Category HOMESTEADING SPACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday it is—as of 3/7/72. Kohler.

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

3/10: cancelled until further notice. ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To: cb/Skylab Astronauts

From: cb /Joe Kerwin

Subject: Al Bean’s Clothing Memo

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

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

c) Lip buttons will be providedfor complainers.

To: cb /Skylab Astronauts From: GeraldP. Carr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Splawn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subject: Bioinstrumentation for Apollo Applications Program (aap) Missions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subject: Medical Operations Requirements

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

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