"We Fix Anything&quot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Houston: “Okay, you may have.”

Pete: “Yes, he did.”

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

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

Pete: “How do you read, Houston?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Houston: “We guess about 125.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Houston (laughter): “Probably not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete: “No, sir. I’m in the wardroom.”

Houston: “Okay. . . .”

Pete: “What do you need?”

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

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

And here’s Pete later in the day:

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

Houston: “Roger. Copy.”

And later.

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

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

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

Temperature reports were frequent throughout the day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Houston: “That’s affirmative.”

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

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

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

So ended the third day.

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

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

First breakfast in the wardroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Houston: “Don’t scare us like that.”

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

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

Houston: “Skylab, Houston for the cdr.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe: “I’m busy.”

Pete: “ok.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe: “That’s right.”

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

Joe: “The power.”

Pete: “ok.”

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

Paul: “How could I?”

Joe: “Well. . . .”

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

They increased their skill in zero-G operations:

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

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

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

Pete and Joe: (Laughter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete: “Ready—do mode auto.”

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

Pete: “What did you find?”

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

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

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

Pete: “Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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