Category HOMESTEADING SPACE

Just as it took a team of thousands working together to make the Skylab program, telling its tale would not have been possible without the gener­ous contributions of many people. While the three of us struggled over the past several years to put everything in place and to make this story of Sky – lab both accurate and interesting for all readers, we have found that abso­lutely key elements required the personal contribution of additional mem­bers of the Skylab team.

Alan Bean’s substantial contribution to this book, for which we are im­mensely grateful, was discussed in the preface.

And then there is Ed Gibson, the scientist pilot of mission three, who makes clear the major contributions made on the longest Skylab mission of all and who sets the record straight about some of the common misconcep­tions surrounding the mission. He is the principal author of most of chap­ter io, “Sprinting a Marathon.” He attacked the challenge passionately and went above and beyond our expectations.

Gibson’s insight can also be found elsewhere in the book, particularly in his in-depth explanation of solar astronomy on Skylab. Gibson’s knowl­edge of our sun, and observation thereof, is vast, and his expertise made for an invaluable addition to the book.

In addition, we would like to give particular thanks to the following people.

Vance Brand and Bo Bobko, who shared not only their personal ex­periences but also a wealth of resources they had saved over the years.

Chris Kraft, who provided us with unpublished Skylab material he had written for his memoir, Flight: My Life in Mission Control.

Lee Belew, Jerry Carr, Phil Chapman, Bob Crippen, George Hardy,

Charlie Harlan, Hans Kennel, Jack Kinzier, Don Lind, Gratia Lousma, Jack Lousma, Bob MacQueen, Joe McMann, George Mueller, Bill Pogue, Chuck Ross, Bob Schwinghamer, Phil Shaf­fer, Ed Smylie, Jim Splawn, J. R. Thompson, Bill Thornton, Stan Thornton, Jack Waite, and Paul Weitz, all of whom shared their experiences with us, either during in-person interviews or through written correspondence. (Some of these also extended and enhanced material from their interviews with the jsc Oral History Project for this book, particularly in chapter io.)

Colin Burgess, our series editor, who got us started on this adventure and shepherded us along the way. Colin also contributed the story about Stan Thornton’s experience finding a piece of Sky – lab; and he occasionally provided feedback on our manuscript when not too busy working on countless of his own.

The jsc Oral History Project, an incredible historical archive. Inter­views from the project served as the foundation for the crew bios and the Skylab III chapter of this book and added additional in­sight to other areas.

Francis French, Gregg Maryniak, and Rob Pearlman, who looked through our in-progress manuscript and provided expert feedback.

Gary Dunham, who supported us graciously during this process.

Homer Hickam, who captured what we were trying to do in his ex­cellent foreword.

Richard Allen of Space Center Houston, for letting us in at odd hours to review the Skylab trainer.

Genie Bopp; Sandra Brooks; Susanna Brooks; Eve Garriott; Bill and Leah Hitt; Lain Hughes; and Lee and Sharon Kerwin, who were kind enough to read through our developing book and point us in the right direction.

Many, many others who answered questions for us as they arose.

David Hitt would also like to thank his father, Bill Hitt, for setting his first­born in front of the television on 12 April 1981 and fanning the flames ever since; Jim Abbott, for being the best mentor a young reporter could have hoped for; Nicole, for going along on an amazing experience; Jesse Hol­land; and last, but certainly not least, the good Drs. Garriott and Kerwin, for giving me the greatest adventure of my life by letting me share in one of the greatest of theirs, for being my patrons through Olympus, and, most of all, for their friendship.

Joe Kerwin would like to thank his wife, Lee; his daughters, Sharon, Joanna, and Kristina, for letting him be a part-time dad before the flight and for providing his main motive for coming back to Earth; and his grandsons, Christopher, Joel, Anthony, Brendan, and Joshua, for giving him a reason to help write this book—that they might be encouraged to go on adven­tures of their own.

Owen Garriott is most appreciative of the support provided by his family and children in his life both as a “flyer” and as a writer as he prepared this book. It is not an insignificant source of personal satisfaction to find that some of his enthusiasm for space adventure has carried over to his children.

Perhaps the best way to begin a tour of Skylab is to begin where its crews did—on the outside, with a look at the station’s exterior.

If a crew in an Apollo Command Module were to approach Skylab with its docking port before them, the nearest module would be the Multiple Dock­ing Adapter (mda) . From the exterior, the mda was basically a nondescript cylinder, marked primarily by its two docking ports. One of the docking ports, the one used by the crews docking with Skylab, was located on the end of the cylinder. The second, the radial docking port, was at a ninety – degree angle from the first, on the circumference of the mda.

The other notable feature of the Multiple Docking Adapter was the truss structure that surrounded it and connected it to the Apollo Telescope Mount (atm), on the side of Skylab opposite the radial docking port. The atm is easily recognized by its four solar arrays, which had a very distinctive wind­mill appearance. Between the four rectangular arrays was a cylinder that housed the atm’s eight solar astronomy instruments. Covers over the instru­ment apertures rotated back and forth, revealing the instruments when they were in use and protecting them from possible contamination when they were not.

Continuing from mda, the crew would next come to the Airlock Mod­ule (am), a smaller cylinder partially tucked into the end of the exterior hull of the larger workshop cylinder. The Airlock Module was most nota­ble, as the name suggests, for its airlock featuring an exterior door allow­ing the crew to egress to conduct spacewalks outside the station. While the program that spawned Skylab had been dubbed “Apollo Applications” for its extensive use of Apollo hardware and technology, the Airlock Module was actually a “Gemini Application” — the door used for evas was a Gem­ini spacecraft hatch.

The airlock and all the spacewalk equipment on Skylab were designed for one purpose — to allow the crew to retrieve and replace film from the solar

telescope cameras on the Apollo Telescope Mount. “There was no thought of the crews doing repairs or maintenance on other things,” Kerwin said. “Little did we know!”

The airlock was partly covered by the Fixed Airlock Shroud, a stout alu­minum cylinder that was a forward extension of the skin of the workshop. The aft struts from which the Apollo Telescope Mount was suspended were mounted here. The truss structure included a path, complete with handholds that spacewalking astronauts could use to move from the airlock hatch to the atm so that they could change out the film.

Finally moving farther past the Airlock Module, the crew would reach the largest segment of Skylab, the cylindrical Orbital Workshop. This was the portion that consisted of the modified s-ivb stage. As it was originally con­structed, the most distinctive features of the station were the two solar array wings, which stretched out to either side and which were to be the primary source of electrical power for the workshop. Prior to launch the photovolta­ic cells that made up the arrays folded up flat against the beam that would hold them out from the sides of the workshop. These beams, in turn, fold­ed down against the outside of the s-ivb stage in its launch configuration, making the wings much more aerodynamic for the flight into orbit.

After completing their fly around, a crew would return to the top of the Multiple Docking Adapter and dock their spacecraft to the station. A com­plete tour of the interior of Skylab should begin right there on their cap­sule. After docking, the Command and Service Module became a part of the cluster. While there were occasions when things needed to be done in the Command Module, they were few. Perhaps its primary use while docked with Skylab was essentially as a telephone booth; crewmembers could float up to the Command Module to find a little privacy for conducting space – to-ground communications with their loved ones at home on a back-up fre­quency that was not available in the workshop.

Upon opening the hatch and entering Skylab, the crew would first find themselves inside the mda. Originally planned to have a total of four dock­ing ports around its circumference, the mda lost three as a result of the switch from the wet workshop to the dry. When the wet workshop cluster, which had to be assembled individually on orbit, was replaced with a facil­ity launched all at once as a dry workshop, the additional ports at which to dock separately launched modules were not needed. Eliminating the three

14- A cutaway view of the Skylab space station.

extra docking ports freed up a large amount of wall space around the mda’s circumference, space that was utilized to turn the module into essentially an additional science annex.

The design of the interior of the Multiple Docking Adapter was itself one of Skylab’s experiments. The argument had been made that in the micro­gravity environment in orbit there was no need to follow the same design paradigms that were unavoidable on the ground. There was no need to leave a floor empty to walk on. The ceilings were no more out of reach than walls, and equipment could be placed on them just as easily as on a wall. The mda was an experiment in designing for that environment, with no up or down. Equipment was located all the way around the wall of the cylin­der, allowing more complete use of the available space than would be prac­tical on Earth.

Foremost among the scientific equipment located in the module was the operator’s station for the Apollo Telescope Mount, a large flat panel featur­ing the controls and displays for the atm with a narrow table in front of it.

The atm console was arguably evidence of the extent to which the module’s designers were influenced by Earthbound thinking. Though care was tak­en to design the mda as an ideal microgravity work environment, the atm console was furnished with a chair for the astronauts to sit in while oper­ating the controls. “We called it the ‘Commander’s Chair,’ because it was Pete’s idea,” notes first crew science pilot Joe Kerwin. “It didn’t survive lon­ger than about the first two weeks of our mission; we then put it away some­where, and I don’t think anyone retrieved it.”

Also located in the mda was the Materials Processing Facility. Included in this experiment was a furnace used to study flammability and melting of solid materials in microgravity. The adapter also housed the Earth resourc­es experiment equipment.

Leaving the Multiple Docking Adapter and heading farther down into Skylab, one would next come into the Airlock Module, the function of which was very aptly described by its name. Joining the mda and the Air­lock Module together was the Structural Transition Section, which con­nected the larger diameter of the Docking Adapter on one end to that of the smaller Airlock Module on the other. The Structural Transition Sec­tion housed extensive systems operation equipment. The Airlock Module provided a way for astronauts to egress the station for spacewalks. Before they could go outside, the Airlock Module would have to be shut off from the rest of the station and then depressurized. Once the atmosphere had been removed, the airlock hatch could be opened, and the eva crewmem­bers could go outside.

To prepare for an eva, all three crewmembers would put on their space- suits in the larger open area of the Orbital Workshop, where the equipment was stored. The astronaut who would be staying inside stopped short of don­ning his helmet and gloves but suited up the rest of the way in case a prob­lem occurred. The eva umbilicals were stored in the Airlock Module, and the ends of these were pulled down into the workshop during this time and connected to the suits of the two eva crewmen. These provided oxygen, cooling, and communications for the two astronauts who would be going outside as well as tethering them to the station.

Once all three were suited up, the non-EVA crewman would precede the others, move through the airlock and into the MDA/Structural Transition Section. There he would attach himself to a shorter umbilical. With his

helmet off, he would be breathing the atmosphere in the mda, but in the bulky spacesuit, he needed the umbilical for cooling as well as for communi­cations. The eva crewmen would move to the airlock and close both hatches (helped on the mda side by the third crewmember). Once the hatches were closed, the Airlock Module would be depressurized by venting its atmo­sphere into space. The outside hatch would be opened, and the two space – walkers could venture outside.

Once the eva was completed, the two astronauts would return to the Airlock Module and close the outside hatch. The am would be repressur­ized, and they would open equalization valves in both end hatches to assure equal pressure with the rest of the station. Finally, they’d open both hatch­es, return to the workshop and doff their suits. The normal pressure regu­lation system would add gas to the workshop as needed.

The Airlock Module’s location in the middle of Skylab meant that a prob­lem with repressurization could mean the end of the mission. If for some reason the module were unable to hold an atmosphere, the third crewman would put on his helmet and gloves and depressurize the Multiple Docking Adapter. The other two would disconnect their umbilicals from the Air­lock Module and rely on a reserve oxygen supply in their suits while they opened the hatch between the two modules, and moved into the docking adapter. Once there, they would reconnect their umbilicals in the mda, and then seal it off from the Airlock Module and repressurize it. If they and the ground were then unable to figure out a way to fix the problem with the Air­lock Module, the mission would be aborted. They would leave the mda for the Command Module and return home.

Continuing deeper into the station, one would next reach the large Orbit­al Workshop volume. This section was divided into two “stories,” with a hole in the middle of the floor of the top story that allowed the crew to move between them.

Like the Multiple Docking Adapter, the workshop was part of the exper­iment in designing for microgravity. Whereas the mda was designed with­out consideration for the direction of gravitational force on the ground, the approach to the workshop design had been to keep in mind that it would be used by men whose brains had long been wired for the one-G environment in which they had lived their entire lives. The “bottom” story of the work­shop was arranged with a very definite up and down. Furnishings and large

equipment sat on the floor like they would on Earth (with a few exceptions), and the walls functioned more or less the way walls normally do. The upper compartment was more of a hybrid, with variations from the one-G—based design of the lower section.

The area at the top of the workshop was very unusual by spacecraft stan­dards. Traditionally spacecraft design is a field in which mass, and by exten­sion volume, are at a premium, reflecting the challenge of moving anything from the surface of the Earth into orbit. As a result spacecraft tend to be rel­atively cramped with every inch utilized as much as possible. While mod­ern spacecraft like the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station are roomy compared to early vehicles like the Mercury and Gemini cap­sules, their designs still reflect the basic limitations in putting any mass into orbit. Skylab had a couple of advantages that made it exceptional in that respect. The availability of the Saturn v as the launch vehicle and the deci­sion to use an s-ivb for the Orbital Workshop meant that it was much less constrained by the traditional mass and volume limitations. Nowhere was that more apparent than at the top of the workshop, which featured an open volume that by spacecraft standards was incredibly large. While the low­er floor was divided into separate “rooms,” the upper floor, the larger of the two, was not divided. An astronaut could float freely in the middle of this volume without bumping into the walls.

In fact Skylab’s designers were concerned that this could present a real problem. They feared that an astronaut could get stranded in the middle of this open volume; without anything nearby to push off, he would have to rely on air currents or his crewmates to push him back toward a solid sur­face. To eliminate this danger and to provide for easier movement through Skylab, they provided a “fireman’s pole” in the middle of the workshop, running from one end to the other. The idea was that the astronauts would hold on to the pole to move “up” and “down” the workshop. The pole, how­ever, proved unnecessary, and the crews found that it just got in the way. It turned out to be quite easy to push off from a surface and glide to one’s des­tination —no pole required. The first crew took it down for the duration of their stay, but at the end, politely restored Skylab to factory specs, reinstall­ing the pole for the second crew. They in turn did the same—promptly tak­ing it out of their way but putting it back before they left so that the third crew could remove it one last time.

The upper portion of the workshop dome volume was left almost vacant for experiments requiring a lot of volume for checkout, like a Manned Maneu­vering Unit prototype. Just below this was a ring of white storage lock­ers, which the first crew found provided an excellent “track” to enable easy shirt-sleeve jogging and tumbling around the inside circumference of the workshop. Also located in the upper deck were storage of food supplies for all three missions, a refrigerator and a very heavy (on Earth, at least) steel vault for film storage.

A few experiments were also located in this area, including Skylab’s equiv­alent of bathroom scales, the body mass measurement device, which the astronauts used to keep track of how much “weight” they had lost or gained. The upper dome volume was also where the two astronaut maneuvering units were kept. One was a backpack device that was the forerunner of the Manned Maneuvering Unit later used on some Space Shuttle missions and of safer, the Simplified Aid for eva Rescue, used on the Internation­al Space Station. (Ironically, a member of the one Skylab crew that did not get to test the maneuvering unit, Joe Kerwin, was a co-inventor of the saf­er unit, while working at Lockheed Martin years later.) The other device was a maneuvering aid that astronauts operated with their feet, rather than their hands.

The upper story of the workshop also featured a pair of airlocks. Too small for a person to go through—only about ten inches square—the two Scientific Airlocks (sals) were designed for solar physics, astronomy, Earth photography, and space exposure experiments, allowing astronauts to pass materials samples through to see how they weathered the harsh environs outside. The two airlocks were on opposite sides of the compartment from each other; a solar airlock pointed in the same direction as the Apollo Tele­scope Mount, while the antisolar sal faced in the opposite direction. (This solar-looking airlock would be an important part of addressing problems that occurred during launch.)

Also located at the top of the dome was Skylab’s unofficial “Lost and Found.” “Most of us have enough trouble keeping up with our pencils, notes, paper clips, and other small items here on Earth in a largely ‘two dimension­al’ world,” Garriott explained. “By two dimensions, we mean that an object may get pushed around horizontally, but it seldom floats away vertically in a third dimension, like a feather might do. But space is different—everything floats away unless it is tethered or tied down. But our eyes and our minds

have been trained for years to look only on the tops of surfaces to find lost articles. We may not ‘see’ a small floating object in space, or may not look in all the more obscure places a lost article may have become lodged.

“But serendipity came to the rescue here,” he said. “The very slow air cir­culation from the lower decks up to the single air intake duct in the top of the dome volume slowly urged all drifting objects to come to it. We found that each morning when we arose, we could find many of our small, lost articles on the screen on the intake duct!”

At the bottom of each of the workshop’s two “stories” were floors with an open-grid construction that was a fortunate relic of Skylab’s development. During the wet-workshop phase of Skylab’s history, engineers looked at whether any of the station’s infrastructure could be included in the s-ivb stage while it was being used as a fuel tank up to, and during, the launch. Anything that could be built into the tank would mean mass that would not have to be carried up later, and installation work that the crew would be spared. The catch of course was that it would also have to be something that could withstand the environment of an s-ivb filled with cryogenic pro­pellants, that it could not pose a risk of igniting the propellants, and that it must not interfere with the function of the rocket stage. One item that the engineers decided they could include was the floors of the workshop. How­ever, solid floors could not be used, since they would impede the flow of fuel through the tank. As a result, special floors were designed with a grid pattern that would allow fuel to flow through them.

When the switch was made from the wet workshop to the dry, the grid – pattern floors were no longer needed for their original purpose. However, the design was kept for the dry workshop because it was realized that the grid could serve another purpose as well, solving one of the challenges of life in microgravity. The Skylab astronauts were given special sneakers that had triangular fittings attached to their soles. These pieces would fit into the tri­angles that made up the floor’s grid pattern and lock in place with a small rotation of one’s foot. This allowed the crewmembers to stand in place on the floor without the help of gravity.

Finally, one would reach the farthest point from the Command Module, the bottom “story” of the Orbital Workshop. This was the primary living area of the space station and included its bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, and gym. This area was divided into four major areas: the sleep compartments, the waste-management compartment, the wardroom, and the experiment volume.

Skylab had three sleep compartments, one for each of the astronauts aboard at any time. To make the most of the available space, the beds were arranged vertically in the quarters. Without gravity to keep a sleeper in place, the beds were essentially sleeping bags with extra slits and a vent to make them more comfortable. These were mounted on an aluminum frame with a firm sheet of plastic stretched within it to serve as a “mattress.” A privacy curtain took the place of a door at the entrance to each “bedroom.” Also in each sleep compartment were storage lockers, in which crewmembers could keep their personal items, and an intercom for communications.

The intercoms in the sleep quarters were among several located around the station, which served a dual purpose—they allowed communication both with the ground and throughout the station. Because of the low air pressure on Skylab, sound did not carry far, which could make it difficult to be heard in other parts of the station.

Voice communications with the ground were carried out in two major ways. The primary means of communication was the A Channel, which was used for real-time conversations with Mission Control. The other was в Channel, which was recorded on an onboard tape recorder and periodi­cally “dumped” to the ground and transcribed. This allowed the astronauts to pass along their thoughts about such things as habitability issues on Sky­lab, things that were not urgent but were needed for future reference. The crews were given questionnaires about aspects of life aboard the station and would dictate their answers into the intercom on в Channel.

For Project Mercury, NASA had to quickly develop a worldwide satellite­tracking network so that voice communications, data from spacecraft sys­tems, and commands from the ground could be sent and received. Stations were placed in exotic locations such as Zanzibar and Kano, Nigeria — often with help from the State Department — and were staffed by small teams of NASA employees and contractors. There was no real-time communication between Mission Control and most of these stations; data was relayed via leased commercial phone lines, undersea cables, and radios.

Capability of the system was continuously upgraded during the Gemini program. By the time Apollo 7 flew in late 1968, satellite relay of voice and data permitted Houston to communicate directly with the spacecraft; the remote-site teams were called home, and a unique travel experience disap­peared. But communication was still only via the transmitters and receiv­ers at the tracking stations.

The system inherited by Skylab was called the “Spacecraft Tracking and Data System.” It consisted of twelve stations: Bermuda, Grand Canary island, Ascension Island, St. Johns (Newfoundland), Madrid, Carnarvon and Hon­eysuckle Creek (Australia), Guam, Hawaii, Goldstone (California), Cor­pus Christi (Texas), Merritt Island (Florida), plus the ship Vanguard off the east coast of South America, and sometimes an aircraft (call sign aria) used to fill gaps during launch and reentry. As a result, communication between Skylab and Houston took place only in the brief passes over these stations, often interspersed by an hour or more of silence. The crew could tell where they were around the world by Houston’s calls — “Skylab, Houston, with you at Guam for eight minutes.”

To the left of the sleep compartments was the waste-management com­partment. This room featured a water dispenser that was the microgravity equivalent of a sink, a mirror for personal hygiene, and, of course, the space toilet. The Skylab mission required a level of innovation in this area not achieved in previous spaceflights. While the bag-based system used on pre­vious spaceflights for defecation had not been particularly pleasant, there was not really room on the smaller vehicles for a better means of dealing with the issue. For the comparatively short durations of those missions, it was something that astronauts simply had to bear.

Skylab, however, involved both a long-enough duration to merit finding a better solution as well as the space needed to provide one. For urination, the crewman stood in front of the collection facility with his feet beneath straps to hold himself in place. He urinated directly into a funnel with modest air­flow drawing urine into individual collection bags, one for each crewman. For defecation, he rotated about 180 degrees and seated himself on a small chair on the wall, rather like a child’s potty chair. But here a plastic bag had been placed beneath the seat for each use, which maintained a simple and hygienic “interface” with the astronaut. A lap belt and handholds were pro­vided to allow the user to stay in one place. As with the urine system, air­flow took on some of the role that gravity would play on Earth. An innova­tive feature of the fecal collection system allowed these bags to be placed in a heating unit after mass measurement, then exposed to the vacuum, which dried their contents completely. It was then much lighter and quite hygienic. The dried feces and samples of the urine were saved and returned to Earth for post-mission analysis.

To the left of the waste-management compartment was the wardroom, the station’s combination kitchen, dining, and meeting room. (Explained Kerwin: “Why was it called the wardroom? Because the first crew was all­Navy, and they got to name stuff. The wardroom is the officers’ dining and meeting room in a Navy ship.”) In the center of the room was Skylab’s high-tech kitchen table. Its round center was surrounded by three leaves, one for each crewmember. The flat surface of each of the leaves was actu­ally a lid, which could be released with the push of a button. Underneath the lids were six holes in which food containers could be placed, three of which could be heated to warm food. The trays had magnets for holding utensils in place. The table also featured water dispensers, which could pro­vide diners with both hot and cold water. Both thigh constraints and foot loops on the deck provided means for the astronauts to keep themselves in place while eating.

The walls of the wardroom were lined with stowage lockers and with a small refrigerator-freezer for food storage. The wardroom was one of the most popular places on Skylab for spending time—partially because it had the largest window on Skylab, which could be used for Earth – or star-gazing.

The largest portion of the bottom floor was the experiment area, which was home to several of the major medical experiments. The Lower Body Negative Pressure experiment was a cylindrical device, which an astronaut would enter, legs first, until the lower half of his body was inside. After a pressure seal was made around his waist, suction would then decrease the pressure against his lower body relative to the atmospheric pressure around his upper torso. The pressure difference would cause more blood to pool in his lower extremities, simulating the conditions he would experience when he returned to Earth and gravity caused a similar effect.

Also in the experiment volume was the ergometer, essentially a wheelless exercise bicycle modified for use in microgravity. Like its Earthbound equiv­alents, the ergometer featured pedals, a seat, and handlebars, but it was also equipped with electronics equipment for biomedical monitoring.

The Metabolic Analyzer was used with the ergometer to monitor the crew’s respiration. The device itself was a rectangular box with a hose connected to a mouthpiece. The user would put on a nose clip and then breathe in and out through the mouthpiece. The analyzer could not only measure respira­tion rate and breath volume but also, via a mass spectrometer, the composi­tion of the air he exhaled and thus oxygen consumption and carbon diox­ide production.

Another experiment in that area of the workshop was the Human Vestib­ular Function device, which was basically a rotating chair. With an astro­naut sitting in it, the chair could be rotated about the axis of the subject’s spine at speeds up to thirty revolutions per minute, either clockwise or coun­terclockwise. The purpose of the experiment was to test how their vestibu­lar systems (responsible for balance and detection of rotation and gravity) adapted to the microgravity environment. The experiment had been per­formed with the astronauts on the ground to provide a baseline and was per­formed again in orbit for comparative results.

Another major item located in the experiment room was only an experi­ment in the broadest sense—that life on Skylab was all part of research into long-duration spaceflight habitability factors. Because of the way the low­er deck was divided and because the shower was a later addition to the sta­tion’s equipment, the shower was instead located in the larger, open experi­ment area instead of being located in the waste-management facility, which in other respects was Skylab’s bathroom.

Water posed a potential hazard in Skylab. In weightlessness water would coalesce into spheres, which could float around the spacecraft. If they weren’t collected, they presented the risk that they could get into electronic devic­es or other equipment and cause damage. Small amounts of water could be easily managed, but large amounts were generally avoided in spaceflight. To wash their hands, for example, astronauts would squirt water into a cloth and then clean their hands with it rather than putting the water directly on their hands.

The shower provided means for a true spaceflight luxury. In it, astronauts could clean themselves in a manner that, while not quite the same as the way they would shower on Earth, was much closer. They would pull a cylindri­cal curtain up around themselves and then squirt warm water directly on their bodies using a handheld spray nozzle. Confined within the curtain, the water posed no risk to the spacecraft and after the shower could be cleaned up with towels or a suction device. The crews found the suction it provided inadequate for drying off completely and so used lots of towels. Nevertheless,

15- Lousma demonstrates Skylab’s shower.

at least one crewmember thought this “luxury” was both unnecessary and a gross waste of time.

At the center of this lowest floor of Skylab, the very opposite point from where the tour began, was the Trash Airlock. The s-ivb stage from which Skylab was modified had two tanks that originally would have been used to store the propellant: a larger tank for the fuel, liquid hydrogen, and a small­er tank for the oxidizer, liquid oxygen. The entire manned volume of the workshop was inside the stage’s liquid hydrogen tank. The liquid oxygen tank, which was exposed to vacuum, was used for trash storage. Between the two was an airlock that was used to transfer trash into the storage area. The oxygen tank was vented to space, creating a vacuum that helped pull the trash through, but it had a screen to prevent any trash from escaping. The arrangement meant that the waste generated on Skylab was stored safe­ly instead of becoming orbital debris.

The task of turning a spent rocket stage into a livable space station was prov­ing more difficult than anticipated. The man in the spacesuit was attempt­ing to carry out the tasks that would convert the used, empty fuel tank into an orbital workshop. It was a daunting challenge. If the series of steps could be carried out, it would provide an expedient path to homesteading space. If not the station as designed would be worthless, an unusable husk. For the plan to work, when it came to these tasks, one of the agency’s great truisms definitely applied—failure was not an option.

Almost immediately, he ran into problems.

Loosening the bolts before him was a simple enough task on the ground. Here though it was substantially more difficult. When he turned his wrench, instead of the bolts rotating, he did. The bolts were held in place, and since he was floating, there was nothing to keep him still. The gloves he had to wear only made things worse. Their bulkiness made it difficult to perform precise tasks. The fact that his suit was pressurized meant that it took effort to move the fingers of the glove. After a while, his hands would become sore from the effort. It was too much to ask, he realized. It couldn’t be done. Reluctantly, he signaled to the safety divers to bring him to the surface.

That revelation was to be a turning point in the development of Skylab, America’s first space station, and may well have saved the program. The man in the spacesuit was Dr. George Mueller, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (nasa’s) associate administrator of Manned Space Flight, and the event took place in a water tank at nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center (msfc) in Huntsville, Alabama. Mueller had been trying to find the best solution to the latest in a string of difficult decisions involv­ing the orbital workshop. His quest for answers had led him to get hands – on experience himself with a simulated space station.

i. George Mueller (left) and Wernher von Braun prepare for dives.

The agency had already decided that a Saturn ivb rocket stage would be converted for use as the workshop. (Its name is a relic from early nomencla­ture for the Saturn rocket series.) Because launching more weight into space requires more fuel, every effort is made to reduce weight on a spacecraft. Dividing rockets into stages is one way that can be accomplished—when the fuel in one section is gone, that section separates, and the rest of the rock­et continues. That way the rocket doesn’t have to haul the weight of empty fuel tanks the entire trip.

Though there was agreement that the s-ivb stage should be used for the workshop, there were two schools of thought as to how that should be done. The initial idea was to launch the workshop as part of a Saturn IB rocket, the smaller of the two Saturn boosters. That rocket was not powerful enough to deliver a completed workshop to space, but it could place its s-ivb upper

stage in orbit. Once the s-ivb was there, a crew of astronauts could convert the spent stage into a space station. Because this plan involved the station being launched full of fuel, it was known as the “wet workshop.”

The other option was to use the larger and far more powerful Saturn v. That booster also used an s-ivb as its third stage. The workshop could be readied for use on the ground, and stacked on the Saturn v in place of the third stage. The first two stages would carry the heavy payload into orbit. This latter option was the “dry workshop.”

As NASA’s supply of Saturn v boosters was dedicated to the upcoming mis­sions to carry men to the moon, the wet workshop option would allow the orbital workshop program to proceed simultaneously with the Apollo moon­landing program, using the more readily available Saturn IB rockets.

The plan, though, depended on the ability of astronauts to convert a fuel tank, which had just expended its supply of volatile liquid hydrogen and oxygen, into a home where they could safely live during the months to come. The crew would have to dock with the spent stage and then, working in bulky pressure suits, remove several bolts to gain access to its large liq­uid hydrogen tank. Then the astronauts would “passivate” the tank, mak­ing sure all of the propellant was gone and filling it with breathable gasses. The passivated stage would then have to be fitted with the equipment that would turn it into a laboratory and home. Those opposed to the wet work­shop option argued that the required tasks would be too difficult for the astronauts to carry out while wearing spacesuits and working in a vacuum and in weightlessness.

Mueller, who initially supported the wet workshop, joined its detractors in 1969 following his visit to the Marshall Space Flight Center. He had been invited by the center’s director, Dr. Wernher von Braun, who had been the leader of a team of German rocket scientists who were brought to the United States at the end ofWorld War II. As happened more than once during their tenures as center directors, von Braun was in disagreement with Bob Gilruth, his counterpart at the Houston, Texas, Manned Spacecraft Center (msc), later renamed Johnson Space Center (jsc ). George Mueller recalled: “The resolution of the question of a wet workshop versus a dry workshop occurred when I was met at the Marshall Space Flight Center airport by Eberhard Rees. He said that Wernher had asked him to show me the newest facility at [Marshall]. He took me to an old hangar, which was most unremarkable.

And then he took me inside, and here was a gigantic tank.

“As we climbed up, he explained that they had decided that they need­ed a neutral-buoyancy facility to establish the feasibility of carrying out the refurbishment of the wet workshop. There were a number of technicians and several spacesuited divers working in the tank.

“Eberhard did not know what my reaction would be. This was an unauthor­ized capital expenditure and broke most of the rules for facility mods—typi­cal Wernher. I guess to Eberhard’s surprise, my first reaction was that I want­ed to try out the tasks that the astronauts were being asked to do myself. So that’s where I learned how to scuba dive. Once I tried even the simple task of closing the valves between the tanks, it convinced me that we couldn’t rebuild and refurbish the tank in orbit, so that led me to the decision to go with the dry workshop.”

After the dive Mueller began the process of making his decision a real­ity. “Bob Gilruth took a little more convincing, and Bob Thompson [the Skylab program director at msc] was dead set against it. I really had to just say, we’re going to do it, because I couldn’t convince them,” he said. “What they were trying to do, connecting all those things up, never would have happened.”

It’s interesting when you stop and think about it,
how you get thrust very unexpectedly into an environment that
a few years later is the apex of your career.

You were doing stuff that had never been done before,
and you were successful.

Jim Splawn

“Eighteen days before launch—let’s see, that would be April 26—the Sky – lab 2 crew entered quarantine and started eating our carefully measured flight-type diets,” Joe Kerwin recalled. “That meant saying goodbye to our wives and families and moving into a couple of trailers on jsc property. Yes, we missed our families, but the arrangement was efficient, and we were in peak concentration mode. Nobody could come near us without a brief physical exam and a surgical mask. Launch readiness was everything. One of us recalled Coach Vince Lombardi’s famous and often misinterpreted quote about football: ‘Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.’ He did not mean that football was more important than God, country, or fami­ly, just that on Sunday afternoon, you should not be thinking of that oth­er stuff. That’s where we were. It was a good, team feeling; I remember all six of us [the prime crew of Conrad, Kerwin, and Weitz and their backups, Rusty Schweikart, Story Musgrave, and Bruce McCandless] standing out­side the trailer each evening at bedtime, joking as we filled our urine spec­imen bottles for science.”

By launch morning the uncertainties of the Skylab program had practically vanished. All the battles that had been fought to improve the hardware and

procedures were over. Chris Kraft, jsc director, had called the first crew in to his office about a month earlier to tell them to knock off trying to change the medical experiments and start working to accomplish them; and Com­mander Pete Conrad had been able to say that they were already there. Train­ing was over. They felt confident of their abilities and trusted the team. The crew and NASA were ready to fly and had no premonition of disaster. “You could say Fate had us right where she wanted us,” Kerwin said.

With only one day left on the countdown for their own launch, the crew watched from the roof of the Manned Spaceflight Operations Building the Skylab station launch on a beautiful May morning. The Saturn v rose slowly and majestically from the pad and disappeared into the eastern sky. The launch looked good. They went back down the stairs to the crew quar­ters conference room, where the flight director voice loop from Houston’s Mission Control was set up so that they could listen to the activation activ­ities as they lunched and did a last-minute review of the next day—their launch day.

According to Owen Garriott, “May 14, 1973, was a beautiful day at the Cape. All of the three planned Skylab crews, along with tens of thousands of space enthusiasts, were in attendance to watch what would be the final launch of NASA’s most powerful launch vehicle. It all appeared from the ground to go perfectly with a long, smoky trail headed into the blue sky.

“Jack [Lousma] and I headed back to our usual motel—Holiday Inn, Cocoa Beach—to change into flight suits and head for Patrick Air Force Base where our NASA T-38 was ready for a quick flight back to Ellington Air Force Base, near the Manned Spacecraft Center. We wanted to be home as soon as pos­sible to observe the Skylab telemetry and verify that our home to be was in good shape for human visitation and also to watch the launch of Pete, Joe, and Paul scheduled for the next morning from Mission Control.

“As we were walking out to our rental car for the short drive to Patrick, we noticed the recently appointed director of the Marshall Space Flight Cen­ter, Dr. Rocco Petrone, walking along the porch in front of his second sto­ry room. ‘Looked like a great launch,’ we shouted. ‘Yes, but don’t get your expectations too high. There were some telemetry glitches observed.’

“With no more time for discussion, we headed for our aircraft, hoping that the telemetry issues would be resolved by the time of our arrival in Houston. We could only speculate about what these ‘glitches’ were, never imagining

16. Skylab was launched as the third stage of a modified Saturn v rocket.

the problems to be encountered and then solved in the next ten days.” That apparently beautiful launch was when things started to fall apart. The problems didn’t surface all at once. There had been a “g spike” — a sud­den, brief shock to the vehicle—about forty-five seconds after launch as the Saturn booster was accelerating through the speed of sound. Around a min­ute after liftoff, and very near the time of “max-Q” when the atmospheric pressure on the speeding vehicle is at the maximum, telemetry received in Houston indicated the micrometeoroid shield had deployed prematurely,

an anomaly not fully appreciated as the Saturn kept going and deposited Skylab in the correct orbit.

Once the s-ivb stage was in orbit, a planned sequence began to reconfig­ure it from its launch mode to its operational arrangement. The first deploy­ment action was to jettison the “sla Panels,” four large panels that protect­ed the docking adapter and atm during launch. That action went well. The next sign that something was wrong began to surface as workshop temper­atures started to climb above normal, but the full extent of the problem was still not apparent, and the deployment appeared to be going well. Mission Control proceeded with the next scheduled step: rotating the atm ninety degrees to face the sun and opening its four solar panels into their “wind­mill” configuration. That too went smoothly.

Then it was the turn of the Solar Array System, the main solar panels on the workshop itself. First the Solar Array System beams, the solar panel housings, would be deployed to ninety-degree angles from the workshop; then the panels themselves would unfold accordion-style. Fully open they would provide two-thirds of Skylab’s electrical power. And after they were open, the thermal/meteoroid shield over which they’d been folded (the “heat shield”) could itself be popped up away from the workshop’s exterior sur­face to assume its function of reflecting the sun’s heat and breaking up small meteoroids. The beams did not deploy. And the workshop surface and inter­nal temperatures continued to climb. Something was wrong with the heat shield, which should have kept the workshop cool even before deployment. Mission Control went into troubleshooting mode.

By late afternoon they finally realized the truth: the heat shield was gone. That G spike during launch had been the shield departing the vehicle. The anomalous telemetry had been completely accurate. Further there was no response at all from Solar Panel 2, indicating that it was probably gone as well. Solar Panel 1 was showing just a trickle of current, leading controllers to believe it was still present but stuck shut. NASA was soliciting high-reso­lution photography from other satellites and ground-based telescopes.

While the full import of what had taken place would take some time to pin down exactly, it became very apparent very quickly that something very bad had happened. For those involved in the program, 14 May would be an unforgettable day; many can still recall what they were doing when they learned that what had looked like a perfect launch had in fact been anything but and that years’ worth of work was in real danger of being lost. Mar­shall Skylab program director Lee Belew remembers that he was at Kenne­dy Space Center that day, having traveled down there to watch the launch. One particular memory that has stuck with him over the years since was being grilled by the national media for answers that were still unknown. “I was interviewed by Walter Cronkite at the Cape, and of course, he asked pretty tough questions.”

Phil Shaffer was in Mission Control at Johnson Space Center. He was not actually on duty; he was scheduled for a shift as flight director for launch and rendezvous the following day, overseeing the launch of the first crew. “Don Puddy was the flight director for the workshop launch,” he said. “Because I was going to sit down to launch sl-2 [with the first crew] the next day, I was there, more than willing to be a ‘gofer’ for him. When the telemetry just went nuts and those pieces started coming off, we didn’t know what had happened except that a lot of things we were seeing from telemetry didn’t make any sense. We certainly hadn’t seen anything like that in any of the simulations. We got to orbit, and Don started trying to get the post-insertion sequence to work. Many of the actions he was trying to get done involved equipment that was missing now. It wasn’t working, and the instrumentation was so screwed up we really couldn’t tell what was going on. Then additional unex­pected things began to happen on orbit, began to not work. Probably the best thing I did for anybody that day was start a malfunction list. Puddy didn’t have time for it. Two or three hours into the business, Gene Kranz leaned over the console and said, ‘You guys better start a malfunction list.’ I told him, ‘Here it is; it’s got forty-seven items on it, or some number like that, things that need to be pursued.’ So at that point we were stalled out on the post-insertion activation sequence. And stuff just kept failing, and we could see it was beginning to get hot inside Skylab.”

Though things looked grim, Shaffer had a moment that night of being able to view the Skylab in a more positive light. “I remember distinctly, the night of the day of Skylab i launch, I knew it was going to come over Hous­ton,” he said. “And I went out to look for the ‘string of pearls’ as it had been advertised—the [booster’s second stage] stage, the sla panels, the refrigera­tor cover, and the Skylab itself. There it was, a big ol’ string of pearls, going across the sky. Outstanding. Beautiful. It was really spectacular. It was a crystal-clear night in Houston, and I watched it for a very long time, almost from horizon to horizon.”

As controllers began to determine what the problems meant for the work­shop, the first crew realized what it meant for them: they weren’t going to Skylab the next morning. Instead they were going back to Houston. Ken – win recalls that his family and friends were having a prelaunch party at the Patrick Air Force Base Officers’ Club in Melbourne. “I called my wife and told her the news. ‘No launch tomorrow. But might as well keep partying!’” The next morning the crew manned their T-38 jets at Patrick and flew back to Houston. They joined a full-scale battle in progress: the NASA/contrac – tor engineering workforce versus Skylab’s problems.

As it happened, the high atmospheric forces near “max-Q” had caused the shield to be torn off the Workshop and drop into the Atlantic Ocean, all unseen from the ground. “Max-Q is a very dangerous, peculiar place, and the pressures are really peculiar at that point and shock waves all over the place,” Shaffer said. “If something is going to come undone, that’s where everybody says it’s going to come undone.” And to make matters worse the meteoroid shield also tore one of the workshop solar arrays completely off, dropping it into the ocean as well. The second workshop solar array had a different story. In this case the departing shield caused a metal strap to wrap across the array, which turned out to likely have been a blessing in disguise. On the one hand the strap caught the array and prevented it from deploy­ing properly, leading to severe power limitations after launch. On the other hand, the strap held the array in place during the launch so that it couldn’t be ripped off too, a life-saving event for the Skylab science program, which needed the power the array would later be able to generate.

“We knew quickly something was wrong, that’s for sure,” said Marshall’s George Hardy, who had gone down to Houston to monitor the launch and ended up staying there for much of the time before the first crew launched, serving essentially as a liaison between the operations team in Houston and the engineering team at msfc. “We knew there’d been a failure of the heat shield to deploy, or to properly deploy. We weren’t quite sure about that. Because there weren’t any extensive strain gauges and instrumentation and things like that on it that, we couldn’t pinpoint a structural problem of some kind exactly. But we knew that it wasn’t functioning properly. We weren’t getting thermal protection. It was a battle for the first days.”

That battle was fought on several fronts. First was keeping the vehicle in shape for the crew’s arrival, whenever that would be. (The orbit of Skylab

yj. The exterior of the Orbital Workshop, stripped of its heat shield, began to bake in the solar radiation.

passed directly over the Kennedy Space Center every five days, so launch opportunities would be at five-day intervals after the original 15 May launch date.)

Skylab’s only source of power was the atm solar panels, and every watt was needed, which meant keeping the atm pointed straight at the sun. But with the heat shield gone, pointing at the sun was the worst direction for work­shop temperatures. It was 130 degrees Fahrenheit inside the workshop. The results of the high temperature could be disastrous: food might spoil; nox­ious chemicals might outgas from the walls; batteries and other equipment might be degraded. The materials lab at Marshall had conducted a tempera­ture overtest on the substances used inside the workshop to make sure there wouldn’t be an outgassing problem if temperature exceeded nominal levels but had only run the test up to over 100 degrees. After the loss of the heat shield, they resumed their testing, this time at higher temperatures.

The flight controllers battled this dilemma for ten days. With no pana­cea for the conflicting problems of heat and attitude available, those days were filled with constant compromise between the dual concerns. They’d roll Skylab away from the sun, to keep the temperatures from increasing. Power would drop, battery charge decrease, and a roll back toward the sun would have to happen.

The question of controlling the station’s attitude was further complicat­ed by its means of attitude control. Skylab had the three large momentum wheels, like large gyroscopes, called “Control Moment Gyros.” By order­ing the cmg’s electrical system to push against the gimbals of one or more of these cmg momentum wheels, it was possible to move the direction in space in which Skylab was pointed, thanks to the principle of conservation of angular momentum. So it was easy enough to change the station’s direc­tion. But when this was done, other small forces were encountered (techni­cally called “gravity gradient forces”) that tended to drive Skylab’s attitude in another direction, perhaps opposite of the one desired. This problem was not so easily solved and required firing the cold gas jets in space to hold the desired attitude. Further complicating the matter, the amount of cold nitro­gen gas was strictly limited, and if this procedure were to continue for too many days, perhaps twenty or thirty, all the gas would be expended and attitude control would be lost. So a fix was needed in rather short order to save the Skylab missions.

For ten days mission controllers worked constantly to preserve the del­icate balances needed to keep the station fit for when its first crew arrived. Over half the supply of the nitrogen gas for the entire mission was used in these ten days. “It was ironic,” Hardy said. “There was a preferred orienta­tion for generating electric power. However, it turns out that most of the time that was the most adverse orientation for the workshop overheating and for drag.

“It was management of the orientation of the workshop on a continual basis, going to one particular attitude knowing that it was penalizing you in some areas. But you had to do that, and you figure out how long you have to stay there and then get back in the other attitude. It was a real balanc­ing act between those three things. The operations people did a fantastic job in that, and of course we loved the great engineering team. There were real questions about whether the batteries would actually survive that kind of cycling. We just started cycling, and I guess we learned a lot of things.” But they kept Skylab alive.

The second front of the battle to save Skylab was finding a way to erect a substitute for the heat shield. The spacecraft, its contents, and any crew just could not tolerate those temperatures. And whatever NASA came up with, they had to be quick about it. The longer launch was postponed, the less likely it was that Skylab would remain salvageable.

Engineering teams were formed at NASA centers across the country and told to forget the paperwork for a while. “It was an opportunity for some imagination,” Shaffer said. “It was an environment where if you had a good idea, it was really easy to get it executed, ’cause all of the energy was there to do that.” The astronauts from the later Skylab missions and the back­up crews were sent out to the centers to provide an operations viewpoint for the efforts.

“I remember leaving the launch site and coming back to the Holiday Inn,” Jack Lousma said. “I met Ed Gibson and Julie, and they had more word than I did. They were somewhat disappointed and discouraged. I was thinking, at least the Skylab is up there, and even though it’s not perfect, there’s proba­bly something we can do about it; at least it’s up there. I had no other knowl­edge, and no one else did either. I didn’t know what the extent of the dam­age was, or if I should feel confident that something could be salvaged. But I knew at least it was up there. And that was somewhat heartening.

“I went on to Houston because they hadn’t figured out what the problem was for a short period of time. I wasn’t there long, because we had to find out what was wrong with the Skylab and figure out what to do about it. I remember coming to work one morning, and Al Shepard said ‘I want you to go to Langley and help them develop one of the fixes for the thermal shield.’ I didn’t go home, I didn’t get any clothes, I didn’t do anything, I just got in a T-38 and flew there directly. I spent about three days there and worked all day and all night with those guys at Langley to develop one of the concepts that was being proposed. This was an inflatable structure [inspired by an ear­lier communications satellite design], where it was a very lightweight mate­rial that would be shaped in the form of a covering, and it would be inflat­ed when it got up there. It was all this silvery material.

“I think we [would have] extended it out the airlock, but I could be cor­rected on that. I don’t remember there being any external tie downs, or anything like that, that we developed. But anyway they had fabricated one of those very quickly, and started the inflation, and tried to deal with those engineering difficulties, and finally made it work. I introduced my crew comments on it as we went along on how to make sure the crew could actu­ally do it and be able to get it to operate.

“But my conclusion after being there for two or three days was that it was not going to be a satisfactory fix. It was too vulnerable to losing its inflation; the dynamics of its inflation and spreading over the workshop were mar­ginal in my estimation. So all of us rendezvoused down at the Cape direct­ly after that. All of us went to the Cape and met with Pete’s crew. I sat and listened to all of the presentations of the fixes that were available, and then I told them that I didn’t think that the one I was working on had top prior­ity. They could make up their own minds, but here’s what I thought about it. It wasn’t one of the ones that went through.”

After all the work was done and all the ideas were brought together and reviewed, three solutions seemed feasible. All three ended up being launched, and two were used.

From the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, a cloth sunshade that would be deployed by flying the Command and Service Module from point to point around the workshop, while the crew would unfold it and secure it to structure. Installation would be feasible but tricky. This one was not used.

From the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, the “Marshall Sail” (also known as the Twin-Pole Sunshade), designed to be deployed by a pair of astronauts during a spacewalk after docking with and activating Skylab, using the Skylab airlock. A solid and elegant solution, it was deployed over the original parasol a few months later by the second crew to extend the life of the parasol’s delicate aluminized Mylar reflective covering material.

From Houston, a “Solar Parasol” (or “jsc Parasol” or just “the para­sol”) — a large square of thin nylon cloth attached to four spring-loaded fish­ing poles and packed in a long metal canister. As luck would have it, there was the Scientific Airlock built into the wall of the workshop on the sun­pointing side. It was designed to allow astronomy and materials experiments in pressure-tight canisters to be pushed right out into vacuum to take their observations. The parasol made some investigators unhappy by monopoliz­ing that airlock for the entire mission. But it played an essential role in sav­ing Skylab, being a quick, safe solution to the heat problem. It was invent­ed by Jack Kinzler.

i8. Jack Kinzier (secondfrom right) explains his parasol concept.

Jack Kinzier graduated from South Hills High School in Pittsburgh in 1938. He was hired at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ Lan­gley Research Center in 1941 as a journeyman toolmaker. His skills earned him multiple promotions, and in 1961 he was assigned to the Manned Space­craft Center in Houston as chief of the Technical Services Division. He nev­er got a college degree, but his “equivalent in experience” was worth at least a master’s in mechanical engineering.

“Different groups were working on sun shields deployed on spacewalks,” Kinzler recalled. “When I realized nobody thought about going inside and doing it the simple way, I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to look around some.’”

He found the experiment airlock on the sunny side of the station—he called it a “Sally Port”—in the trainer in Building 8. “So I had one of my techs go down to Houston and buy four fiberglass extendable fishing poles,” he said. “I drew up a hub with springs attached to the bottom of each pole. Then I had the sheet-metal shop roll up a tube about eight inches in diame­ter. I called up my parachute shop and said, ‘Get me a twenty-four-foot sec­tion of parachute cloth.’

“The machine shop fastened the four fishing rods to my base. I fastened

that base to the floor of our big high-bay shop area. We fastened the cloth to the rods and long lines to the tips of each rod. I lowered the big overhead crane to floor level and swung my four lines over the crane hook. Then I called Gilruth, and everybody came over for a demonstration. I said, ‘I think I’ve got something you’ll like.’

“So they were standing around thinking, ‘What’s Kinzler up to now?’ I raised the crane back up, letting out excess line ’til I had enough clearance, then let the crane pull all four lines simultaneously. It looked like a magi­cian’s act because out came these fishing rods, getting longer and longer. They’re dragging with them fabric. They get all the way to where they’re fully out, and all I did was let go and it went ‘sshum!’ So the springs were on each corner (and each spring pulled a pole outward and downward), and they came down and laid out right on the floor just perfectly. And everybody was impressed, I’ll tell you. They were impressed! So that concept—my con­cept —was chosen for the real thing.”

Kinzler and his techs gladly paid the price for success, working day and night for six days building the flight version (substituting thin nylon for the parachute cloth) and testing it. Afterward he got a lot of fan letters — and from NASA its highest decoration, the Distinguished Service Medal.

Many others were working on the problem at jsc. Ed Smylie, then chief of the Crew Systems Division, remembered: “We constructed an umbrella that would deploy like a flower petal, rather than like a traditional umbrel­la. We covered the assembly with a test canopy filled with holes to reduce air resistance during our deployment tests. On the initial test it worked perfectly. I invited NASA management to review our design. Most of senior management from Johnson, Marshall, and headquarters joined us. Upon deployment the frame twisted itself out of shape and failed completely. The managers shook their heads and went away. When I asked my crew what happened, they said they thought the spring was too weak and installed a stronger spring.

“Shortly after, I had a call; I should abandon our design and support Max Faget [director of engineering at Johnson] in the design of the chosen approach. As I recall, the frame was constructed in the jsc fabrication shop under the direction of Jack Kinzler and Dr. Faget. I can remember work­ing with Max laying out the frame on the floor of the shop in the middle of the night. Max turned to me and said, “Isn’t this fun?” I had not thought of it that way, but he was right. There was intense pressure, but it was a fun kind of pressure.”

Ed shared the fun and the pressure with his key engineers — Jim Correale, Larry Bell, Harley Stutesman, Joe McMann, and others. He set up a clear­inghouse called “Action Central.” All elements of the center used it for get­ting things done quickly. One of his branch chiefs took it upon himself to charter a Learjet to move supplies as needed around the country.

“Everybody was working horrendous hours, and towards the end of those ten days one of my branch chiefs was leaving Building 7A one evening, and as he walked out the back door he simply collapsed,” Smylie recalls. “He was not injured, but his system had simply shut down.

“The briefing of the Skylab 1 crew was held in the ninth-floor confer­ence room [of the main building at Johnson, then called Building 2] after the crew had been quarantined. Everybody had to wear those little paint­er’s masks over their mouths and noses. It was quite a sight to see the astro­nauts, senior management, engineers, and industry types—over a hundred of them—crowded together in that room around the huge table, all wearing those little white masks. After an hour or so everyone’s masks were getting damp and hard to breathe through, so people started moving the masks a little bit and sneaking breaths. Then Pete Conrad stuck a cigar out the side of his mouth and commenced to smoke it—still keeping the mask on his face. Soon everyone was moving the masks away from their mouths so they could breathe. They started wearing them over their ears, on top of their heads, anywhere—but no one took off their mask!”

While the Houston-designed parasol had the advantage of being easy to deploy and thus providing a quick fix to the heating problem, Bob Schwing – hamer, who was the head of the Marshall materials lab, had concerns about its long-term durability. “I was afraid of that because I had run these tests about building the flag, and I knew the nylon wouldn’t stand up very long.” Schwinghamer was also concerned that the station’s TACS thrusters would damage the thin material when they fired. “What if it rips or comes apart totally?”

“For the Marshall Sail, I had used that same rip-stock nylon material, and I had a material called S-13G, which was a thermal-control material, real nice white stuff, very highly reflective,” he said. “When you sprayed it on that sail parachute material, it still had high flexibility. It wouldn’t flake

19. Seamstresses prepare the Marshall Sail sunshade.

off or anything. So we sprayed it with that, and I ran some ten-sun tests in the lab to see how long it would stand up, and we knew it would last for the Skylab mission.

“Then we had some Navy seals in; they packed it. We didn’t have a para­chute packer; they packed it. That thing was pretty big, it was like thirty by forty, I think. We got some seamstresses in from New Jersey to do the sew­ing. I remember that stuff was laying all over the floor, and they were just sewing away, and pulling that big sail through there. And we got that stuff all done in ten days, in time to fly.”

The failure of the micrometeoroid shield had come as a complete surprise to the Skylab engineering team, which had not foreseen even the possibility of its failure. “The meteoroid shield went through design reviews like all the other hardware did,” Hardy said. “There were known design requirements; there were some tests that were done. You couldn’t do a test that exposed it

directly to aerial loading and things like that, obviously. Nobody predict­ing a failure or anything like that. But like a lot of other things, after it hap­pened, you go back and look and see where you were deficient in your anal­ysis and some of your designs, but not prior to launch.

“McDonnell Douglas Huntington Beach was the prime contractor for the Orbital Workshop, which included the heat shield. But other contrac­tors were involved in design reviews and things like that. I don’t know, there could have been somebody out there that was expressing some concern that wasn’t taken into account. But if there was, it was almost after the fact, because I had no knowledge of that.”

While the rescue effort was underway, an investigation was started into the causes of the failure. The board of investigation was chaired by Bruce T. Lundin, director of NASA’s Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center and pre­sented its findings on 30 July. The board determined that the most proba­ble cause of the failure was pressurized air under the shield forcing the for­ward end of the shield away from the workshop and into the supersonic air stream, which tore the meteoroid shield from the workshop. The report stat­ed that this was likely due to flaws in the way the shield was attached to the workshop, which allowed in air.

The failure to recognize these issues during six years of development was attributed to a decision to treat the shield as a subsystem of the s-ivb, based on the presumption that it would be structurally integral to the tank. As a result, the shield was not assigned its own project engineer, who could have provided greater project leadership. In addition, testing focused on deploy­ment, rather than performance during launch. The board found no evidence that limitation of funds or schedule pressure were factors and that engineer­ing and management personnel on Skylab, both contractor and government, were highly experienced and adequate in number.

Resolving one final issue was absolutely essential to Skylab’s long-term success. It was to answer the questions “Is one of the solar array wings still there; what’s wrong with it; and how can we get it deployed?” Related to these were the further questions of how much the crew could do with atm power alone and how they would do it. Even if it were possible to deploy the remaining solar array wing, living off the atm power would be nec­essary when they arrived and until (and if) they got the solar panel open. The crew spent a lot of time with the flight planners, going through all the checklists, and marking them up for low-power operations. General con­clusions were:

With care and frugality, the crew could live in the workshop and do some of the experiments.

They should use lights sparingly and turn them off when they moved and not make coffee or heat food.

The solar physics and Earth resources work should be minimized. (The medical experiments were pretty low power users and ok.)

And so forth.

There was serious doubt that Skylab could go three missions like that or that it would be worth doing. One or two failures would put it out of busi­ness. The science return would be badly hurt. They had to get that solar panel out to save Skylab.

Some images had been obtained. They were blurry but showed that the solar panel was there. What was holding it shut would have to await inspec­tion after crew arrival. But the holdup must have to do with the ripped – off heat shield. Freeing the array would require a spacewalk. And the team had to select a suite of tools for the job right then without waiting for the inspection. Engineering did a superb job of outlining possible situations they might meet and finding a collection of tubes, ropes, and cutters to make up their tool kit.

And soon the decision was made that NASA couldn’t possibly be ready to launch on 20 May. The flight controllers said they could hold on another five days. So they aimed for 25 May, the next fifth-day opportunity to launch.

“I was in the flight operations management room at jsc at the launch on May 14 and spent about the first week down there,” George Hardy remembered. “After the first ten-twelve hours of meetings and looking at data, everybody was walking around with their heads down. I’d just come out of a meeting with Gene Kranz. I felt we’d bought the farm; we’d lost the mission. And Kranz said, ‘No, no, we’ll figure it out. We’ll figure out some way to get this thing done.’ That’s the sort of guy he was, still optimistic.

“The next seven to ten days was remarkable. I stayed down there with the first-line Marshall engineering support group. And, of course, we stayed in touch with what was going on at Marshall. But I got to see firsthand what the jsc folks were doing too. It was quite remarkable.

“We were getting all kinds of suggestions from the public. I still have, tucked away somewhere in shoeboxes or somewhere, letters that I got from people all over the world that had suggestions about what we might do.

“The other thing I remember, Chris Kraft had a meeting every morning in his conference room, and he accepted me in that conference room just like I was one of the jsc guys. We had the best working relationship you can imagine. There was no ‘invented here or there.’ Both centers worked aggres­sively to get their sun shield out, and both of them worked; both of them served their purpose. Those were good days, great days.

“That was something, the first seven days. It was actually ten days, but there was a movie about that time called ‘Seven Days in May,’ and Jim Kings­ley and I joked later about that. It turns out at that point in time we’d worked on Skylab about seven years, and we almost lost it, so we decided we were going to write a book called Seven Years in May.”

About a week after the launch, Hardy left jsc to return to Marshall and oversee his team there. He recalled that Rocco Petrone, who in January of that year had been brought to the center to serve as its new director, was very involved in the discussions about the status of Skylab. “Dr. Petrone would come by every morning and get a briefing on what was going on,” Hardy said. “He’d usually call sometime during the day. And he’d come by every after­noon. And every afternoon we’d have a briefing for him on every problem, all the plans for the next day and everything. He’d come by like six o’clock in the afternoon, and sometimes those briefings would last until midnight. You had to stay on top of it. At that particular time, initially, he hadn’t been [at msfc] but a very short time, and his wife wasn’t here, and he was living in an apartment, so he had a lot of time. He’d come over there and eat Ken­tucky Fried Chicken, or whatever it was we’d ordered for that night, and stay with us. A lot of times he’d stay five or six hours.”

Lee Belew had a similar recollection: “We worked day and night. I mean, absolutely day and night. With Rocco whipping us all the time. He was something else.”

Bob Schwinghamer was also at Kennedy Space Center for the launch. “I was down there on the fourteenth,” he said. “I had the family along for that launch. That was a big deal, Skylab. Right away we started hearing that the temperature was not the way it should be; and they concluded that some­thing had happened with the micrometeoroid shield and everything.

“I hung around the control room as long as I could down there. I final­ly went back to the motel and told everybody, ‘We’ve got to get out of here, and we’re going to leave very early, about three o’clock in the morning,’ and it was about nine or ten then. We drove all the way back, nonstop. And I got in sometime the next day—I don’t know exactly when—went over to Hose, which is where our control center was, and for the most part stayed around there. We started trying to figure out what might have happened, and what should we do.”

Like most at NASA’s manned spaceflight program at that time, Schwing- hamer has memories of long hours of hard work, and as with most at Mar­shall then, Rocco Petrone features prominently in those memories. “It was ten days and ten nights,” Schwinghamer said. “I didn’t go home the first three days. And then after that, Rocco would come in about ten o’clock at night all the time, eleven o’clock, ‘What kind of progress are we making?’ After we started building the sail, I had three teams for around-the-clock coverage on the sail, and I had a big chart in my office, and I had a guy that his responsibility was to log in the results: When did you paint? Have you inspected? All the steps were there, and they were logging them in as they occurred.

“And Rocco would come in at ten or eleven o’clock at night, and he’d say, ‘I’ll be back later.’ Well, hell, you didn’t know if later was in an hour, or two hours, or tomorrow morning. So the first three days, my deputy Gene Allen and I stayed all night. Finally on the third day, we looked at each other, with dark circles under our eyes, and I said, ‘Gene, I can’t keep this up.’ He said, ‘I can’t either.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you what let’s do, let’s go on two twelves, and a little bit extra if it takes it, fifteen, maybe, or whatever. But nominally two twelve-hour shifts.’ Well, we did that after the first three days, and it worked out pretty good. Somebody was always there when Rocco showed up. Oh, he was tough on us. Oh, he was tough. But that’s what it took.”

Schwinghamer recalled that during the preparation of the sail, the process laboratory at Marshall insisted that they should be responsible for spraying the protective coat on it. He warned them that it would probably be more difficult to apply than they were anticipating and said that his materials lab could do it. “They said, ‘Ah, we can do anything,’ And I said, ‘All right go ahead, spray it.’ So I went over there, and it was about six o’clock, seven o’clock in the evening, and I was standing there, and it was the damnedest mess you ever saw. All of a sudden, somebody behind me says, ‘Did you guys ever make any flight hardware in this place?!’ It was Rocco, and he was mad­der than a hornet. It was a mess. He said, ‘Bob, you get everybody that has anything to do with this sail into your office; at eight o’clock tonight we’re going to decide how this gets done.’

“So I called Matt Sebile, the lab director in the process engineering depart­ment. I call him on the phone and he said, ‘Well, I’m cutting the grass, I’d like to get finished.’ I said, ‘I tell you what, I can’t tell you what to do; I’m just a division chief. But if I were you, I’d get my butt over here just as fast as I could.’ And he did, and he had ratty old Bermuda shorts on and dirty ten­nis shoes. At that eight o’clock meeting, Rocco says, ‘All right Schwingham – er, the sail’s your responsibility. J. R. [Thompson, head of crew systems at Marshall], you’re responsible for the deployment and how it gets used. Now get out of here, and get it done.’ Of all things, my dad came down to visit us from Indiana right in the middle of that. I said, ‘Dad, no fishing this time.’ He always used to come down, and I’d take him fishing one time.”

Despite the busy schedule, Schwinghamer did get to talk to his father, once, during the visit, while he “was home shaving one morning, and tak­ing a shower.” His father questioned why his son was spending so much time at work. “He said, ‘Are just you doing that?’ And I said, ‘No, everybody’s doing that.’ He said, ‘I can’t understand that.’ He was the superintendent of a chair factory up there in Indiana. He said ‘You know what, I couldn’t get my people to do that.’ I said, ‘Everybody’s doing that, not just me.’”

While Petrone loomed large in Marshall’s efforts during those ten days, he made at least one contribution of which he was utterly unaware. One eve­ning Schwinghamer found himself in need of some material used in the sail, which was only produced at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Obviously simply ordering the material would have taken far too long; he had to have it right away. As happened often during the around-the-clock work, it was already into the evening when Schwinghamer discovered he needed the material.

“I wanted to get [the center’s] Gulfstream to go up and get that stuff so we’d be there at seven o’clock the next morning and could bring it home by noon the next day,” he said. “Of course, everybody was gone, and you couldn’t get the normal approvals. I tried to call some people at home to get approval to use the Gulfstream. I finally conned somebody — I don’t remember who,

I don’t wanna know—who would give me enough paper that I could go out there and say I need to take the Gulfstream. And we did that.

“And I kept thinking, ‘Rocco Petrone’s the director, if I get caught doing this, I’m done for.’ That would have been a little too far. But since it was at night, there was no call or request or requirement for the airplane, and we got by with it all right. Boy oh boy, that would have been very bad. I can tell you some center directors we had that I could have talked my way out of it, but I couldn’t have done it with him.”

The only-semi-authorized use of the center’s Gulfstream was practically by the book though, compared to another vehicle use Schwinghamer was involved in during that ten-day period. When he ran out of another materi­al he needed one evening, Schwinghamer called Tom McElmurry in Hous­ton for more at around 9:00 or 10:00 p. m. “I called him; I said, ‘Tom, I’ve got to have some of that damn material. Can you bring me some?’ And he said, ‘I think I can.’ He got here at midnight, I’ll never forget. He said, ‘Bob, I’m not flying back to Houston tonight. I’m going to get a hotel room. Can you get me a car?’

“I thought, ‘How am I going to get a car now?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, the lab director’s got a car, and I know where they keep the key.’ The secretary always left the key under the desk. I said, ‘I’ll get you the lab director’s car.’ My thought was, he’s going to take off at six in the morning, and Heinberg wouldn’t come in until seven thirty, and I could get that car back, and he’d never know it was gone. But I worked all night, and I was getting pretty woozy. By that time in the morning, I didn’t think about the damn car any more. The car was sitting out at the Redstone strip.

“Heinberg comes in—the secretary told me this story—he looked through the Venetian blinds, and said, ‘Where the hell is my car?’ She said, ‘Mr. Heinberg, it’s in your parking place.’ He said, ‘You just come over here and look, and the car was gone.’

“So then they called all around, and they had the mps running around looking for the car with the license number and all that crap. And they finally found the car out there at the Redstone airstrip, and somebody out there, said ‘Yeah, Schwinghamer did that.’ So he called me up about ten o’clock that morning, I’ll never forget. And he said, ‘Schwinghamer, you know what, you’re totally irresponsible.” And he hung up. And I thought, ‘Oh, I’m fired.’”

There were several other occasions when the exigencies of the situation meant that protocol was waived in favor of expediency. “We had very strict rules about handling flight hardware,” Schwinghamer said. “You couldn’t just put that in the trunk of your car and drive off. This guy that worked for me had this big Ford van with just two seats in the front. I got so tired calling transportation and then having them show up four or five hours, or the next day, later. And I thought, ‘The hell with it.’ So every time we had to move [something], I’d get him and we’d put it all in the back of that big Ford van and move it.”

On one occasion, though, he had “unofficially” transported some flight hardware for a qualification check, and someone came back and told him it wasn’t working. “And I said, ‘What are you talking about? We checked that thing out ourselves here and it was working fine.’ So I went up there and said, ‘Nothing happened here, did it? I mean, when we moved it?’

“I looked around real carefully, and one corner of that cube was scrunched, and it had green tile in it. And they had green tile on the floor up there. I said, All right, this metal got yielded. I suspect it fell on that corner.’ Finally one guy broke down, and he started crying. He said, ‘I did it, I didn’t mean to.’ I’ll never forget, he was one of the best techs we had. I really hated that. I said, ‘Just forget about it. You get this thing going again, fix it, and I won’t say anything.’ I felt so bad, ’cause he was one of the best techs we had and that would have gotten him in a lot of trouble. And I had a little personal interest too: I thought, next thing you know, they’re going to start inquir­ing about how this stuff gets moved around. We were in it together, I do believe. He fixed everything up, and it worked fine.

“One night I needed something in that same building, and I got in before they closed everything, but I stayed too long, and then I couldn’t get out,” Schwinghamer recalled. “I had what I needed; it was two small parts. And I couldn’t get out. I thought, ‘If I call these damn security guys, they’ll be here in two hours or something. I’ll climb the fence.’ It was one of these fenc­es with that overhanging barbwire. I didn’t think about what the hell I’m going to do when I get up to the barbwire. I cut a big gash in my butt, and I fell off the fence and fell on the ground. It was about eight feet high. And just when I hit the ground, two headlights came on. These darned securi­ty guys drove up and slammed up the brakes and jumped out. One of their names was Miller; I knew him well, ’cause he had nailed me for speeding four or five times. He walked up there, and I’m lying on the ground, saying ‘Oh, my. . And he said, ‘Hell, I should have known it’d be you, Schwing – hamer.’ He didn’t do anything; he let me go. Boogered my butt too.”

“We didn’t let anything deter us in those days,” Schwinghamer said of the construction of the sail. “A lot of funny stuff happened on our way to the Skylab. We did all kinds of stuff in those days. I can remember I was getting in hot water all the time. And it was day and night, I’m telling you what. It was really something. Oh, we did all kinds of stuff like that at that time, but we got her built. And they got it deployed, and the temperature came down real nice.”

A total of seven of the sails were built; two of which were set aside as flight hardware, and the others were designated for testing. “I even had one left and gave it to the Space and Rocket Center out here,” he said.

During the ten days they were grounded, the astronauts of the first crew were still under quarantine and continued to eat their flight diet so as not to ruin the metabolic balance experiment regardless of when they launched. But a trip to Huntsville was necessary, to inspect hardware and discuss repairs with Skylab engineers and to try out the Marshall Sail twin-pole sunshade in their water tank.

“That spacesuited water tank run was a memorable experience,” Joe Ker – win said. “There was an air of quiet intensity. We were all old hands at this, donning the suits, checkout, entry into the water were quick and easy. A pre­liminary version of the sail was ready, and tools were available. We worked our way through the deployment process, noting omissions and improve­ments. We liked what we saw. It was late in the evening when we emerged, and we didn’t know that reporters had gotten wind of the exercise and were clamoring to get in and take pictures. Word came to us, we’d done enough, go back to the motel and home tomorrow; let the backup crew take over. So we returned to the motel, and who should show up but Deke Slayton, carrying a couple of large pizzas and a bottle of wine. Best pizza and wine I ever tasted. Morale was good. Deke knew how to lead. And the metabol­ic balance experiment didn’t suffer. That was the only time we broke the meal regimen.”

Marshall’s Neutral Buoyancy Simulator, large enough to hold full-scale replicas of space hardware underwater, had already played a vital role in the Skylab program in the wet workshop versus dry workshop decision. Now it would make yet another key contribution. “It really proved out to be very,

20. Jim Splawn (left) shows Rocco Petrone (center) and Bill Lucas the mount of the sunshade poles.

very beneficial,” said Jim Splawn, who was the neutral-buoyancy tank manag­er at Marshall at the time. “Because once we had the difficulty at the launch of the Skylab itself heading toward orbit, it really proved its worth because of all the hardware we had to assemble underwater.”

Like so many others involved in the effort to save Skylab, Splawn had been at the sl-i launch and was already putting plans in motion even before boarding the NASA plane for the return flight to Marshall. “Once we knew we had a problem, I got on the phone with the crew back here in Huntsville and said, ‘Hey guys, we’ve got to start thinking about how we may help with the repair — design of tools, the mechanics of the procedures we go through. We need to start thinking about that, not tomorrow, but right now. And just ‘think outside the box,’ as we say today.”

The two biggest tasks were to contribute any ideas as to how the prob­lems with the orbital facility could be fixed and to begin thinking about how they would train the flight crews on the procedures and the tools that would be needed to make the repairs. “And that started within probably an hour or so of knowing we had a problem,” he said.

Once development of the Marshall twin-pole sunshade began, the water

tank played an important role in qualifying the design. Test hardware would be fabricated and tested in the tank, problems would be identified and cor­rected, and the cycle would begin again. “With us being there right next door to the shop areas, we had the run of the entire shop to make whatev­er we needed,” Splawn said. “There were times when the shop would make a welded piece, and we’d grab it and run to the water, and when we would put it in the water, it would sizzle because, luckily, with the close proximity we were just working that fast.”

During that period the tank essentially operated as a twenty-four-hour – a-day facility. “Our wives, our families brought changes of clothes to us; they brought hot meals to us. I have no idea how many hours we went with­out sleep. I think at one point I personally went about thirty-four, thirty-six hours. But it was simply because the adrenaline was flowing; you had a mis­sion, and you felt that it was just absolutely your job to do everything you could to make it happen. And we were no different from dozens and doz­ens of other people at Marshall that were pursuing an answer to the problem that we had. So it was very rewarding to see it all come together eventually and put us in business.” Other key members of the msfc neutral-buoyancy team included Charlie Cooper and Dick Heckman, and astronaut Rusty Schweickart spent a large amount of time working with the team to pro­vide crew operations input.

For Splawn his work on Skylab, and particularly the effort to save the sta­tion, was the highlight of his career. “When we were doing flight crew train­ing, we never dreamed that we would end up doing an exercise like this, to have a salvaging kind of ‘Let’s fix the Skylab for the crew so that they can go and spend their days on orbit and do the things they had been trained to do.’ We never dreamed we’d end up in that kind of posture. But the way it worked out, that really is a highlight of my career, even beyond the flight crew training, which for us was probably what we thought would be the apex of our careers. But that ten days, obviously, topped it.

“For the launch of the last crew, we took all of our staff— all the divers, secretary, everybody—to the Cape and got to see the last launch,” he said.

At the same time that the work was going on to figure out how to erect some sort of sunshade on Skylab, another effort was underway to work out how to free the station’s remaining solar array so that it could deploy and provide power. With an attitude that was typical of people involved in the

2i. When the first crew arrived at Skylab, they discovered that debris had prevented the solar array (white beam at top) from deploying from the workshop (black cylinder at bottom).

project, the engineers took a task that was considered impossible and prompt­ly began working to figure out how to make it happen.

“Six weeks or so prior to that, maybe it was a little longer, we had done a failure modes and effects analysis, which is kind of typical,” said Chuck Lewis, a man-systems engineer at Marshall at the time (not the same as the Chuck Lewis at Mission Control in Houston). “And one of the things that we and jsc did together was a study of what sort of contingency plans were feasible. One of the issues, believe it or not, was if one of the solar arrays mal­functioned. And the answer to that was, ‘It’s not possible [to do anything]. Can’t get there. Don’t even need to worry about doing any analysis on that.’ The message was, ‘You’re not going down the side of the s-ivb. It’s not pos­sible to get down there, because there are no handrails.’ That was the killer in the notion of whether you could do anything about this.”

Just weeks after the task had been deemed impossible, J. R. Thomp­son, who went on to become the director of the Marshall center, and later nasa’s associate administrator, called in Lewis and others after the Skylab had arrived in orbit and controllers had learned that the unfixable problem had occurred. “J. R. Thompson called three or four of us up to the confer­ence room up there,” Lewis said. “He had the whole vehicle on one drawing spread out on a table. And he said, ‘ok, guys, I know we’ve said we aren’t going to do this. But we’re going to do it. We’re going to figure out how to get down there and see what’s going on.’”

Work on solving the task began even before the initial imagery revealed what exactly had happened. “J. R. was jumping the gun a little bit, not knowing what the details were. Essentially telling us, ‘Start thinking hard about this. We don’t know what’s going on yet, but start thinking about it.’” A “war room” was set up to deal with the situation, with communica­tion lines established with other NASA centers and with the contractors who would be able to provide expertise on the equipment either involved in the problem or needed to fix it.

“We were sitting in that office,” Chuck Lewis said, “and at that point we were basically going on a thirty-hours-on and eight-hours-off schedule; you worked till you dropped—which was about thirty hours—and then went home. I spent the first or second night under the conference table in the room under the one-G mock-up in 4619. My wife brought up a sleeping bag, and I sacked out the first night under the conference table, and J. R. Thompson went and slept in that advanced concepts module, which later turned out to be the precursor to Spacelab. And we were all growing beards and had sunken eyeballs and everything else.

“We were all in contact with an awful lot of people. Because at this point the environment had changed from ‘Who are you, what’s your need to know, who do you work for, and why should I give you this information?’ to ‘What can I get for you?’ Managers were walking around asking what we need­ed — money, people, airplanes, whatever—which was a 180-degree reversal from the typical NASA mindset.

“It seemed like everybody in the world had ideas for solutions. And every­body was working on something. So we had the MacDac [McDonnell Douglas] contractors and our NASA guys sitting in the same room across the aisle from one another. Everybody was keeping track of what was going on. It was the day after launch because everybody was working—Boeing and MacDac and Martin and a bunch of people were working overnight to put concepts together.

“We were being called constantly. The phone was ringing off the wall; everybody had an idea. Every now and then Thompson would come in, and he’d have some reporter calling him on the line, and the typical question was, ‘What are you guys doing?’ And Bob’s answer typically was, ‘It’s what we’re not doing that’s easier to answer. Ask us what we’re not doing, and that’s an easy answer. We’re doing everything.”

Relatively early in the discussions, the idea had arisen of conducting a “stand-up eva,” in which the first crew would fly their Command Module around to the stuck solar wing, open the spacecraft’s hatch, and one crew­member would stand up through the open hatch and attempt to free the array. They got in touch with their counterparts at Johnson Space Center, who said they had been thinking the same thing. “We’d been sitting there with a mock-up on the table, playing around with toothpicks and strings,” Lewis said. “We kinda brainstormed that together and thought what we need to do is figure out something to take up there that will let you poke and prod and maybe pull on something.”

By the morning after the sl-i launch, someone had found a lead on just such a tool. “About nine o’clock in the morning, one of the MacDac guys poked me on the shoulder and said, ‘Chuck, we just learned about a com­pany in Centralia, Missouri, called A. B. Chance Company,’” Lewis said. “They made what they called hot poles for linemen to use from the ground to reach up and activate breakers and stuff like that. They were fiberglass collapsing poles.

“[The Mcdonnell Douglas engineer] said, ‘We found out they also have a number of detachable tools that go on the end of these poles. It might be that if you call these guys, there might be something useful there.’ Anyway, the MacDac guy gave me the phone number for this A. B. Chance Compa­ny, and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll give them a call.’

“So I gave the guys a call, and I talked to the first person who answered and kind of explained the situation. I said, ‘This is Chuck Lewis, and I work for Marshall, and you probably know that we’re having a little trouble with the last launch, and we think you guys might have a tool with some end effectors on the end that we might be able to use.’ The answer I got back was, ‘Well yes, we do, we have a lot of those, and I can send you a catalog right out.’”

Of course, with the crew launch at that point scheduled just days later on 20 May, a mail-order catalog wasn’t going to be anywhere near fast enough. Lewis explained the situation and was directed to the next person up the ladder at the company, who told him that the same – or next-day delivery he needed just wouldn’t be possible because of an airline strike.

“I said, ‘That’s ok, no problem, no problem. Let me talk to the next guy up,’” Lewis said. “He said, ‘ok, I’ll let you speak to the product manager.’ So a guy came on the phone, and his name was Cliff Bosch.”

Bosch told him that A. B. Chance did carry the sort of tools that it sound­ed like NASA needed, took his phone number, and promised to call back in fifteen minutes with an inventory of possible solutions.

“So I let him go, and about that time, the same guy that had original­ly clued me about the A. B. Chance company bumped me on the shoul­der again and said MacDac had been working on an automatic, pneumat­ically operated nibbling tool that you could pull the trigger, and it would nibble through,” Lewis said. “They’d been working on that all night, and [the president of McDonnell Douglas] wanted to bring it out, and he was headed to Huntsville, flying his Aerocommander, and if the guy from A. B. Chance really came up with anything, he’d land at the airport in Cen – tralia and pick it up.

“So when Cliff called back, I asked him how things went, and he said, ‘Oh I haven’t had so much fun in a long time. It’s the first time I’ve ever done this; I walked through the stock room with a box in my hands, and I just picked up stuff off the shelves—now how do I get it to you?’

“And I said, ‘Well, do you have a little airport there in Centralia?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Well, the president of MacDac is going to pick it up in his Aerocommander and bring it to Huntsville.’ And he said, ‘Hell no, you guys don’t know how to use this stuff; you need somebody there to tell you how to use it. Has he got an extra seat?’ So we negotiated back and forth, but the upshot was that Cliff came to Huntsville.”

By the time Bosch arrived at Marshall, first-crew backup astronauts Sto­ry Musgrave and Rusty Schweickart had joined Lewis’s team in working on the solution to the stuck solar array. When Bosch arrived in the high-bay room with the full-size Skylab mock-up, he and the team all sat in a circle on the concrete floor, and he began showing them everything he had brought in his box. “We all sat down cross-legged on the floor, and it was kinda like opening presents at Christmas time,” Lewis said. “He had all kinds of stuff. He must have had thirty or forty pounds worth of end effectors, and two of the extendable poles.”

One of Bosch’s tools, in particular, struck the team at Marshall as having potential. “The one thing they had that was really neat was this scissorslike

22. Ed Gibson (from left), Rusty Schweickart, and Pete Conrad participate in discussions about saving Skylab.

cutter that they used to clip electrical cables, that was kinda like the tree trimmer,” Lewis said. “The guys at Marshall re-engineered that in about a day and a half to provide some extra mechanical advantage because they did the analysis on the strap—we’d figured out the material by that time—and we knew what sort of load it was going to take for those jaws to get through that and whether they were going to be able to pull on it. So they put a dou­ble-pulley arrangement in there that was not there originally.”

Of course modifying a tool for spaceflight and actually being able to fly it are two different things. “They had to get that through stress test and every­thing else,” Lewis said. “And how it usually goes is it takes forever. Well, in

this case what they had done was to set up stations, just like college regis­tration. Station one, there was a desk out in front of the office, and some­body would be there with a rubber stamp. Put your drawing down, stamp it, take it over to station two, stamp it. And of course, while all of this was going on, we still had managers going through, saying, ‘What can we do to help? What do you need, money?’ So we had a lot of support.”

(That support wasn’t just limited to people within NASA, either, as Steve Marks, who was working at the time as a NASA aerospace education special­ist, recalls. Marks was involved in an effort to explore the untapped poten­tial of television for NASA education and was transporting some equipment for that project to Marshall. Driving late at night, he was pulled over by a police officer for speeding. However, when the officer saw the NASA logo on the van, and Marks explained that he was delivering equipment to Marshall, the officer promptly sent him on his way—without a ticket.)

While the team at Marshall was going through the goodies that Bosch brought, another team took the poles to look into how they could be stored in the equipment bay of the Command Module. (Ultimately, the collapsible A. B. Chance poles would not be used, and NASA would instead re-create a modified version consisting of segments that could be assembled.) By that afternoon, the group working that issue at Kennedy said that they believed they had figured out how to store poles in the Command Module, but they wanted to actually see what they were working with to be sure.

“And J. R. came striding in; he strode into our meeting circle on the floor,” Lewis said. “We were still sitting cross-legged on the floor of the high-bay area, and he said, ‘Where’s this guy from Centralia, the guy with the tools? ’ Cliff raised his hand. J. R. said, ‘Your plane leaves for the Cape in forty-five minutes, can you be ready?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, give me a chance to call my wife.’ He hadn’t talked to her since he left that morning for work. He’d had a glass of orange juice, that was it. So he called his wife, and he said—at least, this is what he reported back—he said, ‘I asked her to pack me a bag, and send it on a plane to Florida. I tried to explain what was going on, and I promised I’d explain it when I had a chance.’ I think it was the Gulfstream that he got on and took his tools, with the exception of the flight items that our guys were still running through the machine shops.

“My recollection is, it was about a week and a half before he got home,” he said. “To me, that’s just a wonderful story, and it’s such a wonderful exam­ple of what was going on around the world.”

During the ten-day period between the troubled launch of the Skylab on 14 May 1973, and the launch of the first crew on 25 May, three completely independent repair methods had been conceived and built by the NASA team and tested and practiced by the flight crews who would deploy them.

“I consider these ten days the crowning achievement of NASA’s real-time performance in their near half-century of existence—only matched in the recovery of the Apollo 13 crew a few years before,” Owen Garriott said. “With Skylab, however, all NASA centers and thousands of civil servants and space contractors were involved in saving the program.

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.”