Blood, Toil, Sweat, and Teeth: Memories of Skylab Medical Training

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.