To start with, I was out in California
in Huntington Beach. And I got this call,
and it was the good Robert Crippen who was calling.
He said, “We had a drawing, and your name was drawn to be
a crewmember on smeat.” And I said, “What the hell is smeat?”
Bo Bobko
smeat, the Skylab Medical Experiment Altitude Test, was a full-length simulation of a Skylab mission. The crew selected for the test would spend fifty-six days in a spacecraft mock-up without the benefits of actually being in space. Selection for the mission might seem a dubious honor, but for the commander of the chosen crew, things had been much, much worse.
“June io, 1969, was probably one of the low points in my life,” remembered astronaut Bob Crippen. On that date the future pilot of the first Space Shuttle flight learned that the project to which he had dedicated the past three years of his life was over. The U. S. Air Force had canceled its Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, leaving Crippen and his fellow members of the Air Force’s astronaut corps uncertain as to what the future held. Beginning almost four years earlier, a total of seventeen astronauts had been selected by the Air Force from the ranks of military pilots. During that time they had completed training on the NASA-developed Gemini spacecraft, which was to have been used in the Air Force program. They had also undergone training on the tasks they were to perform on the space-based laboratory.
At the time the program was canceled, the members of the corps were excited about the prospect of spaceflight, but now the Air Force would no longer have need for astronauts. The nation’s civilian space program, on the other hand, still had an astronaut corps, but that group had become overly
crowded as well. The last class of astronauts NASA had selected, a second group of scientist astronauts brought into the corps two years earlier in 1967, had dubbed themselves the “Excess Eleven” (or, in test-pilot terminology, xs-ii) when they realized just how low their odds were of being assigned to a spaceflight anytime in the near future.
Crippen said that after the program was canceled, “We sat around, and it seems like for a month afterward, we’d go to the bar every night at probably about 2 o’clock in the afternoon and have a wake. One day, I remember a crew meeting, and we were trying to figure out what we were going to do, and Bo [Bobko] said, ‘Why don’t we ask NASA if they could use any of us?’ And we said, ‘Bo, that’s the dumbest damn idea I ever heard. They’re canceling Apollo flights, and they’ve got more astronauts than they know what to do with.’
“But long story short, somebody asked. In fact, in some of my talks, especially with kids, I always remember Bo asked me that question, which I thought was dumb. It doesn’t hurt to ask, even if you think you know the answer. It really doesn’t.”
And, seemingly against the odds, the answer was “Yes.” The request for the mol astronauts to be accepted into NASA’s astronaut corps made its way to Office of Manned Space Flight associate administrator George Mueller, who was near the end of his tenure with the agency. The cancellation of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory marked the end of a period during which Congress had essentially forced NASA and the Air Force to compete with each other. Now NASA was beginning to make plans for its next crewed spacecraft, the Space Shuttle. Mueller hoped to enlist the Air Force as an ally as it lobbied to make the Space Shuttle a reality. Although NASA already had more astronauts than it needed, Mueller believed it would be in the agency’s best interest to try to curry favor with the Air Force by accepting its erstwhile future spacemen into the NASA corps.
Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton, however, was unwilling to accept the entire group of Air Force astronauts into his already crowded corps. He invoked NASA’s requirement at the time that only candidates under the age of thirty-six be accepted, cutting the applicant field roughly in half. Seven mol astronauts were accepted into NASA’s corps as the seventh group of astronauts on 14 August 1969: Maj. Karol “Bo” Bobko, Lt. Cdr. Robert Crippen, Maj. C. Gordon Fullerton, Maj. Henry “Hank” Hartsfield Jr., Maj. Robert Overmyer, Maj. Donald Peterson, and Lt. Cdr. Richard Truly.
Even after NASA hired them, things weren’t settled for the former Manned Orbiting Laboratory corps. “We were fired twice the first year we were here,” Bobko explained. “They came and said, ‘You guys are fired. You’re going to have to leave.’ It wasn’t any joke; they were really serious. I don’t know if they called us in all at once or one at a time, but they told us we were fired. Twice.” However, each time the astronauts’ superiors in Houston gave the orders for the Group 7 astronauts to leave, their superiors’ superiors at NASA headquarters gave the orders for them to stay.
“At the time, I think, both Deke and Al were worried about the cancellation of flights,” Crippen said. “In fact, Deke was honest when he finally hired us the first time before the firings. He said, ‘I don’t have any flights for you until the Space Shuttle flies, and it’s not even an approved program.’ He said that’ll probably be around 1980 at the earliest, but he added, ‘I’ve got lots of work you can do.’”
Even though they were allowed to stay, the newest members of the corps sometimes felt like they were second-class additions. “I mean, we were not particularly loved and watered,” Bobko said. “When I got here, I was the last guy to ever study the Apollo. I’d go and say, ‘Can I get some manuals?’ And they’d say, ‘Yeah, but they’re all out of date.’ ‘What about classes?’ ‘No, those have been all canceled.’ Now it wasn’t that bad, because I’d go over to the simulator, and nobody cared about the simulator. So I’d be over there myself, and they’d let me stay almost as long as I wanted.
“There was a time I felt like I was a cosine wave in a sine-wave world,” he said. “We got on board, and they canceled [flights] before we got here; but after we got here, they canceled a lot more. There was supposed to be more than one Skylab, and I don’t think it was until after we were told we were coming that they canceled the last two Apollos. And then the Shuttle was supposed to be ready a lot faster.”
The ongoing cancellations were already having an effect on the corps when the mol astronauts arrived. “People were bailing out,” Bobko said. “Every crew meeting we went to, they talked about, ‘Well, they’ve canceled another thing.’ So the first year was pretty dismal, it really was.”
If Crippen and Bobko felt underutilized during their first years at NASA, that was to change in June 1971, when they were selected for a mission—of a sort. “[Pete] Conrad called me into his office, and said ‘ok, Crip, we’ve got this test that we want to run, and we want you and Bobko and [Bill]
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io. (From left) Bo Bobko, Bill Thornton, and Bob Crippen.
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Thornton working with it.’ So I said, ‘I learned never to volunteer, but it sounds like the best job available.’”
The third member of the group, Bill Thornton, had been selected to the corps on ii August 1967 as part of the second group of scientist astronauts. Though his path to NASA differed from that of his two colleagues, he had much in common with them. Like Crippen and Bobko, Thornton had come to NASA from the Air Force, where he had been a flight surgeon, among other things. Also like the other two, Thornton had been involved in the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program before coming to NASA, though in a very different capacity. At the Aerospace Medical Division at Brooks Air Force Base, Thornton had been involved in research and development for projects for NASA and decided to submit an application during the second round of scientist astronaut selections.
His qualifications were very good. He didn’t have the flight time Bo and Crip had, but he had over a thousand hours of testing (including flight testing) war weapons and missiles (during his first hitch in the usaf as a physicist) and then testing instruments designed for mol as a flight surgeon. He was awarded a Legion of Merit for this work and accumulated over twenty patents. (Today, his total of over thirty-five patents includes everything from military weapons systems to the first real-time computer electrocardiogram analysis.)
The Skylab missions were intended to pave the way for the sort of long – duration spaceflights that would be needed to send humans beyond the moon and onward to other planets. For a trip to Mars to be possible, NASA would need experience with mission lengths far beyond the fourteen-day record that had been set during the Gemini program. Skylab would be the bridge between the two weeks that NASA had experience with to the months or years that would be needed to go to Mars. The plan was, with the first three Skylab flights, to quadruple the previous record, doubling it once with the twenty-eight-day first manned mission and then doubling that again with a fifty-six-day second mission. The plans called for the third crew to further demonstrate that a crew could successfully complete a mission of that length, rather than increasing the duration any more. (That plan changed, however, when the first two crews demonstrated just how well astronauts could function on long-duration missions, and the better part of month was added to the third crew’s stay on Skylab.)
However, the unprecedented length of the missions would mean that unprecedented preparations would need to be made. Attention was focused in two areas of concern: whether human physiology could withstand such long-term exposure to microgravity and whether everything developed and planned would actually work as intended.
Regarding the former concern, in 1967 the President’s Science Advisory Committee recommended an expansion of the Biosatellite program, which used animals to baseline the biomedical effects of spaceflight before longer- duration human missions were undertaken. The Biosatellite ill mission was carried out in the summer of 1969, sending a monkey, Bonnie, into orbit in a small capsule for what was intended to be a thirty-day mission.
On the ninth day of the mission, controllers were forced to abort the mission and deorbit the capsule because of concerns about the monkey’s health. The recovery team successfully recovered it, but Bonnie died hours later. Fortunately any negative side effects of Biosatellite ill were minimal for Sky – lab. There was plenty of evidence that the monkey’s death was not directly due to microgravity exposure.
The experiment had at least one positive result for Skylab. Due to the concerns about Bonnie’s body mass loss, the microgravity mass-measurement device Bill Thornton had designed while with the Air Force became a high –
priority payload for the workshop so that any body mass loss by the Skylab crews could be tracked in flight lest they suffer similar problems.
Crippen, Bobko, and Thornton were selected to participate in a more down – to-Earth and ultimately more meaningful preparation for the Skylab missions: the Skylab Medical Experiment Altitude Test, or smeat.
Rather than have the flight crews break away from their busy training schedule for full-length simulations, a surrogate crew was selected to complete a full-duration dry run of a Skylab mission. This smeat crew would test out various elements of the Skylab equipment and procedures in a series of trials, culminating in a full-scale simulation that was set at fifty-six days, at the time the longest planned duration of the Skylab missions and the length for which the second and third missions were scheduled.
The first part of the name came from the fact that trying out the medical experiments would be a major focus of the simulation, and the “altitude” referred to the fact it was conducted at the lower atmospheric pressure that would be used on Skylab.
In addition to the qualifying of the medical experiments, many other elements of the Skylab program were to be tried out during the program. The crew was to eat a diet according to the guidelines that had been planned for the Skylab astronauts. Even the interpersonal relationships of the crew sealed in the chamber for almost two months, both with one other and with those they dealt with on the outside, would be a learning tool for the upcoming orbital missions.
Thornton, in particular, was excited about the possibilities smeat presented to do some hands-on testing of the Skylab equipment. He had already volunteered his services to the Marshall Space Flight Center in 1967 to help with the design and testing of Skylab equipment. He was determined that it should work on orbit and had expressed dissatisfaction with several of the designs. To him smeat was an opportunity to complete development and to test the flight gear as only he could test it—as he put it, “with a forced injection of operational reality.” His largest concerns going into the test were the urine collection and measuring system, the food system, and the bicycle ergometer.
The fifty-six days spent inside the altitude chamber would be only a fraction of the time that the three smeat crewmembers would devote to the test.
“It was about a year from the time we first started with all the planning and the engineering, and then the training and the preflight stuff, and then the actual test itself, and the writing reports,” Bobko said.
The training for smeat was an intensive endeavor in and of itself. For example, though they were to be safely on Earth the whole time just a short distance from help, the smeat crew went through the same medical training as the Skylab members. Crippen said that the dental training, during which the astronauts learned to extract teeth, was a rather memorable experience. “We’d each done a tooth and done the deadening with the Novocain and all that kind of stuff,” he said. “And they had this one kid that had a horrible looking mouth come in, and he needed to have a tooth out. They left Bo and I in there. The doctor said, ‘You guys pull teeth.’ We said, ‘We’ve pulled one.’ He said, ‘Go.’ He left, and I think I did the deadening, and Bo did the extraction.”
Bobko said that the youth was nervous about having the extraction done and was anxious about having to have a shot before the tooth was pulled. “And so ‘bedside manner Crippen’ here whips around with this needle that’s about that long,” he said, holding his fingers several inches apart. “But we went through with it,” Crippen said, “and he told us, ‘You’re the best dentists I’ve ever had.’”
In another memorable incident during the medical training, Crippen broke his hand learning cpr. During training at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, the smeat crewmembers were taught cpr techniques with a “Resuscitation Annie” training dummy. “Back in those days, they always had you whack the person on the chest before you started,” Crippen said. “So I whacked the dummy.” When he did, the trainers told him he needed to hit the patient much harder than that. “And I did, and I broke my fifth metacarpal! So don’t have a heart attack around me.”
The smeat crew also spent time before the chamber test participating in the engineering design for the simulation. They played an important role in determining how the facility would be configured for the test. Bill Thornton was a stickler for good engineering in the chamber itself. The fire detection and “deluge system” sprinklers for putting out fires were of particular concern to Bill, who had been at Brooks Air Force Base when a serious chamber fire had taken place. The deluge system was tested successfully, but he followed up by tracing the power system to its source, supposedly a bank of
specially designed, long-life, high-reliability lead-acid batteries. But these batteries were corroded, and some had been replaced by ordinary automobile batteries. “He raised hell, and the batteries were replaced—with other automobile batteries,” Joe Kerwin recalls. “He raised hell again, and eventually the correct batteries were obtained.”
The tests took place in a vacuum chamber used to simulate atmospheric pressure at various altitudes, from ground-level value of 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi) down to a space vacuum. For the full-duration test, the pressure would be held at 5 pounds per square inch, which would replicate the atmosphere that would be present on Skylab (5 psi, with 70 percent of it oxygen). The cylindrical chamber had a twenty-foot diameter and was twenty feet high, which allowed for it to be configured with a Skylab-esque two floors. The chamber was outfitted with equipment to replicate the Skylab layout closely enough for a meaningful simulation, though it was far from an exact copy. Bunks in smeat, for example, obviously had to be placed parallel to the floor rather than perpendicular as on Skylab. The chamber was outfitted with the medical experiments that were to be flown on Skylab, including the vestibular-adaptation-testing rotating chair, the lower body negative pressure device, the bicycle ergometer, and the body mass measurement device. The smeat crew was to use the same toilet facilities as were on Skylab (“Except ours wasn’t on the wall,” Bobko noted), and their waste output was to be measured as it would be on orbit.
“We had a second deck on the thing, and then we divided up the first deck into compartments,” Crippen said. “We had the one sleep compartment where Bo and I had a bunk, and another compartment for Bill, and we had a head compartment, and we had one where all the medical experiments were set up. It was similar but not exactly like the living deck on Skylab. It was comfortable living.”
The two bunk rooms were outside the main cylindrical area in a rectangular extension that led to the main airlock. The waste-management compartment was an area partitioned off on the first floor of the cylindrical area. The large open volume of the main area housed the medical experiment equipment as well as the smeat equivalent of the Skylab wardroom, a food storage and preparation area with a table. The main room also featured a small access hatch through which items could be passed to or from the outside world. This small airlock was about the only compromise made in smeat that was not available on orbit. The second level featured desks at which the three astronauts could work (an additional desk was located on the first level).
Before the full-length fifty-six-day run, the crew conducted shorter tests in the chamber to work out any problems before committing to being sealed in for the full duration. After a “paper simulation” in which the crewmembers went into the chamber and talked through a day’s activities, two run – throughs of two and three days were conducted. As with the full-length test, the shorter runs required that the crew go through the process of preparing to enter the lower-pressure environment in the chamber. “We ran a large number of tests where we’d only go in the chamber for a day or so and run these things to wring it out before we actually got in for the long duration,” Crippen said. “Otherwise we’d never [have been] able to do it.
“I remember one case where there was this one tech that worked in Building 7,” he said. “He was normally one of their chamber guys that were trained to operate the chamber. He and I were doing one run one day. They’d always prebreathe you [require you breathe ioo percent oxygen for three hours to eliminate nitrogen from your tissues and thereby prevent the bends] before the pressure is reduced from sea level to 5 psi in the chamber. We were setting up in the prebreathe room, and only he and I were there, and he got up and took off his oxygen mask and made a phone call to his girlfriend. Sure enough, we got in there and he was on the bicycle, and I was overseeing him. And he started hurting, and they had to take him out and put him in the hyperbaric chamber, ’cause he almost ‘bent’ himself— well, he did get the bends.”
Just as the actual Skylab crews did, the smeat crew received small tattoos on their bodies to mark where sensors went for the medical tests in order to ensure the sensors were placed consistently and thus increase the accuracy of the results. According to Bobko, “They came to me, and they said, ‘We’re going to tattoo you so you know where to put the electrodes.’ And I said, ‘OK, only after one of you guys shows us exactly how it’s gonna look.’” He acquiesced after one of the doctors had the tattoos placed on himself. “He said, ‘If I could figure out how to see [behind me], I would have put it on my ass.’” Well over thirty years later, smeat and Skylab crewmembers report that their tattoos are still visible.
As any good crew would, the smeat astronauts came up with an official crew patch for their mission. The patch, reflective of the crew’s plum assignment, depicts Snoopy the beagle from Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip (a favorite icon of the astronaut office) with an aviator’s cap, goggles, and scarf and a rope tied around his neck. Their original idea was to use Snoopy and “put a fishhook in his mouth.” The crew contacted Schultz to see if he would be willing to draw Snoopy for their patch. He agreed, but with one change: Crippen said, “[H]e wouldn’t put a fishhook, so he did the little noose-around-the-neck thing for us.”
Another part of the smeat simulation that began before the crew actually entered the chamber for the fifty-six-day test was the premission diet. Just as the actual Skylab crews did, the smeat astronauts ate beforehand a diet similar to what they would eat during the mission in order to establish some baseline information with which the metabolic data collected during the mission would be compared. According to Bobko, the “preflight” and “postflight” diets the crew ate were not exactly the same as what they ate in the chamber during the test but were carefully selected to have the same mineral count and nutritional value. The crewmembers had two refrigerators brought to their homes before the chamber simulation: one stocked with the premission food that was all they were allowed to eat, the second was used for storage of waste output, which would be taken back to msc for analysis. As things worked out, the astronauts got plenty of opportunity to enjoy the preflight diet; the planned twenty-one-day period during which they were supposed to eat it stretched to twenty-eight days when the start date for the test slipped by a week.
Crippen said that he’d certainly had his fill of the prescribed diet after eating the twenty-eight-day preflight diet, the fifty-six-day mission diet and then the postflight diet. “That got to be a pretty long time,” he said. “I can remember after we got out that I wanted a hamburger something awful.” (Other astronauts had similar experiences. After weeks of preflight diet and almost sixty days of Skylab meals, Owen Garriott made arrangements to have a chocolate milkshake waiting for him on the recovery aircraft carrier when he landed after his mission.)
“We used to give them a hard time about the food,” Bobko said, “Like I’d ask them, ‘What’s your analysis technique?’ and I never got an answer. We’d have a meeting, and they’d hem and haw around it, but they never gave it.” The smeat crew’s persistence in challenging the experimenters’ dietary planning was to be a vital contribution during the actual test, which led to
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її. The smeat mission patch.
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an important change in the Skylab flight program. Thanks to Bill Thornton’s persistence, a one-size-fits-all, relatively low approach to caloric intake planning was amended. “We tried very hard,” he said. “I tried to get information from them; we’d say, ‘How are you going to do this? We’re going to be eating this three months or so; how are you going to do the analysis?’ On the first day, obviously, we have outside influence, when does that wash out? You can’t average it over the fifty-six days, that doesn’t sound reasonable, etc. etc. And I never got an answer.”
“I don’t think they had an answer,” Crippen agreed.
“There were a number of things like that we had questions on that nobody really knew,” Bobko added.
Finally, on 26 July 1972, only ten months before the first crew would launch into space, the time came to enter the vacuum chamber. And so the fifty – six-day stay began, and the astronauts were faced with what seemed at the outset like one of the mission’s biggest challenges—keeping occupied for fifty-six days. Apart from its terrestrial location, one of the main differences between smeat and Skylab was the lack of much of the science package that would make up much of the actual work in orbit. While the smeat crew conducted most of the Skylab biomedical experiments, they were obviously unable to conduct the astronomy experiments and Earth resources observations, which depended on Skylab’s location in Earth orbit, or the materials science research and microgravity experimentation, which depended on its constant state of free fall. Thus, they were given the full duration of a Skylab mission, without all of the Skylab activities that would fill that duration in orbit. In addition they were unable to share some of the favorite free-time activities of the orbital crews — viewing the Earth and enjoying the wonders of weightlessness.
However, despite not having those Skylab activities to fill their time, the smeat crews managed to find ways to avoid becoming bored by their extended isolation. “I think we all worried about that ahead of time,” Crippen said, “because it wouldn’t be like the guys flying where you had the atm and all that to do. We worked on trying to find stuff to do. They let us take things in. We built a model, or tried to build a model. We took Russian. We found enough activities where I think we were reasonably busy.” (Notes Kerwin: “I have a memo from Crip, April 1971, to ‘Skykingdom’ [Conrad, et al] asking for things to do. We suggested bridge and ping-pong.”)
“We kept up the pretense: ‘ok, this is like a spaceflight,’ and we communicated through Capcoms, and all that,” Crippen said (Capcoms being short for “capsule communicators,” the people in Mission Control assigned to talk to the astronauts on a flight). “They said ‘We’d like to make it as much like Skylab as possible,’ and we did that. We did things like only communicating during aos schedule.” In orbit, a spacecraft could only contact the ground when it was within range of a relay station on Earth, periods known as acquisition of signal (aos). Using that schedule for smeat meant the crew had only the same limited opportunities to talk to Mission Control as the orbital Skylab crews would. A closed-circuit television was used for training classes, and each of the crewmembers was able to use it for two videoconferences with their families during the test.
As would be the case during the orbital program, the smeat crew took on some extra work to fill some of the time. Crippen set up regular debriefing sessions during the weekend to help organize the crew’s efforts. Just as
would be the case on Skylab, housekeeping also filled some of the crew’s time. “They [once told] us that things coming out of there were stinking,” Crippen said. “And we were very sensitive because it didn’t smell bad to us. I can remember, especially after we got the complaint about things kind of smelling that were coming out of there, we’d take Neutrogena soap and rub it down and scrub things around, so we worked hard at trying to keep the place clean.”
And then there were the phone calls. As another way to pass the time, Crippen insisted before entering the chamber to begin the test that it be outfitted to make phone calls to anywhere in the country. Bobko recalled the line being a wonderful luxury as his wife used the time that her husband was away to take a vacation through California, and he was able to keep in touch with her as she traveled.
Crippen had a slightly different experience when friend and fellow astronaut Dick Truly arranged a little joke to remind the confined commander just what he was missing out on in the real world. “I remember somewhere around Day 40-something, I got this call from Dick Truly,” he said. “I got on the line, and there were two young ladies on the line, and it was the biggest sexy phone call I can remember. I almost came out the door right then.”
As it worked out, the premission concern about staying occupied proved to be unfounded. Between their primary smeat tasks and the supplemental activities they had scheduled for themselves, the crew not only had no problems keeping occupied but found their schedule so full that they sometimes had to skip some of the supplementary activities they had planned. Work days, six days a week, began at 7:00 a. m. and continued until 9:00 p. m. with breaks for meals.
In addition to managing to keep occupied, the crew also maintained good relationships with one other despite being confined together in a limited space for almost two months. Bobko, though, noted that the question of how they got along after being “shut up” together is really somewhat misleading. “It wasn’t something that was a shut-up thing,” he said, “because we had worked with each other for damn near a year, for probably eight or nine months or something, before we ever got in there. So any of the crew dynamic had already been worked out. My feeling was that we each had our own little peculiarities, but we understood each other, and we knew what they were, and we accepted them, and we got along.”
The same, he said, was true of all of the spaceflight crews of which he was
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и. The smeat altitude chamber.
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a member. By the time the beginning of the actual mission arrived, the crew had worked together in training for so long that the various personalities had already meshed into a team, and any initial problems had been overcome. “I had a woman on one of my flights, Rhea Seddon,” Bobko said. “People would say, ‘What do you think about taking a woman on your flight?’ Well, hell, we’d trained with her for six or nine months. That had all been worked out; the dynamic had been established already.”
Despite the eventual monotony that set in by the end of the “postflight” diet period after months of restricted choices, the astronauts said that the Skylab food provided during the fifty-six-day chamber run was not bad at all. “After we got the menus, I don’t remember being unhappy with the food,” Crippen said.
Bobko, who later went on to command Space Shuttle missions, said that the unique hardware specifications of Skylab were a boon to the program’s
menu options. Unlike later spacecraft, Skylab had facilities to store frozen food, and unlike previous NASA spacecraft and the Space Shuttle, Skylab did not use fuel cells for power generation.
“Compared to Shuttle, I think Skylab menus were a lot better,” Bobko said. “They had the frozen steaks; they had ice cream; they had other frozen things. And, unfortunately, the Apollo having fuel cells, which made water, and the Shuttle having fuel cells, which made water, has kept their food all on a narrow track; they wanted it to be dehydrated to save weight on the Shuttle.” Skylab had plenty of lift capability to launch nondehydrated food.
The biggest challenge was setting up the menus in such a way as to make sure that the demanding nutritional guidelines were all met. “The food system was a bit of a problem,” Bobko said, “because they wanted us to balance our intake of proteins and minerals every day, which just made selection and consumption and everything else more difficult. That was the difficulty with the minerals and [calories]. Because if you took peanuts, if I remember right, it excluded a whole bunch of other selections because [they] had enough other things in [them] that it really restricted your choices.”
As would be the case with Skylab, the crews set up menus for six days, and then cycled through those selections for the duration of the menu, eating the same meals every six days. “The six-day cycle, at least for me, was interesting,” Bobko said. “The way certain activities repeated led to some unusual associations.” For example, he said, part of his exercise schedule was on the same six-day cycle as the meals; so the same meal—spaghetti—was being prepared every time he did the exercise. “So, it’s like, if you’re exercising, you know you’re going to have the spaghetti smell in the background.”
A few of the food items developed for the program, however, were less appealing than some of the others. “I can still remember finding out that Silly Putty and the little pudding that they gave us were in cans that were exactly the same size and looked exactly the same,” Bobko said. “So we tried to feed it to one of the experimenters before the test, but he didn’t show up to the meeting.”
Despite being designed to replicate the Skylab menu as closely as possible, the smeat menu did feature one perk that the orbital version did not. Once in every six-day cycle, the smeat astronauts were allowed to imbibe a serving of sherry. The original plan had been for the Skylab menus to include a wine selection in each rotation, and a tasting had even been held for the crews to select what they wanted to carry into orbit with them. Medical
objections had been overcome, but serving wine on a government “ship” was too much of a break with precedent for the political sensitivities of 1972, and it was removed from the flight diet.
Fortunately for the smeat crew, however, by the time the decision was made to remove the sherry from the Skylab menus, the smeat menus had already been made out, and it was too late to go back through the process of completely rebalancing the various nutritional factors that would have to be changed if the sherry were removed. “We had it,” Crippen said, “and we really looked forward to it.”
A more significant disagreement over the menus, however, proved to be of great importance to the Skylab program. The intense scrutiny on diets was not just to make sure that the crews stayed healthy, it was also one of the major biomedical experiments. Since the crews would be setting new spaceflight duration records, scientists wanted to learn all they could about how the microgravity exposure affected their metabolisms. Their dietary intake would be closely monitored, as would their waste output and their body mass, in order to make sure there were no unknown issues that would be a limiting factor for future long-duration spaceflight.
In order to facilitate the close scrutiny of the astronauts’ intake, the decision had been made to standardize the intake for all Skylab (and smeat) crewmembers so that all crewmembers would consume the same number of nutritional calories each day. One set of dietary guidelines would be established, and all of the astronauts would adhere to it, making it easier to keep up with exactly how much everyone was eating. The astronauts and the investigators had been negotiating the diet since 1969, and when smeat took place it had changed from a standard 2,400 calories apiece to a base of 2,000 calories worth of real food (containing all the protein, calcium, and phosphorous allowed) plus up to 800 additional “snack” calories.
Bill Thornton, however, no stranger to medical concerns himself, disagreed with the decision and took it upon himself to prove that the standardized diet was a bad idea before it could be implemented on orbit, where there would be no way to change it. The tall and muscular Thornton, one of the corps’ most physically imposing members, believed that setting a uniform standard for all the crewmembers would be unhealthy, that each needed a nutritional plan custom tailored for his own body type and metabolism.
Bill decided to demonstrate the inadequacy of this diet (“2,000 calories
plus sugar for a 207-pound man with less than ten-percent body fat”) by consuming it as directed. Pretest he maintained his usual extensive exercise regimen. In the chamber he estimated the difference between his usual routine and his chamber activities and made up the difference with cycle ergome – try. He gorged on sugar cookies and lemon drops to stay alive.
“Bill like to drove me nuts,” Crippen said. “He didn’t think the caloric intake they had assigned for the flights was adequate, and he was determined to try to prove that so that they would up it. Bill was exercising on the ergometer. And he exercised on the ergometer, and he exercised. It’d be in the middle of the night and he’d be in there peddling on the thing.
“He finally got to be almost like a skeleton. He got to where I was worried about him. I didn’t know how much weight he lost, but it was significant. Somewhere around the thirty-day point, I finally called outside and said either he’s coming out or you’ve got to send some food in. They boosted up what we ended up flying, and I thought it was around 2,500 calories a day. I got irritated at Bill a few times simply because I couldn’t get him off the damn bicycle. I thought he was going to starve himself to death. He’s a bulldog; but you know, he’s a great guy, and that was the only thing that he and I had an issue on—he wouldn’t get off that damn bicycle.”
And, indeed, the diet was insufficient for Thornton to maintain his body mass. “I was under the impression that a loss of twenty-eight pounds, most of it upper-body muscle, would be enough to convince anyone,” Thornton said. As it turned out, it wasn’t enough to convince the principal investigator for the mineral balance experiment. Dr. Donald Whedon thought “He overexercised,” and his coinvestigator, Dr. Leo Lutwak felt “He only lost body fat.” But a lot of discussion resulted in extra food being stowed aboard Skylab for the flight crews. Specifically, the eight hundred calories of “snack” food was now allowed to contain significant amounts of protein, which put many more food items onto the snack list.
Just as the intake monitoring had issues that had to be worked out, so too did the output monitoring. A similar problem occurred in planning the urine-collection system as had with the nutrition-standard guidelines: the designers had taken a one-size-fits-all approach that while wonderful in theory proved to be less wonderful in practice.
The urine system was Thornton’s biggest hardware concern. It had to collect and measure twenty-four hours of output efficiently and reliably
with very small error, in weightlessness. The contractor had designed a two – chambered bag separated by a “hydrophilic” membrane to transfer the urine into the measurement chamber under enough pressure to activate a complex mechanical displacement indicator. It failed as soon as urine was used to test it instead of water.
“The urine collection burst on us,” Bobko said. “They had gone, I guess, into hospitals and figured out what the urine output would be, and it was too low. So two things happened, and one is that if you got up to take a leak at night, you may fill this thing up, so halfway through your evacuation, you had to cross your legs, and you had to [change] the bag.” The other thing that happened was that the bags occasionally became overfilled and burst.
Emergency meetings were held. A centrifuge was designed whose centrifugal force would generate enough pressure to transfer urine into new, filterless bags. Thornton was skeptical. He campaigned hard to get the system into smeat for test and was the only one of the three crewmen who used it.
There were multiple failures. Seven times the bag broke, usually near the end of a twenty-four hour cycle when it was nearly full. Thornton recalls, “I had only my dirty discarded underwear and a very limited amount of water and soap to sop up a couple of liters of urine into discarded bags and clean up the floor. Then I had to thrust my big hands into a maze of machined parts with sharp edges to dry them, lest they corrode and seize up. My hands looked like I had taken on a bobcat.” Crip and Bo joined Bill in telling management it wouldn’t fly. A meeting was scheduled, and the three of them collaborated in preparing a rather blunt demonstration of the seriousness of the problem.
“They had the overcans for food, the big cans,” Crippen said. “I think it was Bill that was doing this, but we were all complicit. We took one of the big food cans and took a spring out of the tissue dispensers, turned one of the small food cans over and put it down in on the spring, and then took a urine-soaked rag and put it down in there, and sent it out there. So when they opened up, it popped out, to demonstrate that we had a problem in there.” The result was a complete system redesign with Dick Truly in charge. Bill suspects to this day that the food can was never opened; Truly just believed his fellow astronauts.
In addition to urine, stool was also sent out to be measured and analyzed. According to Bo Bobko: “We didn’t freeze-dry the feces; we didn’t have the vacuum as was available in space. We put them in little cans and sent them out. We sent the urine out, but we did the sample first; I think it was thirty milliliters per day.
“Then there was Thornton. I can remember them going to Thornton, and saying, ‘Bill, it’s Friday noon, and you haven’t given us a fecal sample, and we’d like to let all the people go home for the weekend.’ And Bill would say, ‘Just a minute.’ So he turned around, and said, ‘You were talking to the wrong end.’
“I can remember them giving us these little cups. I said, ‘These little cups, you know—how about something like four times larger?’ So they gave us something that looked like a mailing tube. I said, ‘You dummies, give us something that looks like an ice cream half-gallon container or something, that we don’t have a hard time hitting.’ So they did. But there were probably a lot of little things like that flight crews never knew about or cared about.
“They were complaining to us that we weren’t sending everything out. Like, they said we weren’t sending out all the feces. We said, ‘What are we doing with it? Storing it under the boards of the floor?’ I remember that time Bill got on the phone with our surgeon, kind of an excitable guy. Bill asked for a private consultation. He got on the phone, and he was saying, ‘I’ve been noticing some strange behavior.’ The flight surgeon said, ‘Oh, oh, tell us about it.’ He said ‘Well, you know, these people seem to be paranoid. It looks like we have some paranoid things,’ and we have this and that. The flight surgeon was assuming it was us, and he was getting more and more excited. The flight surgeon finally said ‘Who is this? Who is this?’ And Bill said, ‘It’s the management.’ You don’t think of him as a funny person. But when you have things like talking to the flight surgeon about this deviant behavior, you thought about it and laughed about it for days.”
In a similar vein, the crew noticed an unanticipated side effect of the lower atmospheric pressure in the altitude chamber: “There was a lot of flatulence,” Crippen noted. “We tried to think maybe it was the diet, but I think it was just strictly the 5 psi. It was significant.” Common sense supports the latter theory: At the 5 psi of the smeat chamber, any given mass of a gas would have three times the volume that it would under sea-level atmospheric pressure. (Skylab crewmembers confirmed that the same phenomenon occurred during orbital operations as well.) Recalls Bobko: “We had a timer, and we were counting. I don’t remember how many times it was in a day, but it was a significant number.”
The 5 psi atmosphere had more mundane effects as well. The lower pressure reduced the transmission of sound so that during the first few days the crewmembers frequently found themselves shouting, and became hoarse as a result. (On Skylab, an intercom system addressed this problem.) They also found that they were unable to whistle in the lower pressure atmosphere and that sneezes were milder.
The most important part of smeat, of course, was the work the crew did in testing out the equipment and procedures designed for Skylab, making sure that everything would function as planned by the time the first crew arrived in orbit. While the problems the smeat crew had with the urine collection system were inconvenient for them, to say the least, their inconvenience served a greater good—the consequences of the urine collection problems would have been much greater had they first been discovered in the microgravity environment of Skylab.
One of the most immediate tasks for the smeat crew was to begin taking the roughly delineated guidelines that had been developed for Skylab operations and turn them into the finely detailed procedures that would be needed for the astronauts in space. The efforts to refine the checklist were an ongoing process for the smeat crew, beginning long before the chamber test and continuing through the simulation.
“We did quite a bit of development on the checklist, because a lot of that was almost nonexistent when we started,” Bobko said. “It was in bad shape. So we had to do something; we had to make it operational. A lot of this stuff just wasn’t in an operational format.” Much of the early checklist, he said, was too short and vague for use in spaceflight. “It was ‘Don’t do this.’ It was all right for training, but it wasn’t really good enough to use. So we really worked on that quite a bit. That was part of the engineering and training that took place at the beginning.”
Working with the principal investigators for the medical experiments in developing the procedures, Bobko said, had an additional beneficial side effect. The opportunity to witness the smeat crew performing the experiments gave the investigators some idea of what they could expect in working with the Skylab crews during orbital operations.
As was the case with the urine collection system, the smeat astronauts’ use of the Skylab hardware revealed problems with equipment destined for the orbital workshop. Their discoveries meant that the problems could be
addressed before the equipment was launched into orbit, where the sort of flaws uncovered during smeat would have been devastating for the program.
Bill Thornton’s dedicated use of the wheel-less bicycle ergometer, for example, did more than just reveal problems with the dietary guidelines imposed on the crew; it also contributed to breaking—and then fixing—the bicycle. (Though that problem was corrected, the ergometer would present other challenges during its use on orbit, though fortunately all of the crews were able to deal with it in situ.)
Thornton used the ergometer primarily to maintain his normal exercise level. But because he questioned its ruggedness and thought it had not been tested thoroughly, he wanted to put it to that test. He recalled, “After a reasonable break-in period I planned to take it to its 300 watt rating for an hour, but starvation was taking its toll, and I was relieved when it screeched to a stop at about forty-eight minutes. The airlock was used to exchange it for an old, indestructible model. A considerable time later the bike was returned, ‘fixed’ by restricting it to thirty minutes at 300 watts, now an ordeal with my continued malnutrition. But this time it took only twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds to destroy the bearings. I shall never forget the look of disgust on Crip’s face.”
This time, after independent engineering analysis, a different shaft and bearings were installed. The flight unit, however, was further restricted to 250 watts. Fortunately, this proved enough for the mere mortals who flew. Bill still remembers feeling hurt by the subsequent efforts of msec management to separate him from his testing role. And he insists that he never actually used it when Crip and Bo were asleep — “maybe when they were watching TV, but not after lights out.”
Here are some of the hardware redesigns accomplished as a result of the smeat tests:
In the lower body negative pressure device, a seal that was necessary for depressurizing the lower extremities developed a leak and had to be redesigned. In addition, the decision was made to carry a spare seal during the flight program.
The equipment used for measuring blood pressure was discovered to have been miscalibrated, causing it to produce inaccurately high results.
Several problems were discovered in the metabolic analyzer unit. Some
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ІЗ – Bill Thornton riding the cycle ergometer.
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of the measurements it took were found to be substantially higher than they should have been, and the oxygen consumption measurement of the device was discovered to be significantly greater in the 5 psi atmosphere in the chamber than at sea-level pressure. The unit was redesigned to provide accurate and consistent data for Skylab.
The electrode cement used for the vectorcardiogram test was found to cause skin irritation, and action was taken to prevent the situation from recurring on Skylab.
Coagulation problems in samples were discovered to result from the blood sampling techniques used in smeat, and additional anticoagulants were added.
The centrifuge used for blood separation was found to be prone to excessive vibration and had to be redesigned prior to the flight program.
Of course, not all the problems the crew experienced were the fault of the hardware. One of the less-coveted tasks for the smeat crew was wearing the electroencephalogram (eeg) cap that monitored sleep levels. Crippen initially had agreed to be the one to wear the cap but before the beginning of the chamber test discovered that the salve or jelly that had to be applied to wear the cap caused his head to break out in welts. When Crippen realized that he was going to have to pass on the eeg duties, Thornton volunteered to take it over. But he too was unable to wear the cap. The task was then passed on to Bobko, who with no one left to pass it on to was stuck with it. Though no longer the one who would be wearing the cap, Crippen was still the one trained in its operation and thus had the responsibility of changing the tapes on which the device’s data was recorded. Unfortunately due to an error in changing the tape, the data wasn’t recorded. No one realized, however, that there was a problem until after the test was over, and the experimenters went back to review the data. “So Bo went through [the test], and there was no damned data,” Crippen said. “I guess we got some from the first tape.” Even that experience presented new ideas for the Sky – lab program—for the orbital operations, some of the data was sent down in real time to prevent just that sort of problem.
The smeat experiences proved to be invaluable to the Skylab orbital program, and the three men were proud of their contributions to the success of Skylab. “The first mission would have been a lot more difficult for the medical experiments” without the lessons of smeat, Bobko said.
Crippen agreed that the breaking-in the smeat crew put the medical experiment equipment through on the ground was a key to how well things went when the equipment was used in orbit. “If we’d flown those without running them in some sort of operational situation, I think there would have been a problem,” he said.
Thornton praised Richard Johnston, then director of Life Sciences, for initiating a daily logging and review system for medical data which resulted in good status monitoring during the flights—and eventually in a fine document capturing Skylab’s medical achievements, “Biomedical Results of Skylab.”
Finally, though, the time came to bring the test to a close. Crippen said he was never entirely sure if the test was going to run exactly the full fifty – six days for which the second two Skylab missions were planned. First, he said, he believed that the simulation might be brought to an early close and the crew released from the chamber. But then as the test drew nearer to its conclusion, he wasn’t sure if the mission planners might not decide to extend it to continue the experiments.
Bobko said he also wondered whether the crew might have to spend additional time in the chamber. “Near the end, I can remember thinking we may not get everything done, because we just have a lot to do,” he said. “Fifty- six days was the target, and they said, ‘If anything goes wrong, we can take you out.’ But there was a feeling of, we had a purpose, and we had to get to it done. I can remember having some concerns that we weren’t going to get all the results that we really wanted to get. And it all turned out; I think that we did. And like I said, I’m not sure that if anybody said, ‘You want to go for another fifty-six days,’ I would have been ready for that.”
Crippen agreed: “I know I wouldn’t have. If it were one or two more days to get some stuff done we would have been able to do that.”
The smeat crew would eventually get their chance to move up from simulated space missions to the real thing. As Slayton had predicted when the mol astronauts were brought into the NASA corps, their chance to fly did not come until the Shuttle was ready to launch, twelve years after they were brought in. Even before that happened, though, after almost a decade of being on the lower rungs of the astronaut corps ladder, the mol astronauts saw their situation change in 1978 with the selection of the eighth class of candidates, chosen specifically for the Shuttle program. “We were starting to get into Shuttle before I felt like I wasn’t a new guy,” Crippen said. By that time, many of the veteran astronauts from the earlier groups had left the corps, and the mol class played a vital role in the early Shuttle program. Crippen said that he was told that some of the same managers who had opposed bringing in the Air Force astronauts originally went on to feel lucky to have them when the Shuttle began flying.
Ironically, and sadly, though each did get to fly and command Shuttle missions, Crippen and Bobko’s careers as flight-status astronauts ended much as they began: waiting on a space launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base that was never to come.
The Air Force had modified Space Launch Complex 6 (slc-6, pronounced “Slick Six”) at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, once destined to serve as the launch pad for the mol program, for use with the Space Shuttle. Missions were planned for launch from the “new” Shuttle pad, and crewmembers were selected for those missions, including Crippen and Bobko.
“One of the sad things was, [in mol] we were supposed to fly from Vandenberg on Slick Six, Space Launch Complex Number 6,” Crippen said. “And sure enough, I was up to command 62-A, which was going to launch out of Vandenberg out of Slick Six.”
Bobko recalled: “I can remember going out there during mol and staying in the crew quarters. And then they redid the crew quarters out there to make them a command center. And then they changed it back to crew quarters. I can remember being out there the second time, same place, I don’t know how many years later, when they were getting ready to do the Shuttle flights.”
The 62-A mission that Crippen was assigned to command was to be the first Shuttle launch from the Vandenberg complex and would have been the first launch of a manned spaceflight into a polar orbit. The flight was scheduled for mid-1986, but it was never to be. On 28 January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger was lost during launch from Florida, destroying the vehicle and killing the seven members of its crew. As a result of that tragedy, the decision was made not to launch the Shuttle from Slick Six.
