The Sun

how did the sun get in her place with her round and shiny happy face who cast the shadows high and low.

I do not know, I do not know.

Science on the Cheap

One example of the diversity of the scientific experiments on Skylab was a contribution by rescue and backup crewmember Don Lind. During Apol­lo, Lind had worked with Dr. Johannes Geiss of the University of Bern in Switzerland on an experiment that would use thin metal foils to capture solar wind particles on the lunar surface. That relationship would carry over into the genesis of a similar experiment on Skylab.

“When Dr. Geiss came over for the first Apollo launch,” Don Lind said, “he stayed at our home. And he and I were over in the simulator building one day, standing in the Skylab mock-up that was getting ready for this next mission series. And one of the two of us said, ‘Can we do any good sci­ence on Skylab?’

“We said, ‘Hey, we could put some of those foils on the outside struts that hold up the atm’ and we could pick what were called precipitating magne­tospheric particles. These are particles that were coming down the magnet­ic tail of the Earth, headed toward the Earth. When they struck the Earth’s atmosphere, that’s what caused the aurora. Now the assumption was those may be solar particles, because the energy that they had was exactly what the dynamo effect would produce from the solar wind.

“We proposed that this be added to the list of experiments, and it was called S230. Every NASA center had to evaluate all of the experiments, so they sent out this proposal to all the different space centers. Every space center said, ‘We recommend that it not be approved, because all the other experi­ments were approved a year and a half ago, and it’s simply too late.’

“But I knew exactly what had to happen. It was to be mounted on a fab­ric background, so I went over to the guy at Marshall, and said which fab­ric is the best?’ He said ‘armalon,’ so we proposed armalon.

“I went down to the Cape and said, ‘What is the best installation sequence that will not give you guys any problems?’ He said if we would install the sleeve at one point in the countdown and the foil panels at a different time, there would be no stowage problem. That is exactly what we requested.

“So nobody had any reason not to approve it, except that it was, quote ‘too late.’ But there was really no technical objection to it, so it was proposed, and it was the last experiment that came in.

“All the guys had to do on the flight was, every time they went out to pick up the atm film canisters, they had to pass this spot on one of the trusses, and they’d just take off the next foil and bring it in and bring it home and that would expose the next foil below it.

“A typical space experiment costs a million dollars or ten million or some­thing, and it usually weighs a couple hundred pounds, and it takes several hours of astronaut time. Well, our experiment cost $3,500, and it weighed less than ten pounds, and all it did was require an astronaut to take literally thirty seconds to pick up one of these things on a traverse that he was going to do anyway. And we made a significant scientific discovery for $ 3,500.

“Kenny Kleinknecht, who was the head of the Skylab program at that time, said to me one time, ‘Lind, this is my favorite experiment.’ ‘Well, why’s that?’ ‘It’s the cheapest.’”