister straight at the flare, then activating all the cameras in high speed mode with correct settings. It took lots of photographs; film was flying through the cameras. jop 13 was not to be used lightly—scientists wanted desperate­ly to get a flare, but nobody wanted to waste film on a false alarm.

How could there be a false alarm? The views and instrument readings that the crew had available had never been used this way before, so the “sig­nature” of the beginning of a real flare wasn’t known. As the mission pro­gressed, it seemed that the best clue to a real flare was going to be an increase in x-ray intensity measured by one of the two x-ray telescopes. But anoth­er phenomenon also caused the x-ray count to increase—a trip through the South Atlantic Anomaly.

One of the first discoveries ever made by an orbiting spacecraft was made by Dr. James Van Allen, using data from a simple Geiger counter on Amer­ica’s first satellite, Explorer 1. He discovered two “belts” of solar radiation trapped above the Earth by its magnetic field. The inner Van Allen belt con­sisted of energetic (and dangerous) protons. Its center was about one thou­sand miles up, but at one point, just east of the southern end of South Amer­ica, it dipped close to the atmosphere. That is the South Atlantic Anomaly. And Skylab passed right through it, not on every revolution, but a few times each day. For example:

Pete (on Day 18): “I have an in and out on the flare there, Houston; 650.” [A reading of 650 on the proportional counter.]

Pete (a minute later): “Want us to go after the flare, Houston? It’s 690, 700.”

Houston (after checking): “Pete, you’re in the Anomaly right now, and that’s the reason you’re getting the flare indication. So, we do not want you to press with a flare jop.”

Paul: “Hey, Houston, I think you guys have got to put those . . . anomaly passes, all of them, on our pads. If that ever happens out of station contact, we’re going to come over the hill minus about 300 frames of film.”

Finally, on Day 22, they got lucky. At eight minutes after nine, Houston advised the crew that a “subnormal flare” had started in Active Region 31. Paul was on the atm console. Thirteen minutes later, Kerwin called back:

Joe: “Houston, Skylab. I’d like you to be the first to know that the plt is the proud father of a genuine flare. . . . Just about the time you called, he got a high count. And this time it was confirmed by image intensity count over 300, by a bright spot in the x-ray image, and a very bright spot on the xuv monitor. He found the flare in Active Region 31, a factor of ten bright­er than anything we’ve seen. In other words, it was unmistakable once it happened.”

Paul got about two minutes of flare rise, surrounded by his crewmates, who had dropped everything when he called. Subsequent crews did much better; but they had the first one, and were “proud as new daddies,” as Paul put it.

Pete and Paul, the operators of the Earth Resources Experiment Pack­age, became increasingly skilled at finding and photographing Earth “tar­gets,” even through pretty extensive cloud cover.

Paul: “For information, it’s hard looking out at 45 degrees forward. You look through a lot of atmosphere. It’s hard to see detail. . . . and I got Fort Cobb, and the reservoir. . . . Okay, for special 01, all you’re getting is clouds so far. . . very low sun angle clouds; It’s like a scene from a biblical movie just before the heavens open up.”

Joe: “It’s going to break up in a minute over Lake Michigan.”

Besides doing the scientific erep passes, all the crewmen loved taking pictures of the world. They got pretty good at recognizing continents and islands—not perfect, but pretty good.

Houston: “Skylab, Houston with you for six minutes through Honeysuckle.”

Pete: “We’re just coming up on New Zealand. I think I’ll get some pret­ty good pictures this pass.”

Houston: “You’re sure that’s not Puerto Rico?”

Pete: “You said Honeysuckle before I said New Zealand.”

Houston: “Okay.”

Honeysuckle Creek was the tracking station in the beautiful hills south of Canberra, Australia, occupied by a few kangaroos. It’s closed now and very peaceful. Pete knew he was nowhere near Puerto Rico.

Each man had his favorites. Pete loved to photograph Pacific atolls; Paul favored the Great Lakes, the Rockies, and Australia and New Zealand; and Joe specialized in the Rockies and Chicago, his hometown; he kept looking for Wrigley Field and the Brach candy factory, where his dad had worked. After the spacewalk on Mission Day 26, they asked permission to use one extra roll of film just for Earth snapshots. Houston approved.

Back on Day 16, the crew had heard that President Nixon had scheduled a Summit Conference with General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev of the Sovi­et Union at the “Western White House” in San Clemente, California, for 18—26 June. On Day 24 it got a little more personal. Pete received a call from Nixon inviting them to attend. They accepted, and the president wished them all a happy Father’s Day.

On Day 25 Pete relayed Skylab’s respects to the Russian cosmonauts; this crew had now broken their duration record of nearly twenty-four days, set on the ill-fated Soyuz 11 flight. (The Soyuz 11 crew had been lost due to a loss of spacecraft pressure during its return from Salyut 1 in June 1971.) The following day there was a reply from Vladimir Shatalov, “Congratulations and a safe return.” The crew noted with satisfaction the last erep pass, the last run of each medical experiment. There was one more major chore to do: a spacewalk to retrieve that precious Apollo Telescope Mount film.

Around this time, Kerwin had written a poem to his wife that tried to capture the sensations of living in space:

I’m getting used to knowing how to fly.

When I was young I used to fly in dream Up ways so high and easy it would seem As if Earth wheeled and slanted, and not I.

And now it’s real. We move that way at will,

Like dust motes in a sunbeam. Push away,

Drift down your own trajectory, tumble, play And who can say what moves and what is still?

In this high sunlit ship the laws of space,

Height without vertigo, mass without weight,

Entrain our nerveways to their easy pace As if this rhythm were our native state.

What if Man were an exile from the sky?

Are we, perhaps, remembering how to fly?

Mission Day 26 was another eva day, and the crew was up at 2:00 a. m. Houston time. Pete’s jobs today would include brushing away a tiny piece of debris from the rim of the solar coronagraph (it was blurring the view) and attempting to free a stuck relay in one of the battery charger relay mod­ules by hitting the airlock skin over it with a hammer (it was preventing the battery from charging). At 5:45 Pete took stock:

Pete: “All, right now, let me just stop one second. I got the brush, I got the hammer, I got two film trees and I got an ev-i and an ev-2 [him and Paul] in the Airlock. Is that right?”

Brushing off the debris proved easy. Tapping the relay was a bit more com­plicated. Pete had Rusty Schweickart, who was acting as Capcom, describe twice exactly where to hit. Joe, inside, made sure the charger was turned off. Then Pete gave the relay housing several mighty bangs.

Paul: “There it goes. Yes. Boy, is he hitting it! Holy cats!”

Joe: “Houston, EV-3. He hit it with the hammer. I turned the charger on, and I’m getting a lot of amps on the battery. Do you want to have a look?

Houston: “Okay. It worked. Thank you very much, gentlemen, you’ve done it again.”

Pete and Paul scrambled back into the airlock after just one hour and thir­ty-six minutes, with all the film. The crew pointed out that they had done their thing with a hammer and a feather, sort of like Galileo (or the Apol­lo 15 crew on the moon). And that evening, Pete read the following message from nasa: “To Captain Charles Conrad, Jr. On or about 22 June 1973, you and your crew will detach from Skylab One, leaving it in all respects ready

for the arrival of the Skylab 3 crew on or about 27 July, 1973. You will then proceed by space and air to the USS Ticonderoga without delay, and report immediately to the Senior Officer Present Afloat for duty.”

The next day was Day 27, Wednesday, 20 June. Skylab was cautioned that morning not to record anything requiring immediate attention on в Chan­nel — they’d be home before it could be retrieved and acted on. The very last medical experiment was run—a final exercise tolerance test with Paul as the subject. Then there was a press conference.

The conference was relaxed and upbeat.

Joe gave his preliminary appraisal of the medical effects of a month in space: “Right now the score is ‘Man, three; space, nothing.’ . . . What’s been such a pleasant surprise is how nice we feel. We’re able to get up in the morn­ing, eat breakfast and do a day’s work. I’m tremendously encouraged about the future of long-duration flights for that reason.”

Pete’s appraisal of the most significant accomplishment was “that we have now a ninety percent up-and-operating space station to turn over to the SL-3 crew.” He went along with Joe on the crew’s condition. Neither Pete nor Paul thought they’d eat as much as they did. And Pete thought he was in better shape than at the end of his eight-day Gemini 5 flight.

Paul emphasized how important it had been to have very high fidelity trainers and simulators on the ground. “And the things that are easy to do in the trainer are easy to here, ninety-eight percent of the time. And vice versa.” Their advice to the next crew: “Don’t forget the learning curve, don’t worry about your training, have fun.”

With that over, they started packing and got so far ahead of the flight plan that they decided to go to bed another hour early. Tomorrow was going to be deactivation day.

First call on Day 28 was at 1:00 a. m., and for the first time, Houston woke the crew with music: “That’s ‘The Lonely Bull’ for you, Pete.” Pete said, “You should have started doing that on Day Two,” and a tradition was born. Ever since Mission Control has specialized in playing wake-up music for Shuttle and International Space Station (iss) crews, tailored to their personalities.

They raced around the workshop. In fact, Paul clocked one complete traverse from the Command Module to the Trash Airlock at “sixty sec­onds loaded with gear, twenty seconds at max speed” — just to help out the activity planners. They took front and side “mug shots” of one another for the doctors. Joe squeaked his rubber ducky, the one his brother Paul, the Marine pilot, had carried on missions over Viet Nam. Pete said, “It’s like a day-before-Christmas party up here, Hank.”

Houston (Hank Hartsfield, the Capcom): “You know, it’s 5 in the morn­ing down here.”

Paul: “How about giving him something to do, Houston, will you please?”

Houston: “Can you stomp your foot up there in zero-G as easy as you can in one G?”

Pete: “You bet your sweet bippy, you can also go ‘Ah—haaa!’”

Paul: “You can only stomp once.”

So everything was sailing along. Then it happened. The Trash Airlock jammed.

Pete (ten minutes before eight): “Okay, Houston. We’ve got some bad news for you. We were jettisoning the charcoal canister through the trash airlock per procedures, and it has hung itself in the airlock. . . . We’re work­ing the problem, but—it’ll be pure luck if we bounce it off that lip and get it out of there.”

Pete, Paul, and Houston began to work the problem in an atmosphere of grim hurry. No place to dump trash would give the next crew a terrible problem. Story Musgrave, Joe’s backup, went over to the mockup to try to reproduce the problem and solve it. Finally, at 9:15, Paul reported: “So having wound up there [at the end of a malfunction procedure that didn’t work] we started working on it a little more. And by judicious application of muscle, we did manage to get it up and free. So the trash airlock is oper­ative once more.” In other words, they kept fooling with it till something worked—just like you fix things at home. Everybody sighed with relief and pledged never again to put something that big down without taping up all the edges. And they carried on. There would be only one more glitch before the mission ended.

To bed at 2:00 p. m. Houston time, the crew played “America” to the sat­isfaction of Mission Control. Up at 7:00 p. m., sleepy and in for a long day. They’d be tired and ready for bed about the time they hit the water. Joe told Karl Henize, the Capcom, “It’s wonderful of you to pretend it’s morning, just for us.” Lots of last-minute questions, cross checking that they had the right procedures, messages, and times. There was another review on exactly how to mate the docking probe and drogue, which had nearly sabotaged the mission on Day i, and how to proceed if they didn’t mate. (They did.)

The last problem was that Skylab’s refrigeration system now began warm­ing up. Houston worked the problem for nearly four hours while the crew finished stowage and donned suits. Would their undocking be delayed, can­celed? Finally Houston decided the system’s radiator, positioned right aft at the end of the workshop, where the engine nozzle would have been, had fro­zen up. They maneuvered the cluster to point it at the sun. The crew closed the tunnel hatch and waited in their couches for a go to undock. At 3:30 a. m. it was delayed. At 3:54 it was given; the radiator was unblocked and the loop was cooling down.

Pete flew around Skylab for a farewell inspection and photos; it looked small and friendly as they backed away, with its lopsided solar panel and crumpled parasol against a cloud-flecked ocean background.

The first of two deorbit burns came at a little after five, followed by the last star sightings through the Command Module’s telescope. Joe got drinks for everyone before strapping in for the final burn and decided to save his until after splashdown. At 7:30 Houston gave Skylab the weather in the recovery area.

Houston: “There’ll be two recovery helos, with the call signs Recovery and Swim. And you’re being awaited by the U. S.S. Ticonderoga. And we’re waiting to see you back here in Houston, too.”

Pete: “Alrighty. You can relay to the Tico, ‘We’ve got your Fox Corpen and our hook is down.’” [Pete was playing the Naval aviator coming in for a landing on the carrier’s deck. Fox Corpen is the ship’s heading. It sound­ed great to the rest of his crew.]

The final deorbit burn was successful at twenty-one minutes after six (Pacific Time). Joe and Paul were surprised to note that they “grayed out” a little during the burn. Pilots knew that fighter plane maneuvers that pro­duced high levels of acceleration—loops or very tight turns—could drain the brain of blood and produce a reduction (grayout) or complete loss (black­out) of vision, or even loss of consciousness. The Service Module engine only produced about one G worth of thrust. That was normally a trivial acceler­ation. But nobody’d been weightless for a month before.

Joe: “I went kind of gray and then I was coming back.”

Paul: “I think what gets you on that is the spike [abrupt] onset.”

Joe: “We’ll see; there’s no spike onset to entry.”

Entry G force would build up to about four and one-half Gs but very grad­ually. No problem was really anticipated; but they did rehearse what switch­es had to be thrown to assure successful splashdown, and by whom.

Joe: “Remember, els Logic to auto if you’re blacking out.”

Pete: “Right.”

Nobody blacked out. Pete got the Earth Landing System switch to auto right on time. And at 6:45 Skylab contacted Recovery, at 4,500 feet, with three good main chutes.

The uss Ticonderoga, cv-14, was a proud old ship at the end of its thirty years of service. Recovering Skylab 1 would be its last cruise. Everyone knew that, and it gave the ship a sense of celebration, regret, and tension.

Tico was commissioned on 8 May 1944, the sixth Essex-class carrier and the fourth ship to bear her name. She fought hard in the Pacific, surviving two kamikaze strikes in early 1945 to steam into Tokyo Bay on 6 Septem­ber, four days after the formal surrender. She made several roundtrips state­side, bringing thousands of soldiers and sailors home in Operation Magic Carpet, then was placed in storage in 1947. She was reactivated and convert­ed in the mid-1950s, adding steam catapults and an angled deck to take on modern jet fighters, the Skyhawk, Phantom, and Crusader among them. She served the Navy as an attack carrier for the next fifteen years. In 1970 Ticonderoga underwent her final conversion, configured this time for anti­submarine warfare, helicopters instead of jets. Among her missions were the recovery of the crews of Apollo 16 and 17 in 1972.

She steamed out of San Diego about a week before splashdown. Aboard was a team of recovery and medical experts from NASA. The medical team included physicians from the U. S. Navy, Air Force, NASA, and Britain’s Roy­al Air Force. Also aboard were two women (unusual at that time) — the lead press pool reporter, Lydia Dotto, was science writer for the Toronto Globe and Mail. Doris Rodewig, an artist from New York City, was invited by the Navy to record the recovery. The two were given the admiral’s quarters for the short cruise.

There was plenty of action aboard. With the recovery team in the lead, the ship’s crew spent the time rehearsing the entire process, using a “boiler­plate” Command Module that could be put in the water and hoisted. The medics were preparing their equipment in the six medical trailers deployed on the hangar deck to receive, examine, feed, and house the crew. The deck crew vacuumed and swept the twenty-two yards of red carpet between the port aircraft elevator and the trailers.

A lucky ridge of high pressure had kept bad weather away from the land­ing area, but as the morning of Friday the twenty-second dawned, multi­ple cloud layers threatened to give the helicopters a hard time sighting the capsule. Lydia Dotto wrote: “On the bridge, a dozen officers talk in mut­ed tones, waiting for the fix on the spacecraft as it comes down. Navigator Commander Newton Youngblood and his men huddle over their charts, plotting the ship’s course. Dials and gauges glow red in the darkened room. Now, as the cloud-shrouded sun brings a grey light to the sky, everyone waits for the sight of the three eighty-three-foot parachutes. . . .”

Just as the spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere, the clouds began to break up. A slash opened in the sky, the tops of the clouds glowing red from the rising sun.

The Command Module, its three orange-and-white parachutes gauzy in the morning light, dropped right through the break. As it splashed into the water, four recovery helicopters converged on the scene, dropping swimmers with rafts and a flotation collar to stabilize the spacecraft. Lt. (jg) Tim Ken­ney, commanding officer of the swimmers, gave a thumbs up to the chop­pers, meaning he’d established radio contact with the crew, and they were ok. With that, Capt. Norman Green took the con and steered Ticondero – ga the final six and a half miles. Engines back one-third, and she steadied beside the spacecraft.

For the astronauts, water impact had not been very hard. Pete hit the chute release switch promptly, and the spacecraft bobbed to the upright position. Joe took his and his crewmates’ pulses: lying on the couches, eighty-four for Pete and Joe, seventy-six for Paul; semistanding in the lower equipment bay, about ninety-six for everyone. They were fine, but those heart rates showed that they were fighting the unaccustomed gravity. Pete and Paul returned to their couches; Joe fetched the strawberry drink he’d prepared before reentry and chug-a-lugged it. His gut told him almost immediately that this was a mistake. He paid for it later aboard ship.

Hoisting up the Command Module and depositing it carefully on the ele­vator at hangar deck level was routine. For six anxious minutes those outside waited while yellow-overalled technicians prepared the module for open­ing. There was a moment’s confusion because Pete had already unlocked the hatch from inside.

Pete was determined that this crew was going to egress unassisted. He knew the cameras would be on them. “There’s no way we’re coming out of here on litters,” he told his crew. Mel Richmond, in charge of the NASA recov­ery team, said that Pete was right at the hatch when it was opened—“He was on his haunches, ready to jump out.” According to Lydia Dotto, he looked “like a man from Mars peeking out of some outer-space vehicle for his first look at Earth.” With a hand on each arm he was eased to the plat­form and immediately given a blue Ticonderoga baseball cap to replace the white fireproof model he was wearing. Kerwin was already feeling seasick after his strawberry drink; Pete said to Mel and Dr. Chuck Ross, the Sky – lab I Crew Surgeon, “We need to get Joe the hell out of here; he’s not feel­ing that good.”

Weitz appeared next, then Kerwin. Each tested his legs gingerly and waved to the cheering Navy crew. Then one by one with one hand on the railing, they descended the platform’s steps, each accompanied by a NASA physician; Conrad with Chuck Ross, Kerwin with Jerry Hordinsky, and Weitz with Bob Johnson. With smiles and waves they walked slowly and with wide gait down the sixty-six-foot-long red carpet to the interior of the hangar deck and the Skylab Mobile Medical Laboratories. All three felt vertigo, the sensation that the world was spinning, when they moved their heads; and all felt abnormally heavy. Weitz likened it to riding a centrifuge at four times gravity.

A full day of medical testing was planned. All the researchers wanted to get that precious data on the crew’s response to gravity on recovery day, “r+o,” before any readaptation had taken place. But it was apparent that the men were fighting serious fatigue—they’d been up for seventeen hours on little sleep before arriving on Tico’s deck.

Conrad was in the best condition; his in-flight insistence on a lot of exercise had paid off. He got through all the testing, including a treadmill run and Lower Body Negative Pressure. Weitz tolerated the lbnp about as well as he had in flight. He undertook the ergometer run but was unable to finish. Allowed to lie down, he recovered rapidly and completed his oth­er tests. Kerwin threw up the strawberry juice in the trailer. He felt a little better after that, but the lbnp run was only carried to the second of three steps, and the doctors decided not to ask him to run on the ergometer until the following morning.

After a couple of hours of medical examinations, the crewmen called their wives. Kerwin told his wife, Lee, that he was tired and seasick and had thrown up in the medical trailer but would be fine after a good night’s sleep. Armed with that knowledge, Lee was able to respond later to a call from Dr. Chuck Berry. He told her that Joe was pretty sick, and they didn’t know whether it was cardiovascular or vestibular. Lee said, “It’s vestibular, Dr. Berry.”

That afternoon Conrad and Weitz spent half an hour on the flight deck. They were surrounded by NASA people and a Marine escort, all wearing sur­gical face masks. They were greeted by Captain Green, who did not wear a mask but was careful to stand well downwind from the two astronauts. The reason for the face masks was that the astronauts still represented a valu­able and unfinished medical experiment. NASA intended to collect detailed data for the next three weeks while they recovered and did not want illness to bias it. Green apologized for the strong wind blowing across the deck. “I haven’t seen any wind or sunshine for twenty-eight days,” responded Con­rad, “so don’t apologize. It really feels great.”

By Saturday morning the astronauts were feeling human and hungry. All participated in a full schedule of medical tests. Kerwin especially seemed much better. The trio was allowed some time to walk around on the deck area for exercise and relaxation, while Navy people maintained the pre­scribed distance.

That afternoon Dr. Ross was summoned to the bridge by Captain Green. The skipper told him that a very important private phone call was being linked to the ship for him. The phone rang; Captain Green activated the speaker and a voice said “stand by for the President.” Ross remembered, using the third person for himself:

“It was only a matter of a few seconds, with Ross ‘reeling’ from some dis­belief, and not from the ships to and fro action, that the voice on the oth­er end said “Hello, Dr. Ross, this is President Nixon.” At this moment Ross still could hardly believe in the reality of the situation, but recognized quick­ly that this could not be one of the sl-i crew or other playful astronauts in

Houston playing the ‘supreme joke’ to the discomfort of a NASA Flight Sur­geon. Dr. Ross in a definitely higher pitched voice, while attempting to regain full self-control of himself, replied ‘Yes sir, this is Chuck Ross.’

“With full appreciation for what the sl crew had just done for this coun­try President Nixon requested a visit by the Skylab I crew the next day to the ‘Western White House’ in San Clemente. He did state that he hoped all the individuals were well enough to attend and it was his understand­ing already from NASA that if Dr. Ross gave the ‘thumbs up medical clear­ance’ the event could take place. Ross’s mother had not raised an Einstein, but although he had not written the book ‘Personal Presidential Commu­nications for Dummies’ (still does not exist) he thought that the event had most likely been blessed from NASA Headquarters.”

Actually, Ross had some trouble convincing Dr. Hawkins back in Hous­ton that all three were fit for the visit. Hawkins had attended to yesterday’s reports that Kerwin was pretty sick and wanted him kept behind. Chuck “had to do a real medical sales job,” he recalled but eventually prevailed. The only nonnegotiable condition was that the crew wear masks, since obvious­ly the president wasn’t going to. The word was passed: “You might like to know that the wearing of surgical masks by yourself and the crew is under­stood by the president and is thought to be the proper thing to do.”

NASA flight surgeons never know quite what their duties are going to involve. That evening Ross discovered that due to predicted fog at San Cle­mente, the ship’s helicopter would take him and the crew instead to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, whence they would drive to San Clemente with a military escort. And to preserve the crew from possible infection, he would be the limousine driver. And he was told what the crew already knew—the President was going to be accompanied by Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the Soviet Union. Tomorrow was getting more complicated by the hour.

The crew wanted to bring gifts to present to Nixon and Brezhnev. Volun­teers from Ticos carpentry shop turned to and worked through the evening to produce three shadow boxes to hold flags and patches that had flown on Skylab. The astronauts complimented them on their work and gave them patches as well.

At 0800 hours (8:00 a. m. to you landlubbers), with the Ticonderoga five miles offshore and steaming toward its San Diego home port, the crew and

29. Conrad and Kerwin (sans masks) are greeted by Brezhnev and Nixon.

Dr. Ross launched from its deck in a helicopter piloted by Cdr. Arnold Fies – er. It was the last operational flight to depart Tico’s deck. At El Toro the lim­ousine turned out to be an old Rambler station wagon (to Chuck’s relief.) The Marine escort in another vehicle was a bit speedy and lost them at a stoplight—but came back and found them again. They reached San Cle­mente on time and were escorted to the outdoor Protocol Area where the meeting was to take place.

Then came Ross’s undoing. As the president and the Soviet leader approached, Conrad turned to his fellow crewmen and said, “This isn’t right. We’re not wearing masks in front of the president.” He took his off and stuffed it into the pockets of his Navy whites, and Kerwin and Weitz followed suit. There was nothing Chuck could do.

The meeting went well. Gifts and compliments were exchanged, and the astronauts were invited by Brezhnev to visit the Soviet Union. They then flew directly from San Clemente to the Tico, landing about noon. The crew was relaxed, with just a few more medical tests before flying home to Hous­ton. Ross was not; he still had to contend with Dr. Hawkins.

The crew took a short break upon arrival for a lunch of specially pre­pared Skylab food and fluids. Then the medical tests required for R+2 were

accomplished efficiently and professionally with the crew looking very good. An abbreviated call was made from the docked Tico to Houston at 4:15 p. m. to present the most important clinical information while leaving some of the research data to be discussed in the following days back in Houston. Ross continues with his recollections:

“There was so much emphasis on making the 5:00 p. m. (pdt) takeoff time that the conference call was cut short. In a very short time this would

be rectified from the flight deck of the returning aircraft. In fact some of the jsc hierarchy had a definite need to talk with Dr. Ross; have you ever won­dered about the statement, ‘Were your ears burning?’

“The sl-i crew and members of the medical and recovery teams were trans­ferred to a c-141 for the return flight to Houston. Shortly after take-off and when the aircraft had cleared the San Diego traffic area, a call came for Dr. Ross. The radio operator had provided him a good fitting earmuff headset with a boom mike. This snug but comfortable headset was necessary to pre­vent the next comments from loosening the headset from his head. There was no doubt that the made-up statement “hell hath no fury like a protocol ignored” was coming to fulfillment. Royce Hawkins was definitely upset as he started the communication with the statement: ‘Chuck, we saw you on television with your mask on, but where were the crew’s masks?’ Ross man­aged to maintain his professional composure as he responded: ‘Royce, this is a long story that is better managed face to face when I return to work at jsc on Monday.’”

Early in the week, when the crew and medical team were back in Hous­ton, Captain Conrad took full responsibility for the decision of the crew not to wear the protective masks while visiting the president. At last the “heat” dissipated off the crew surgeon, and life started coming back to the routine of postmission follow-up medical work.

The crew members were welcomed that night at Ellington Air Force Base and reunited with their families. They only got to wave at their chil­dren from a distance—no kids, no chance for a school infection for the next eighteen days.

After the program ended, the accomplishments of Skylab 1 were summa­rized by the astronauts in talks given to the Congressional Committee on Space and Technology. Dr. Kerwin summed it up, after describing the med­ical findings: “You’ve all experienced teamwork in your lives, I hope. Real teamwork is memorable. And in space it’s just the same. People perform up there the way they do down here. Their capabilities, individually and col­lectively, and their potential, and their weaknesses are the same.

“Hopefully, space stations will be a reality at some time during the next human generation. Five days before our crew was launched, we went out­side in the evening to watch Skylab pass overhead. It moved pretty rapid­ly, but it shone as bright and steady as a star, and we knew it was going to be up there for a long time. To me, it was as though we were going up to homestead a new state—as though that vehicle were the fifty-first star on the flag. The territory is still open and there’s a lot to be done up there. We’ll be ready when you are.”

NASA was not the only agency working on developing a space station. In the early i960 s, the U. S. Air Force had also begun work on its own space – station program, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (mol). The Air Force had already been involved as a partner in one successful space-related pro­gram, the x-15 rocket plane, which could carry pilots to the edge of space on suborbital flights and earned Air Force astronaut wings for several of them (awarded to pilots who reached an altitude of fifty miles). However, the Air Force was also interested in its own orbital spaceflight program. In the 1950 s the Air Force was developing the Man in Space Soonest program, which lost out to Project Mercury to be America’s first manned spaceflight program when President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided that he wanted a civilian agency, NASA, to be in charge of the first flights. In 1962 the Air Force began developing plans for Blue Gemini, which would involve military use of NASA’s Gemini hardware. When Air Force officials realized in 1963 that their own next-generation rocket plane, the x-20 Dyna-Soar, could not be completed on a schedule competitive with NASA’s Gemini spacecraft, the Air Force abandoned the x-20 in favor of the mol, which would use Gemini technology as the basis for an orbital workshop program. Plans were made for a space laboratory to be launched in 1968.

Like the Apollo Applications Program, mol was designed to make use of existing hardware. The launch would use the Air Force’s proven Titan iiic booster, and the crew would ride in a modified Gemini spacecraft.

On 25 August 1965 President Johnson gave his approval to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program. In January of the following year, Congress strongly encouraged NASA to participate in the mol program rather than pursuing its own Apollo-based space station program. NASA argued that the Air Force facility would be insufficient for supporting the scientific goals of the Apollo Applications Program and that modifying mol to meet those requirements would generate costs and delays greater than moving ahead with NASA’s Apollo Applications plans. The arguments were ultimately suc­cessful and bolstered support for the agency’s program.

Karol “Bo” Bobko, an mol astronaut who went on to join NASA’s astro­naut corps, said the two programs were very different: “Totally. But we’d have to shoot you before we told you,” Bobko joked (probably). “The sim­ilarity was that it was a laboratory flying in space for a reasonable length of time. The dissimilarity was that missions were different.” While the full details of the Air Force laboratory program have never been declassified, it would have involved conducting intelligence operations and establishing a military presence in space.

When the Air Force canceled the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program in June 1969 because of continuing delays and rising costs, NASA benefited in two ways. The cancellation of mol meant an end to the political compe­tition between the two agencies, allowing the Apollo Applications Program to be seen for its own merits. In addition some members of the Air Force astronaut team were accepted into NASA’s corps. Some of these, most nota­bly Bobko, Bob Crippen, and Dick Truly, went on to play important roles in the Skylab program.

Mueller said that his reaction toward the Air Force program was one of excitement. “Well, at least around me, we were all enthusiastic about the Air Force beginning to be interested in space with the Manned Orbital Labo­ratory. If that had [flown], I’m sure we would have had a much more vig­orous space program.” Competition between NASA and Air Force manned space programs, he said, would have forced each agency to be more aggres­sive in its efforts in an attempt to stay ahead of the other.

At the same time, a thought process similar to what NASA was going through in looking past Apollo was occurring on the other side of the world in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had started the space age staying one step ahead of the United States. The first Soviet satellite, Sputnik, was launched on 4 October 1957, ahead of the January 1958 launch of the first U. S. satel­lite, Explorer I. The first Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, flew into space on 12 April 1961; the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, followed less than a month later on a suborbital flight. It would be February of the fol­lowing year before an American, John Glenn, would match Gagarin’s feat of orbiting the Earth.

Knowing that NASA was developing a two-person spacecraft, the Soviet space program launched the first Voskhod capsule with three cosmonauts aboard on 12 October 1964. The Voskhod was essentially a modified version of the one-person Vostok capsule in which the ejection seat had been removed and three seats had been installed. Because of the cramped conditions in the spacecraft, the three cosmonauts flew without pressurized spacesuits. The gambit allowed the Soviet Union to beat the first multiperson U. S. space­flight, Gemini 3, by more than five months, and the first U. S. three-person mission by almost exactly four years. Apollo 7, the first NASA flight to carry three astronauts, was launched on 11 October 1968.

On the next flight of a Voskhod spacecraft, this time with only two crewmembers aboard, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to go outside a spacecraft for a spacewalk, on 18 March 1965. Less than three months later, astronaut Ed White made the first U. S. spacewalk on the Gemini 4 mission with a duration outside of over twenty minutes, besting Leonov’s twelve.

Following Voskhod 2, however, the momentum shifted. It would be two years before the Soviet Union launched another manned spaceflight, and during that time, NASA’s Gemini program established some firsts of its own, including the first orbital rendezvous and dockings. Gemini flights also set new records for altitude and duration.

The year after the Gemini program ended, 1967, was a tragic one for both nations’ space programs. In the United States, the crew of the first Apol­lo mission was lost in a fire during launch-pad tests only weeks before they were to launch. Less than three months later, the Soviets suffered a disaster of their own. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov launched on 23 April 1967 in the first flight of the U. S.S. R.’s new Soyuz spacecraft. The Soyuz 1 mission was all but complete, and Komarov was almost home when the parachute system for the spacecraft failed, killing the cosmonaut.

When the two nations resumed manned spaceflight in 1968, the momentum

in the race to the moon had definitely shifted. Before that year was out, NASA had reached the moon, successfully placing the crew of Apollo 8 in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. Five months later NASA returned to lunar orbit, this time to test the Lunar Module that would be used to land on the moon. Ear­lier that year, the Soviets had made the first test launch of the booster with which they hoped to send cosmonauts to the moon. The first of the Soviet Union’s powerful ni moon rockets was launched on 21 February 1969 and exploded around sixty-nine seconds after launch. A second test was con­ducted in July 1969, and this time the first stage engine shut down prema­turely immediately after liftoff. Seventeen days later, Neil Armstrong made humanity’s first footsteps on another world. Even after the United States had won the race to the moon, two more tests were made of the ni booster, but like the first two, these were also unsuccessful.

Though their lunar objective was slipping away, the Soviet space program was still going strong. In January 1969 two Soyuz spacecraft docked in orbit, and for the first time, members of the crew of one spacecraft transferred to another spacecraft. Soyuz 4 launched with only one cosmonaut aboard but returned to Earth with three. In October of that year, the Soviets achieved another first when Soyuz 6, 7, and 8 were launched within two days of each other. Though there was no docking involved, it was the first joint mission involving three spacecraft. In June 1970 the two cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 9 set a new spaceflight endurance record of eighteen days, besting the four­teen days set four and a half years earlier on Gemini 7.

These missions involving multiple spacecraft and longer durations were paving the way for a new era in spaceflight. The United States had won the race to the moon, so the Soviet Union had set a new goal for itself. In early 1970 Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev himself ordered that a civil­ian space station program be fast-tracked, using technology under develop­ment for a military orbital facility so that it could beat Skylab into space.

On 19 April 1971 the Soviet space program took a major step toward that goal with the unmanned launch of Salyut 1. About forty-three feet long and with a diameter of over thirteen feet at its widest point, the twenty-ton space­craft was launched on a Proton booster. The spacecraft could support three cosmonauts and carried a complement of military and scientific equipment. It was designed to be used by multiple crews on successive missions. How­ever, though the Soviet space program succeeded in placing a workshop in orbit more than two years before NASA did, it failed to man a station with multiple crews before the United States.

After the successful launch of the Salyut i facility, the program hit a series of problems. Three days after the launch, the crew that was to be the first to man it was launched on Soyuz io. Upon reaching the facility, the crew found that they were unable to dock with Salyut and returned to Earth.

The problems that prevented the docking were worked out, and on 6 June 1971 a second crew was launched to Salyut aboard Soyuz 11. This flight was able to successfully dock with the station, and the crew lived on Saly – ut, spending a total of twenty-three days in space. Then tragedy struck at the end of their mission. Their capsule returned to Earth successfully, but when the hatch was opened, its crew was found dead inside.

Skylab II astronaut Jack Lousma explained why the death of the Russian cosmonauts was a cause for concern: “We were already selected for the Sky – lab missions and were in serious training. A serious part of that was medi­cal experiments. It was a time when not a lot was known about the effects of weightlessness [on the human body]; that’s why we were there. Then the cosmonauts came back after about twenty-three days, and when the cap­sule was opened, they were found to have died. And this was the longest flight to that date.

“They launched three people up for whatever reason, and they couldn’t all fit in their Soyuz, or the descent module, with spacesuits on, so they didn’t take them. So something caused them to die. Apparently they hit the ground with a nominal landing. The question was what caused it. One option was that they had in that period of time developed some sort of health prob­lem or space malady that was a result of being in weightlessness for twen­ty-two or twenty-three days, and the other was that they had an accident of some sort.

“Chuck Berry was our doctor at that time, and so he kind of explained all this to us. We talked about it, and the question was what [had] happened to the crew. There was a lot of disinformation flying back and forth during that time because this was still the Iron Curtain days, so we didn’t know if we could get an answer from the Soviets or not.

“We were pleased when they did respond. And they came back and said that they’d had a space accident. A valve had stuck open when they separat­ed their modules just before reentry, and had depressurized the spacecraft,

and they had died of being unable to breathe in vacuum. That then was disheartening news for the space community at large, but as far as we were concerned, it gave us the go ahead to continue onward.

“We felt badly for the Russians. I think the sense was, as long as the Rus­sians were successful, we’d be successful too. We really cheered them on. Because we knew whatever success they might have would be superseded by ours. But we were relieved that was how that turned out.”

Following the loss of the Soyuz 11 crew, further Soviet spaceflights were canceled for the immediate future, and no more flights could be made to Salyut і before it deorbited in October 1971. In 1972, still before the launch of Skylab, the Soviets were ready to resume the space station program. How­ever, on 29 July of that year when a second facility was launched, it failed to reach orbit because of a problem with its Proton launch vehicle.

In the month and a half before the Skylab workshop was launched, the Soviets made two more efforts to place a space station in orbit, one military and one civilian, but both were also unsuccessful. It would not be until July 1974, after the Skylab program was complete, that a Soyuz crew would again successfully dock with a Salyut station. In that month, the crew of Soyuz 14 docked with Salyut 3, staying in space for almost sixteen days.

There are some things you just don’t want to hear in space. Among them: “There goes one of our thrusters floating by.”

The launch of the second crew of Skylab was something of a rarity in the history of human spaceflight. While it’s not uncommon for space launches to be delayed, scrubbed, and otherwise pushed back, the launch of the SL-3 Saturn IB was actually pushed forward. Though it had originally been sched­uled for 17 August 1973, concerns over the condition of the parasol installed by the first crew and the station’s “attitude-measuring” gyroscopes led to a decision to launch the second crew sooner so that the unmanned period could be shortened, and they could assume their role as Skylab’s caretak­ers more promptly. On 2 July the crew was told that they would be leaving earlier than planned and had less than four weeks to prepare for being away from the planet for a couple of months. Launch would be 28 July.

For rookie astronauts Garriott and Lousma, the moment they had long awaited had finally arrived. After seven to eight years of training and simu­lations, the two, along with veteran Bean, were about to be on their way to space. Jack Lousma was struck by the way the Saturn IB looked as the crew arrived at the pad. “It was dark when we got out there,” Lousma said. “I remember seeing it steaming away, and the oxygen venting, and the search­lights.” He remembered thinking to himself, “It’s just like 2001.” (“Which was then almost thirty years away, but it’s history now,” he added.) It was at that point that he realized that he was finally doing this for real; after all those years, the simulations were over. “At least they looked serious about it.”

There are a few special moments that somehow get placed into memory bank for the rest of one’s life. Since the science pilot lies in the middle couch for launch, he was the last to board so that he wasn’t in the way of the other two crewmembers as they got into their couches for launch. The ground crew

would first assist the commander into the left couch and get him all strapped in and connected up—a tradition that can still be seen today on television in preparation for each Shuttle launch. Then, after the commander, it was done again for the pilot in the right couch. At these times the science pilot was left standing on the walkway for some five minutes all by himself with his private thoughts some 380 feet above the ground, and looking out over the entire launch complex. “There was a long training period leading up to this moment,” Garriott recalled. “A fiery rocket would soon take our speed from zero to over five miles a second in less than ten minutes. Yes, it was probably the most dangerous ten minutes of the entire mission for us — and probably of our entire lives, for that matter—but we had planned for it for years, and we knew the options for escape if that should become necessary. Were we scared? I would say ‘no,’ but we knew the risks and had a healthy regard for the potential for disaster. Yet it was a very pleasant and introspec­tive few minutes, which I have remembered for decades. Only more recent­ly have I learned how other crewmen, and especially the other two science pilots, still recall and treasure these few moments waiting on the walkway.” If Lousma was at all scared at that point, he handled the pressure well—“I fell asleep on the launch pad,” he recalled.

Finally the countdown reached zero, and the wait was over. The SL-3 Sat­urn IB cleared the pad, and the crew was on their way into orbit. “One of the things I remember distinctly about launch was we had to get rid of the launch escape tower,” Lousma said. After the spacecraft reached an altitude where the launch escape tower was no longer needed for an abort situation, its motor was fired to separate the tower and its shroud from the Command Module. “When we did, that uncovered all the windows. After climbing to a considerable attitude, the escape tower took off like a scalded eagle. You could see a lot more.”

His first experience with staging, when one stage of the rocket burns out and separates and the next fires, is another memory that has stayed with him. “The engine shut down, and we had to coast for a little bit,” he said. “The separation of the first stage was memorable for me. A shaped charge cut the [launch vehicle] cylinder all around like a cookie cutter, with a kind of bang, and all this debris was floating around out there in a circle. It was spectacular in that it was just, bang, and all of this stuff went in a sort of disc configuration out around us.”

Garriott recalled the experience of reaching orbit as being exhilarating. “From pressed against our couch at several times our weight to floating in our harness in a fraction of a second. We were feeling great, literally ‘on top of the world,’ cruising along—well, coasting along—on our planned trajecto­ry to reach a Skylab rendezvous in a few more hours. Long-duration weight­lessness was new for Jack and myself, but it was not uncomfortable—at least not yet!—and we certainly were enjoying the view.”

Unfortunately just as with the sl-i launch of the Skylab’s Saturn v less than three months earlier, the beautiful launch was marred by malfunction. “I was in the center couch and Jack was on my right with a small window near his seat,” Garriott said. “He suddenly announced, ‘Owen, there goes one of our thrusters floating by the window!’”

And indeed the object Lousma had seen float by was a dead ringer for a nozzle from one of the Service Module’s quad thrusters. “I remember report­ing it and thinking this was odd,” Lousma said. “It was a conical shape just like a thruster, so it looked like a thruster bell, like a thruster nozzle. I don’t think that I quite deduced the implications of that at the time because we were so busy with the rendezvous procedures. We were moving onward, noticed that, reported it, went on to the next thing.”

While primary thrust for the Apollo spacecraft was provided by the one large service propulsion engine at the rear of the vehicle, directional con­trol was the job of the four smaller quad units, positioned on the outside of the Service Module, near the Command Module. Each quad unit consist­ed of four engine nozzles arranged in the shape of a plus sign with one noz­zle pointed toward the fore of the spacecraft, another toward the aft, and two more at right angles from those. The four quad units were positioned around the Service Module at ninety-degree angles from one another. From the crew’s perspective, there was one on the left of the craft; one on the right; one at the top, one at the bottom.

“With a quick look out the window, we agreed it certainly looked like a thruster, but we hardly believed it to be literally true,” Garriott said. Bean recalled the sighting being followed quickly by a thruster low-temperature master alarm. Added Garriott, “We promptly realized that there must have been a small propellant leak [oxidizer or fuel, meaning nitrogen tetroxide or hydrazine] which slowly crawled around the inside surface of the thrust­er and froze into ice in the shape of the metal thruster exhaust cone. Then when that thruster was fired the next time, even briefly, it must have shak­en the ice loose and it slowly floated by Jack’s window.”

With that interpretation, Bean checked with the ground for confirma­tion and had to turn off the propellants to that quad of four thrusters. With that one quad shut down the spacecraft had three more quads still work­ing fine. This had never happened before in spaceflight and was going to make the rendezvous difficult to pull off. There are no “time outs” in space to fix a problem.

Soon enough the crew began to close in on their target—first just a bright dot in the navigational telescope that grew brighter and began to take form as they got closer. Garriott’s excitement increased at seeing his new home growing larger as the Apollo craft approached it. “Soon we were close enough to see the Skylab with the darkness of space as the background for viewing,” he recalled. “Then the solar panels of the atm and one wing of the work­shop solar array could be resolved visually and even the orange parasol set by the first crew came into sight.”

“Before the boarding, however, we had to complete a successful rendezvous and docking in a crippled spacecraft,” he added. Rendezvous required the Apollo spacecraft to arrive in the near vicinity of the Skylab within 330 feet or so and match its velocity with that of the station. The commander had a schedule of quad thruster firings that had to be carefully executed to slowly match his speed to that of Skylab so that they would arrive on station with no relative motion. “Otherwise the crew might arrive at the Skylab rendez­vous point with too much speed, or even worse, possibly collide with Skylab in a terrible catastrophe,” Garriott recalled. “This actually happened dur­ing the manual rendezvous of a Progress vehicle at the Russian space station Mir some years later, with nearly catastrophic results. It should never hap­pen in normal circumstances, but ours was not normal. We had lost one set of quad thrusters and that meant less than full force was available—tech­nically, reduced ‘authority’—from the control system. But equally trouble­some, this failure also produced an asymmetric thrust since nothing com­pensated for the one lost quad on one side of the csm. Any translation such as braking to slow down produced unwanted rotation, and then rotational correction to bring the spacecraft back to the desired pointing direction, or attitude, produced unwanted translation!”

Also every time Bean used the thrusters to slow down, he had to fire them

30. The Service Module thruster quads are visible in this picture of the SL-4 Apollo spacecraft docked with Skylab.

for a longer period than scheduled to compensate for the reduced authority. This sequence—slow down, correct pointing direction, slow some more—was repeated many times during the rendezvous phase, and it all had to be done with precision to complete a successful rendezvous.

As the Apollo craft zoomed along at almost five miles per second around the Earth, its velocity relative to Skylab was only a few feet per second and this had to be slowly reduced to zero at the rendezvous point. Alan Bean said, “Back in the simulator, Owen, Jack, and I were really good at rendez­vous. We never missed a rendezvous in all our training time. They gave us failures by the zillions; we didn’t blink—we’d rendezvous. During our training cycle they gave us all the failures they could think of. Because they knew we were hot and could do this stuff. We never missed one. So lo and

behold, we get up in space, and I remember Jack saying a quad just floated by the window. We thought, ‘That can’t happen. A whole quad just can’t let go.’ About that time the master alarm came on for a low temperature of that quad. We quickly realized that it might have been a chunk of fuel or oxidizer ice shaped like the inside of the thruster and that’s what Jack saw as we fired the thruster.

“We realized we were lucky we didn’t have some sort of explosion and blow that leaky quad thruster right off and really have a problem. But it didn’t. So then we had to isolate that quad and not use it again. We’d nev­er done that in all our rendezvous training.

“We went through the failure mode checklist to isolate a quad. We went to the book; I had Jack read it to me. We had circuit breakers for each thrust­er; throw that one, not that one, and that one. It really incapacitated us a lot. The main effect we had was any time I did anything, we went off atti­tude in the other axes.

“Meanwhile we are coming up on burns [more thruster firings], tracking and all that other stuff needed to successfully complete the rendezvous. But still whenever I tried to brake, we went off in yaw. That was the big prob­lem. And the amount of braking wasn’t the same as with all four thrusters available; it was a lot less. That’s where Owen and I got into a discussion that I often remember.”

Garriott’s job at this time was to help Bean make sure the spacecraft was on the defined trajectory to arrive on station at the rendezvous point with zero relative velocity. In other words he was keeping an eye on how quickly they were “slowing” as they approached Skylab. “My advice to Al on the nec­essary braking or deceleration required would have been greatly facilitated if we had only had a range-rate measuring device on board,” he said. “But in 1973 these had not yet been developed. We had to estimate our ‘range rate,’ or the rate at which our distance from Skylab was decreasing, by taking two range measurements from our onboard radar transponder at two different times and then dividing the range difference by the time difference. Not the most accurate technique, but we had practiced as best we could. As we began to close, it became clear to me that the standard deceleration protocol, which Al was attempting to follow, was not slowing us down enough.”

Lousma, who had been concurrently running the same calculations during the initial portion of the approach, was reduced almost to bystander status during the final phase. “I had to make his backup calculations on the closure rate,” he said. “I was sitting there with this little HP calculator and punch­ing all those numbers in, going through this formula and backing up what the ground saw and what we saw in the spacecraft. There had to be a third vote and that was me. I never enjoyed making that calculation. You had to get it right. If you missed one keystroke, you had to start all over again and it was a long one. But that kept me busy. It kept me from bothering every­one else and being worried.”

Bean was doing the best he could to balance the competing concerns of attitude and velocity. “One of the worst things you could ever do was slow down too much,” Bean said. “Because then you had to use fuel to get clos­ing again, all the timing’s off, you came into daylight too soon—all these things were going on in my mind at that time, really zipping. I remember thinking I’d braked enough. We didn’t have range rate; we had range only. Owen could use the ranges and times and estimate range rate. He’s a great ‘back of the envelope’ guy, and he would look at the ranges and make a rec­ommendation. I remember braking and braking. When we did midcourse corrections, you only did them with the quad thrusters, we did not do it with the main engine. That’s where the problem was.

“Anyway, I braked and braked, but I didn’t know for sure what our range rate was. Owen was giving me recommendations, which was good, which we did in training. ‘You need to brake a little more.’ I remember Owen kept saying, ‘We’re closing too fast; you’ve got to brake some more.’ Finally after braking for what I thought was at least twice as much as we had ever braked in training, I said, ‘No, we’ve braked enough.’ Owen studied the comput­er range and said again ‘Alan, we are closing too fast; you’ve got to brake some more.’ ‘No, we’ve braked enough,’ I replied. I was concerned that our closure rate might be too little at this distance to complete the rendezvous. As I looked out my window Skylab seemed very small and far away; at least that is what I thought.

“During training Owen always stayed in the middle seat next to me during the braking phase of the rendezvous, right in front of the computer. Now all of a sudden Owen released his restraints and floated out of his couch down into the lower equipment bay. To say this caught my attention would be an understatement. He’d never done that before when we had a difference of opinion. I’d better rethink my decision, because Owen makes a lot fewer mistakes than I do. And when he believes this strongly but doesn’t want to argue with the commander, I’d be wise to listen up and so I did.

“Then I began to actually see that we were really closing. If Owen had not said that, we’d have zipped right by. I can remember Jack saying when we got closer, ‘Don’t hit it!’ That was on my mind too, but I was keeping it where I could see it. You can’t maneuver relative to an object unless you can see the object; I had to keep Skylab in the window and keep moving towards it. I had to keep moving along this ‘line of sight.’ It was not the pre­cise maneuver we had planned and practiced but I knew we weren’t going to hit Skylab, because I wasn’t going to let us hit it.

“I was also concerned that if we went by Skylab, Mission Control would tell us to wait and re-rendezvous. And that uses more fuel. That would be real embarrassing, even though we did have this failure. I would say that I had the highest heart rate I ever had during my two spaceflights, no doubt about it, more than landing on the moon. So then as we get close, I could see we might be able to stop, maybe, but for sure we weren’t going to hit it, and we actually stopped right underneath Skylab. Our best efforts and skills were tested. It was difficult, but it turned out okay; we did it.

“I’ve heard Kenny Kleinknecht [the project manager at jsc] and others congratulate us for doing it. The quad failure was a big one. They didn’t even give us that in training, so we had never, ever practiced that. Looking back on it now, as a crew we did a really good job. But the hero was Owen. If he had not said what he did, I would have sped past Skylab, and we would have had to re-rendezvous.”

After rendezvous the crew was to make one fly-around inspection of the whole Skylab at a relatively close distance, less than three hundred feet, to inspect the Skylab exterior. This too was complicated with one quad thrust­er inhibited. With considerable skill, Bean drove around their new home to be, being careful to not get too close, where the thruster jets might blow away the orange parasol deployed by the first crew, which was keeping the Skylab relatively cool.

Garriott kept a memento of that incident for years afterwards: “We had no general-purpose computers available in Apollo, only the special-purpose computers for navigation and other functions,” he said. “So before flight I obtained a HP-35 hand-held calculator to assist me in tracking our motion around the Skylab. We still had to estimate our range and range rate by eye, but we measured angles with the Apollo ‘attitude ball,’ and I entered the numbers into the calculator. The HP-35 was quite helpful with a small program I had written manually and entered into the calculator on a small magnetic strip.

“When I resigned from NASA some thirteen years later, I still had this now ancient calculator in my possession. Technology was now leaps and bounds ahead of this old ‘antique.’ But I listed all the government property in my possession at that time, including the HP-35, with a request to pay for and retain it personally. Naturally, this was more than government bureaucra­cy could manage, so I had to turn it in, after which it was probably junked some years later and lost to posterity as a potentially interesting artifact.”

The crewmembers in orbit were not the only ones having somewhat of a bad day. Lousma’s wife, Gratia, had returned home on the launch day, 28 July. That same evening after she had seen Jack depart on his adventurous rendezvous with Skylab, she was back home mucking out her horse stalls, even as a heavy downpour of rain threatened to flood their home near a creek in Friendswood. With three small children at home, she had to worry about the possibility of having their car submerged, so she drove it to higher ground and then walked back home in the heavy rain. Finally she just stopped and sat down in the middle of the road and had to laugh at the contrasting situ­ation, from celebrity to soaking stable hand, all within a few hours. (Coin­cidentally, Joe Kerwin’s wife, Lee, had a similar experience with flooding in a thunderstorm not long after her husband’s launch.)

The crew had managed to rendezvous with Skylab successfully and dock safely with their new home. By Mission Day 6, things were beginning to look up. The challenge of rendezvous was several days in the past, and after initial difficulties adjusting to life aboard the station, the crew was feeling better. Life on Skylab was beginning to fall into its routine for the second crew. But the problems with the Command Module’s thrusters were not over yet.

“When we awoke that morning we were getting right to work,” Garriott said. “I was checking my weight (body mass) in the slowly oscillating chair, the time period of the oscillation measuring the mass. Al might have been getting our eva hardware ready, while Jack was getting out the prepackaged breakfasts for all three of us.

“Jack happened to look out the wardroom window where he saw a very unusual sight and called me over to look. It was the first of a good many beautiful auroras we would see, in this case near New Zealand. We admired the long folded sheets of green ‘curtains,’ whose slow motion was notice­able with careful observation. It was sometimes tinged with red at higher altitudes, caused by a different chemical reaction in the high atmosphere about ninety kilometers, or about fifty-five miles or more, above the Earth’s surface but still more than three hundred kilometers beneath our Skylab perch in space—a most unique opportunity to view. I was just about to call the ground, half a world away, when a ‘snow storm’ came blowing by our wardroom window.”

Since a real snowstorm never occurs in space, the crew immediately knew that something was leaking from Skylab somewhere. Judging that the leak was probably from the Apollo spacecraft docked to the far end of the sta­tion, Lousma and Bean zoomed off through the workshop, the airlock, and the Multiple Docking Adapter to the Command Module in a matter of sec­onds, where they confirmed that another of their spacecraft’s quad thrust­ers had sprung a leak, even though all valves were turned off. With guid­ance from the ground, the systems were reconfigured so that all propellants to both of the leaking quads were completely cut off.

“I remember seeing that—shower spray was what it looked like—glistening in the sunlight,” Lousma said. “Shortly thereafter, the low-pressure alarms went off. Al hustled for the Command Module and shut everything off.

“I think for me that was probably the low point of the mission because it threatened our ability to get our job done, and I wasn’t willing to come home,” Lousma said. “I’ve never been afraid of space, but that was a fear that I had—losing the mission—more than anything else.”

Bean recalled that the crew got a call from Johnson center director Chris Kraft to discuss how to proceed. They told him that, despite the problems, they wanted to stay and complete their mission. “We were concerned that they were going to make us undock and come home, which we didn’t want to do, naturally,” he said.

Only two of the four quad thrusters were now usable and an extended debate was initiated, especially on the ground. There were two vital ques­tions that had to be faced. Could the crew maneuver home safely in a Com­mand Module with only half of its quad thrusters functioning? And more importantly was the problem isolated to only those two thrusters? With those were several related issues. The precise cause of the problems had to be identified. It had to be determined whether the two failures were con­nected. The likelihood of another failure had to be examined.

These in turn raised more questions: Could the crew successfully reenter with only one usable quad if there was another failure? Should they come home right away before there were any more failures? Was it possible to mount a rescue mission for the crew? Could a Command Module be reconfigured in time to allow one or two crewmen to come up to Skylab then return with three more passengers? Most of the answers had to be worked out on the ground with the large assembly of talented engineers and flight controllers. Of course the astronauts on orbit were very much interested in their think­ing, and wanted to participate in the decision making as well.

“Basically, we felt secure,” Garriott recalled. “Skylab was working well. There was plenty of food and water for many months. The only issue for us was a successful return to Earth. We had worked so long and hard to get here, we certainly didn’t want to come home now.”

But with so much uncertainty about the situation, work began on plan­ning a rescue mission that if necessary could bring the Skylab II crew home safely.

To some, the situation no doubt seemed to eerily echo a movie that had come out only four years earlier. In 1969 Columbia Pictures had released the space thriller, Marooned, based on a novel by Martin Caidin and star­ring Gregory Peck, Richard Crenna, David Janssen, and Gene Hackman. While the original version of Caidin’s novel was set at the end of the Mercu­ry program, the story was updated for the movie version, which focused on a crew of three astronauts that had just completed a long-duration mission on an s-iVB—based orbital workshop. As they prepared for reentry, however, their thruster system malfunctioned, leaving them unable to come home. In hopes of bringing the crew home safely, a daring long-shot rescue mis­sion was mounted. As in Marooned the thruster problems encountered by the crew on orbit sparked work on the ground to prepare a rescue mission. However, the real-life effort was not the daring desperation ploy of the fic­tional version. In fact planning for the possibility of a rescue mission had begun years earlier.

The first step toward the rescue mission was formalized with George Muel­ler’s flipchart sketch of a rough version of what would eventually become

Skylab, which led to the creation of the Multiple Docking Adapter with its spare radial docking port. Unused during normal operations, the adapt­er provided means for two Command Modules to dock with the station simultaneously should there ever be such a need, among which was a rescue mission. If, for whatever reason, it appeared that a crew would be unable to return in the Apollo spacecraft they flew into orbit, a second Command Module would be able to dock with the station at the unused radial port. Plans then called for the disabled capsule to be jettisoned before the Sky – lab crew left on the rescue vehicle, freeing up the axial port to be used by the next crew. Until the rescue crew arrived, however, the disabled vehi­cle would be left attached to Skylab so that its communications equipment could still be used.

The next step in making a rescue mission possible was to modify a space­craft to be able to carry more crewmen than the three in a standard Apollo Command Module. Without the technology for autonomous rendezvous and docking, the rescue craft would have to be launched manned, and each seat filled on the way up would be one less available for the ride back. Since there were three astronauts in the Skylab 11 crew, a standard Apollo capsule would not be able to bring them all home.

Ironically, Jack Lousma and Alan Bean, members of the very crew for whom the rescue mission was being planned, had played an important role in the design of the rescue-mission spacecraft. By late 1971 work on the res­cue vehicle configuration was well underway, and testing had begun on some of the modifications. “Alan and I had worked on the configuration for the Command Module for five-man reentry,” Lousma said, explaining that the two of them were picked to provide operator input on the design of the spacecraft not because they seemed like they might need to be rescued but rather because it was thought they could well be the first people that might have to fly it in the event that a rescue mission was needed to bring the first crew of Skylab home.”

The pair, Lousma said, spent a considerable amount of time at Rock­well, going through the same sort of design reviews for the modified Apol­lo that would have been needed for any new spacecraft. “We configured it such that there would be two couches on the floor underneath the main couches, one on each side of the package between us, which was going to be the critical experimental data,” Lousma said. “Three people would come

Зі. Modifications would have allowed the rescue Command Module to carry two additional astronauts behind the three standard couches.

down in the main couches, and two would be in the couches under the left or right seat.

“They had couches that fastened to the inside of the heat shield. It was like a molded seat you might lay in on the beach. It probably just had some tack-down, tie-down, or fasten-down points. So when Pete went up, that configuration was already confirmed.”

The biggest concern, he said, involved the potential “stroking” of the upper deck of couches. Those couches, the three that were standard on an Apollo Command Module, were designed to stroke, or have their supports compress like an automobile shock absorber, in the event of a hard landing. While usually unnecessary for a water landing, the stroking was an addi­tional safety feature included in the event that for some reason a crew had to make an unplanned landing on hard ground. If that happened, the supports would absorb some of the force, ideally preventing injury to the crew. For the rescue mission, the concern was that a couch that stroked would drop onto the astronaut in the couch below. However since no couch had ever stroked during the Apollo flight program, the risk was considered minimal.

The addition of the two additional couches came at the sacrifice of a sub­stantial amount of stowage space in the lower equipment bay, so bringing the crew home from Skylab in the rescue vehicle would mean that they would have to leave behind much of what they would have otherwise brought back with them, including results of experiments conducted during their stay.

Between the two crewmembers was a stowage area that would be reserved for the highest-priority items to be returned to Earth, and any leftover space in the lower area would also be filled for the trip home. “There was a priority list of what we wanted to bring back because we couldn’t bring it all back,” Lousma said. “Otherwise, the whole bottom was filled with bring back. Whatever they thought was the most important would come back there.”

“Ironically,” Bean said, “the highest priority items in premission plan­ning were the frozen urine samples and dried fecal samples. They would then be studied to ensure it was safe for the next crews to stay even longer in space.”

With nothing they could do about the thruster situation for now, the crewmembers on orbit moved ahead with life aboard Skylab. Meanwhile, on the ground, two astronauts learned that they were being called up for prime crew duty for the rescue mission. Commander Vance Brand, science pilot Bill Lenoir, and pilot Don Lind were the backup crew for both the sec­ond and third manned Skylab missions. All three men were unflown rook­ies. The two pilot astronauts, Brand and Lind, had joined the corps as mem­bers of the fifth group of astronauts selected, while Lenoir was a member of the sixth group, the second class of scientist astronauts. In addition to their backup crew duties, Brand and Lind had also been assigned as crewmembers for the theoretical contingency Skylab rescue mission. Those duties consist­ed mainly of providing crew input on the planning. They were involved, for example, in testing procedures for use of the modified vehicle. In essence they were the prime crew for a flight that did not exist.

With the problems being experienced on orbit, however, that mission changed from theoretical to imminent. “I don’t remember the exact time that I found out,” Brand said. “Of course you know that the backup crew included three guys, and if you had a rescue, there’s really only room for two crewmen going up so that five could come down. Fairly early on, without much delay Don Lind and I found out that we would be the rescue crew. We were pretty enthusiastic because we hadn’t flown in a spaceship.”

“I suspect that Bill was disappointed that it wasn’t him, but Don was elat­ed of course,” Brand said, adding that all of the members of the crew had trained for each role and that any of them would have been qualified for any role. (Lind, in fact, went on to make the switch for his Shuttle mission from pilot to mission specialist.) “I was not in the discussion that selected

the crew. We just found out. Both were capable of doing that job. Bill was a scientist but also an excellent engineer and pilot. Everybody cross-trained for everything.”

Once they were assigned to the rescue crew, Brand and Lind hit the ground running preparing for the mission as did many engineers, flight control­lers, and others throughout the agency and its contractors. “We had about a month to get ready,” Brand said. “I know that we decided very quickly after they had the two thruster quad failures. Everybody felt really under the gun. The hardware was being prepared at the Cape in a typical fash­ion. The agency—but mostly jsc, really—was responding to have every­thing ready in a month. We were completely serious about this. If anybody was thinking about the alternative, which is what really happened later, that they were able to deorbit, we weren’t thinking about that. We very much [believed] we were going up to rescue them.”

Several tasks were occurring simultaneously involving several different groups. “You will recall the effort that was mounted when the first manned mission encountered a damaged Skylab and the parasol and all that,” Brand said. “Well this was, while not quite that big, on the same order. It was very significant. Everybody was pulling together.”

Engineers were preparing the modifications that would allow Apollo Command and Service Module CSM-119 to be used to carry its two pilots and the three Skylab astronauts safely home from orbit and rapidly ready­ing the Saturn IB to launch it. “The Cape had accelerated their preparation of the SL-4 vehicle, and all of the stuff that was to configure it for a rescue was in place,” flight director Phil Shaffer noted. “So I think we could have gone fairly quickly.” In addition engineers on the ground were also working to figure out exactly what had caused the thruster problems in orbit. Rela­tively quickly they came to the conclusion that the two leaks were isolated incidents with little chance of the other two quads failing.

Brand and Lind spent long hours in simulators not only training for the specific requirements of this unusual mission but also making dry runs on the ground to make sure that everything would work as planned. In addi­tion, they were providing crew input to the other groups as they worked on different aspects of the mission. “We were involved in not only training but the planning, certification and verification, and stowage and that the couch [redesign] would work. We were just involved in a lot of the general

32. Vance Brand (left) and Don Lind in the official rescue crew portrait.

planning on how you would do this, which made it especially interesting,” Brand said, adding that the numerous obligations kept him and Lind quite busy during that time. “Those were very long days.”

Any fear that the crew in orbit had that their mission might be brought to an abrupt end after the second thruster failure was allayed fairly quickly. A few days after the failure, they were told that the rescue flight could not come and get them for at least a month, meaning that there was little point in not letting them finish out the full duration of their mission.

“Probably the long pole in the tent was getting the vehicle ready to go at the Cape, the Saturn IB and the integrated stack,” Brand said. “I recall seeing a launch preparations schedule. I think we would have been lucky to be off thirty days after that. But we were talking about that, aiming for that.” Though the purpose of the mission was unique in NASA’s history, its actual

flight profile was not that unusual. The launch, rendezvous, and docking portions would be very much like the last two flights to Skylab. (Hopefully much more by the book than the last one.) “It was pretty much a standard rendezvous,” Brand said. “They had two docking ports, and we would have just used the unused one.”

The time spent on orbit would have been relatively straightforward. “Not much more than required,” Brand said. “We would have to make sure cer­tain things were brought back. The primary thing was just getting the peo­ple back.” Likewise the return to Earth would have been fairly standard despite weight that normally would have been cargo instead being extra crew. “Because of all the similarities with rendezvous, etc., there wasn’t so much risk,” Brand said. “I guess you would have to say that looking at the overall thing, the main risk is just in chartering another mission. There’s always a risk with any mission because you could lose an engine or something.

“Of course, the other risk is anytime you do things in a hurry, there’s always a chance you might have overlooked something, though we didn’t think we did. And we probably both would have had a little more to do in flight because there were two crewmen instead of three.” About a month after work began on the rescue mission, the agency was adequately confi­dent that it could be flown successfully. “They got a long way,” Brand said. “We had hardware.”

There were a few interesting points about the reconfigured spacecraft, though, according to Don Lind: “One of the funniest things was when they had to reconfigure a Command Module with five seats, and we had to run all the tests and so forth. Well, a Command Module has two stable con­figurations [when floating in the water], one in the normal point-up posi­tion, which they call Stable i. But it would also float in good stability with the cone pointing straight down. That puts the seats not exactly strapped to the ceiling, but in a very strange position very high up on the wall as it starts to curve into the ceiling.

“So we had to test this. We took a test crew that was going to be rescued. Vance and I had some experience with this thing in Stable 2 with just the two of us. I realized out in the ocean with the waves pitching and rocking back and forth, it was incredibly difficult to tell which direction was down. So when we did this with five crewmembers, I was briefing the other three, and I said, ‘You won’t be able to tell which way is down, so when I tell you to unstrap, be sure you’re hanging on to something because you may feel like you’re falling straight up.’ Everybody looked at me like, ‘Oh, come on, Lind, how dumb do you think we are?’

“Well, it turned out when we got in Stable 2 that Bill Lenoir was the first one to unstrap. And as he did so, he just opened the seat buckle and fell up and slammed against the bulkhead. He looked at me like ‘Lind, if you say anything, I’ll get you.’ Of course, the other two were hanging on when they unbuckled. So there were interesting little light notes even as we were get­ting ready to fly.”

For Brand and Lind, however, helping to successfully plan the rescue mis­sion did not mean that it was time to relax. Instead they were given a new task and had to shift gears and start again. More long hours in the simula­tor awaited.

Having proven that a rescue mission could be flown, the agency began looking into whether it could be avoided. Brand and Lind worked with a team analyzing how well a Command and Service Module could maneu­ver without the two thrusters that had failed to see whether it could make a safe return, thereby avoiding the rescue mission.

“Near the end of our preparation period, management said, ‘Well, we believe we can do this, now let’s set about to see how we can get them down without expending the resources for a rescue mission,’” Brand said. “So just overnight we changed goals.

“We got the simulator adapted to the changed situation,” he said. “I spent a lot of time in the simulator on that. I must say in all of my work on the ground in the space program that was probably the most interesting time that I can remember. That whole exercise was very satisfying.”

However, the short-deadline nature of the work definitely could be a challenge to proper coordination. “I found out one piece of information that I thought was critical just when I was walking down the hall at work,” Brand said. “I spoke to the Draper representative, and he said, ‘Oh, by the way. . .’

“He said, ‘You know that when the crew up there gets ready to deorbit and they have to use plus-x, if you don’t hold full left тне [translation hand con­troller] , that might surprise them. They might go out of control and mess up the flight.’ So it was built into the procedure. I mentioned that at some point to Alan Bean, and got the information up to him. And I thought, ‘Gosh, why didn’t we know that?’ Maybe it was before we had an opportunity to simu­late that, because I’m sure we would have found it out in simulation.”

Despite the significant amount of fuel that had been lost during the leaks, running out of fuel was not something they needed to worry about. The Command and Service Module, after all, had been designed for going to the moon, and flights in low Earth orbit used only a fraction of its capabili­ty. The powerful primary Service Propulsion System main engine had to be capable of making the trans-Earth injection burn that pushed a spacecraft out of lunar orbit and back toward its home planet, and it stocked plenty of fuel for making that burn. The Service Module’s Reaction Control System may have lost a lot of its fuel, but the main engine had plenty to spare.

Two reentry procedures were developed. The first assumed that the two remaining good Service Module thrusters would be usable. It involved pilot­ing the spacecraft more or less as had been done during the rendezvous and docking, compensating for the missing quads.

The second procedure was even more creative and would not have used the propulsion systems in the Service Module at all. Instead, the entire reentry would have been handled with the smaller Reaction Control System (rcs) thrusters on the Command Module. Combined, those rcs thrusters could have generated enough thrust for the retroburn that would slow the space­craft down and bring it out of orbit—but just barely enough.

“We had a procedure to do it,” Brand said. “These thrusters were only designed to give you attitude control, so you had to figure out a way to beat the system to get translation out of it. I think it involved having two Com­mand Module hand controllers going in opposite directions at the same time, to actually get translation.”

The Command Module would have had just barely enough fuel. “I don’t think there was much room to waste any, but there would have been enough left after that to control the attitude of the spacecraft [during reentry]. Some­where I still have those handwritten procedures, copies of them, and they were rather bizarre.”

Flight director Phil Shaffer explained: “The solution to the attitude control problem turned out to be putting the cg [center of gravity] of the csm in the right place. When you translated fore and aft, it would rotate the spacecraft around where the real cg was. Once we figured out we had enough stuff on board to place the cg where we wanted it, then it became just a procedure,

which Vance did a wonderful job of working out in the simulator.” In par­ticular, Shaffer said, Brand and Lind had to put in a good bit of time fig­uring out how much burn it was going to take to get the desired reaction. “So it really worked,” he said. “Vance was the hero of the rescue team. Lat­er Alan told us that the heads-up on the тне duty cycle requirements had been extremely helpful.”

While the rescue crew was hard at work on the ground putting the proce­dures together, the crew in orbit was becoming anxious about when exactly they would see those procedures. While they had hoped that it would not be necessary to send up a rescue mission that would end their stay on Sky – lab prematurely, they were now eager to see that the ground had in fact fig­ured out a way for them to come home safely.

“Alan was understandably impatient,” Brand said. “It was, ‘When are you going to get those up here?’ And, just as in the case of Apollo 13, the people who were simulating these were just wanting to be 99.9 percent sure that everything was ok. So we put Alan off a little bit.”

Lind said that while the rescue crew task of figuring out how to retrieve the on-orbit astronauts and the backup crew task of figuring out if the wound­ed spacecraft could make it safely home were both very challenging, they were very different experiences for him. The latter he described as “purely a technical question—do you have the capability to control the Service Mod­ule during reentry in all the modes and all the reasonable failure modes? So it’s just a mechanical question about can this vehicle survive under any rea­sonable circumstances in the configuration it has.”

The issues involved in the rescue crew mission, he said, were more var­ied. There were the technical questions of configuring and operating the rescue spacecraft, but there were other logistical concerns not involved in the backup crew work. One of the biggest of those questions that he was involved in, he said, was figuring out what exactly besides the crew would be brought back. “When you put five guys in that Command Module, it’s rather intimate to start with,” even before the process of loading scientific cargo begins, he explained.

For Brand and Lind the work was accompanied by mixed emotions. After years of waiting, they had finally been assigned a spaceflight. They had done the training and simulations to prove that the mission could be carried out and that they were fully prepared to fly it. Next, though, they were given a

task that could cost them their spaceflight. If they succeeded in proving that the crippled Command and Service Module docked at Skylab could carry its crew home safely, then they would also prove that there was no need for the two of them to fly to rescue them.

“It was kind of a two-edged sword,” Brand said. “In a way, we had so focused on [the rescue mission] that it was a little disappointing that we wouldn’t get to do it. But on the other hand, we understood completely, and we set about working as hard as we could in traditional backup crew mode to help do the flight plan and preprocedures and everything so we could get them down on their own.” He said the disappointment of losing the flight was tempered by the knowledge that NASA was making the right decision by not flying the rescue mission. But it was still a bittersweet experience.

“We would jump at any chance to fly. You know, being an astronaut is a lot like being on a roller coaster. You have these high highs and low lows, dis­appointing events coinciding with the low lows and maybe getting assigned to something and just being top of the world, and so it cycles.”

“It’s hard to describe our feelings,” Don Lind said, “We were the back­up crew, and we needed to work out the procedures with the quads so that they could safely come home. You’re really dedicated; you really feel not just a professional obligation but also a personal obligation to the fellows on the crew that you know so well to do that job very well. So we did the very best job we could and were able to convince management that we had enough redundancy to safely bring the guys home with the quad problems.

“But we were also the rescue crew. And if we hadn’t been so efficient as the backup crew, we would have flown on a mission. After the whole thing’s done, you say, ‘You know, we’re good guys, but boy, are we stupid guys.’ “When you’re in that kind of situation, and many of us in the space pro­gram had been in the military, so when things really count, you simply knuck­le down and work very efficiently. Sure I had to get home and see my family occasionally, and yeah, you require sleep and that sort of thing. Your main emphasis is we’ve got to get this job done in a very limited time; we’ve got to work very efficiently. You obviously don’t take a day off to go play golf; that’s just not in the priorities. You have to relax a little bit, but you have to get the job done, so if you have to get up early in the morning to get in the simulator, you get up early in the morning and get in the simulator.

“You never really hope that anybody has any problems; you just don’t allow yourself those thoughts. But it was a long time before I flew. I was there for nineteen years before I flew. I had been in a group that was being trained to go to the moon, and I thoroughly expected to be the second scientist on the moon. Jack Schmitt was obviously going to fly the first because he had the whole geological community behind him, but I was obviously going to be the second one. And by darn they lowered the budget and canceled the last three flights, and only twelve guys walked on the moon, so big disap­pointment. [Official flight rosters were not made for these missions, and only Deke Slayton knew whom he would have assigned.]

“Then it happened again in Skylab because Vance and I had been the res­cue crew, and Vance and I and Lenoir had been the backup crew on the last two missions. It was completely obvious to everybody that when they flew the second Skylab [workshop], which was already built and paid for, that we were going to be the prime crew. Of course, then they lowered the bud­get, and they cut the second Skylab in half with a welding torch. And it’s now in the Smithsonian museum as the most expensive museum display in the world. Those things are professionally frustrating, but hey, that’s part of life. After a while, you quit whimpering and press on.”

Despite working themselves out of a spaceflight on the Skylab rescue mis­sion, both men would go on to eventually make their way into space. For Brand the wait was relatively short compared to the other astronauts still unflown at the time—a “mere” two years. Along with Tom Stafford and Deke Slayton, Brand flew the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first joint U. S.- Soviet space mission. Stafford, the flight’s commander, was a veteran astro­naut who had flown most recently on the 1969 Apollo 10 mission that had tested the Lunar Module in orbit around the moon. Slayton was both the astronaut corps’ senior member and like Brand an unflown rookie, having been selected as one of the original seven Mercury astronauts but disqual­ified from flight status due to a heart condition. The astp crew launched on the final flight of the Saturn rocket and the Apollo Command Module and docked with a Soviet Soyuz crew in orbit. (Interestingly, the story of Marooned, with its depiction of an international cooperation rescue mis­sion, has been cited as a factor that helped inspire astp.)

When asked which mission he would have preferred to fly given a choice Brand said, “For the sake of [the Skylab 11 crew], I guess I would have picked astp, but if needed, I would have been very enthusiastic about a rescue mission.

It’d be something that, the rest of your life, would really stand out.”

Lind, on the other hand, would not fly for twelve years after the rescue mission he missed out on, a total of nineteen years after he joined the astro­naut corps. Though originally brought into the corps as a pilot astronaut, Lind, who had worked as a NASA space physicist prior to his selection, flew as the lead mission specialist on the 51-B mission of Challenger in 1985, the second Spacelab flight.

Looking back, he said the wait was well worth it. “Oh, yes, absolutely. Because the nineteen years was not just standing in line waiting,” he said. “For example, I had a [position] in the Apollo program that was very, very satisfying.” Lind explained that he was involved in the development of the lunar laser ranging experiment, which involved reflecting lasers off mirrors placed on the lunar surface to make precise distance measurements between the Earth and the moon. He said that his contributions helped make the ranging mirrors the only Apollo experiment still used over thirty-five years after the “corner reflectors” were left behind. “There were some very inter­esting, satisfying experiences going along, even when I spent six and a half years training for two missions that didn’t ever fly.”

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!”