4

ASTRONAUT GERALD CARR

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SKYLAB- THE VITAL LINK
AV
519

Well when the third manned mission launched, the workshop was essentially in a
good liveable condition...we knew that the primary coolant loop was essentially
out of fluid and was going to need reservicing. That didn't really affect whether
or not the workshop was habitable but it did affect the EVA's that we were to
conduct while we were out there. The extravehicular activities would have to be
done on what we call gas cooling rather than liquid cooling which meant that our
bodies would probably build up a lot of heat load and we would not be able to
last as long outside before we got in too overheated condition. The crew before
us had erected a sail and so the workshpp was properly shaded and so from a
thermal standpoint, the workshop was in real good condition. We found when we
got there that the workshop was as clean as a hound's tooth and ready to be lived
in.

The only system in the workshop that was not up to snuff when we got there was
the primary coolant loop, the coolanol loop, and one of the tasks that we had
trained fer prior to launch was the reservicing of that loop, and what it involved
was the attachment of a saddle valve, puncturing of the primary coolant line, with
a saddle valve, and the saddle valve essentially just clamps over the top of the
pipe. You puncture the pipe and then connect up a system of servicing ...a
servicing system that's much like a brick bleeding system that we had...have
here for automobiles, and we reserviced the coolanol system with more fluid, and
then sealed off the system and started it up and it worked very well.

Moving around in zero-G was really a very effortlessthing, once your body
became accommodatedto the fact that you were weightless. It's very much like
the sensationyou get when you're skin diving or just floating around in the water.-
The handling of equipment we found somethingrather peculiar, but again not too
surprisingand that is that we found it much easier to handle very large objects,
objects which on the ground weigh lO0, 200 or 300 Ibs, very bulky objects, much
easier to handle that size object than it was the little bitty pieces, because
the little pieces were so inclined to f!oet away so much more quickly than the
large objects with the high inertia. We also found that if you ever dropped a
small object or released it by accident, your first one-G instinct is to swing
at it and snatch it before it falls, so you instinctively swing below in order
to catch it because of gravity, and what you end up doing, usually, is hitting
 Page 2 - Cart
it with the top of your hand and b_tting it away, and so then you've only made
_" the situation a lot worse and we found ourselves on many occasions having to
unlock from the position we were located at and go chase a small item that we
had batted away because we dropped it.

_sion, we electedpriorto the___ex_rd_es per_o

from an hour to an hour and a half, and this was done mainly on the basis of \

recon_nendations
of previous crew - the second manned mission. We felt that...
they felt anyway, that there just was not enough time for a good exercise
period _ that you really needed more time. We were also bringing up the little \
treadmill, which was going to require time for use, so we just ended up going \
for an hour an a half per day exercise. It appears that that decision was a good I"
one, because we came back I think in better condition than has any other crew that's/
been up there, and I think we can most likely credit that with the increased

exercise that we unde_vent.

Everybody's going to say the same thing, and that is that Gemini and Apollos and
the early S_,!_bs, _vejus_ weren't up long enough to find out what the longterm
effect was_ a_ it reek Khe last two Skylab missions to kind of level it out.
L So why do_t _e .,i_'_*.._
_) by that one. Everybody...andsolar physics again will
be...I tell yo_J,_hy den't I go ahead and take five and we'll see how it works,
but let's definitely leave six for Ed, because he's the solar physicist and it
would be inappropriate for me to be describing any of that stuff on the movie.
Either he or Owen ought to do that.

The last two Skylab missions really were the culmination of the medical protocol,
medical experiments. We answered a lot of questions on those two. We found that
man doesadapt and that the losses of calcium in the bones apparently, and the
deconditioning of the cardiovascular system seems to level out after a certain
period of time, and so I would say that we now can very confidently say that man
can exist in space, in zero-G, in reduced atmospheres for an extended period of
time, really as long as he wants. I think the only word of caution we have to
add here is that man must in zero-G, in weightlessness, be constantly aware of
the fact that sooner or later he's got to go back to one G, and he's got
to maintain his conditioning in ...with that in mind.
Page 3 - Carr

The Kohoutek observations were extremely interesting to us. We - Bill was the
first guy to see Kohoutek, and that was when it was up near the constellation
Scorpio, and we were very surprised to see that as it approached perihelion, it
picked up an orange color, and I don't think the three of us had expected that
at all. The day that we were out, Christmas day, that EVA was probably one of
the more memorable occasions...cut, it wasn't Christmas Day, it was...let's see...
we went out Thanksgiving, then Bill and I went out Christmas, Ed and I went out
later, and that's when we really saw Kohoutek with the naked eye. Bill and I
were eut Christmas Day and we did not see Kohoutek, and we were disappointed.
We tooklots of pictures, and that was pre-perihelion, and post-prihelion, that's
when Ed and I saw Khoutek with the naked eye outside, and that was December 29
or 30 or something...I'll just call it the post-perihelion EVA after the Christmas
EVA or something. EVA l was Ed and Bill; #2 was Ed and me; and then #3 was Bill
and me; and the last one was Ed and me. That was in January. So it was the third
EVA; I'll just refer to it as the third EVA.

We were abit disappointed on the third EVA when Bill Pogue and I couldnot see the
comet with the naked eye outside. We really held high hopes of being able to
see it, but apparently we were working so close to the sun at that time that we
just never got a chance to look at it or see it. We brought all of the proper
cameras to bear and took all the data that the cameras could take, but we just
didn't get to see it until the next EVA which was EVA #3 in which Ed and I were
outside. We were a bit disappointed on the second EVA, which was the Christmas
Day EVA, in that Bill and I didn't get a chance to see Kohoutek. We were just
operating a little bit too close to the sun apparently, and we never could see
it with the naked eye outside, but we did however manage to take all the photo-
graphic data which was necessary. The third EVA which - in which Ed and ! were
outside - we did get to see Kohoutek, and that was a very breath-taking thing,
and one of the interesting aspects of that is that we could even see the little
spike up front, with the naked eye.

"Well, from a layman's standpoint, I think that the solar observations that we
took were rather significant. In my simple-minded way of expressing it, I guess
we can call the sun a big nuclear furnace, in which the hydrogen is the primary
element, and there's many things that apparently the people in solar physics
don't understand about the sun, and one of the reasons - one of the bits of data
 Page 4 - Carr

that they need is data in the ultraviolet wavelengths, and in some of the x-rays
that our atmosphere around the earth naturally protects us from. Any observatory
down here, because of our atmosphere, jus t can't see these wavelengths, so from
our vantage point up above the earth's atmosphere, we manage to take a lot of data
in these perticular wavelengths, which I think will be _nvaluable to the people
in the area of solar physics. One of the areas I think that's very puzzling and
maybe we're going to have some answers to, is the fact that the photosphere of the
sun has a temperature on the order of 6,000 degrees Kelvin, whereas the sun's
corona, which is the atmosphere around the photosphere, has a temperature on the
order of 1.2 million degrees Kelvin, and to the average guy, the average engineer
or anybody who's had basic physics, it doesn't make sense that a radiating body
would have a lower temperature than the atmosphere around it. You would expect
the temperature to fall off with distance from the body, and hopefully, some of
the data we've gathered will give people in solar physics a good field for why.
this phenomena exists.

f- From a lay;,_an's
standpoi_t, I think that solar physics has benefitedfrom the
Skylab program in that i guess we can consider a sun to be a big nuclear furnace,
boiling away up there_ and the main constituentsof the sun is hydrogen, and the
sun is emitting light in many different wavelengths,but our earth's atmosphere
protects us essentially, or blocks out ultraviolet and some of the harder x-rays,
so that means that on the ground in an observatory, people are not ...who are
studying the sun...are not able to see these wavelengths, and so by putting Skylab
up, this vantage point up over the earth's atmospherewe're able to gather the
dta that they don't have in these particular wavelengths and help them anser some
questions about some pecul4arities about the sun that people don't really understand,
and I guess one that I cam think of offhand is the fact that the photosphere, or
the ball that we can see, which is the sun, has a surface temperature on the order
of say 6,000 degrees Kelvin, I think the number is, and the corona, which is the
atmosphere around the sun, has a temperature on the order of around 1.2 million
degrees Kelvin, and to the average physicist or engineer who understands a little
bit about radiation, that doesn't make sens, because usually the radiating body
is at a higher temperature than the atmosphere around it, and temperature decreases
_, as a function of the distance that you move away. Hopefully, some of the data
that has been gathered in Skylab will help the people in solar physics find an
answer for this phenomena.
 Page 5 - Carr

I don't know anything about that stuff.

Earth Resources data that we gathered are certainly going to be valuable in

the areas of estimating the food supply situation in the earth...theEarth
Resources data that we gathered in Skylab is going to be pretty beneficial
to man, I think in one area, and that is the estimation of food resources. There
are two areas that the third manned mission had a good look at, and these were
the wheat-growing areas in western Australia, southwestern Australia, and also
in Argentina, just south of Buenos Aires, and we...

Uh, we learned quite a bit about food supply and crop estimation from the earth
resources program. On our particular mission, we had a good chance to look at
two major wheat-growing areas in the world, one is in southern Argentina, just
south of Buenos Aires, and the other area of interest wasin southwest Australia.
We found that in late November, early December, that most of the fields that we
could see in that two areas were real brown and not many green fields at all,
and this was essentially the late springtime of these two areas, and then as the
mission went on, late January and early February, we could see definite changes
in the coioration of these wheat fields, and so we think that with the proper
type of sensing equipment, that we could certainly measure the change in color,
we can nteasure the rate of growth of wheat and get good estimates of what the
wheat yield will be in an entire wheat-growing area. Another area of interest
for exploration from space of the ground is in the area of geology or mineral
resources. There has been apparently a rather major copper find in Nevada based
on imagery and data taken from space, and I think that man's ability to sense
differences in coloration will probably be of value in the future to finding
more minerals or geological data from space. I think that areas of iron and
copper, mining and petroleum industry are going to find that there's a lot of
data available from space. In the area of energy needs, since petroleum and
coal, the fossil fields are really going to have to be preserved, and we are going
to have to find new ways of generating energy. We took a look at a fw new possi-
bilities from our vantage point up in Skylab. We looked at islands in the South
Pacific and how the ocean currents flow around these islands and how you get
upwellings of cold water from below. It looks like it's possible, or at least
_ feasible, I shouldn't say that. It looks like it may be possible in the future
for an island to become self-sufficient from a power standpoint, by taking
advantage of the current as it goes around the island or taking advantage of
 Page 6 - Carr
_-
the temprature differences between a cold water upwelling area and the normal
warm water that's around the island. Take advantage of that temperature differ-
ence and use it to generate power. We also took a good look...at the fjord-
like looking islands that are on the south coast of Chile, as the humble current
sweeps up from the antartic area and sweeps up north along the coast of Chile,
it gets captured in these fjord, very, very deep channels, fjord-like islands,
along the coast of Chile, and you get some pretty high current buildups in there
and some people think that there may be a possibility of generating hydroelectric
power just from the ocean currents that move through those deep crevices _n.those
fjord-like islands in the southern part of Chile.

Yeah, the Fau!kland current would...I guess the food supplies would be the main
thing. The Faulklandcurrent being green, you know, it indicates plankton, and
where you have plankton, you have fish, so understanding the oceans currents
better hastwo values. Number l, is knowing where the fish are, and the other
of course if n_eteerologicai, the impact of the ocean on the meteorology. Why
_-_ don't we mcve _lete_)IoIogyLipnext, I'll talk about that, and then we'll jump
into ocean currents, erd I'll tie the two together - food and meteorology.

Meteorology has certainly benefited from photographs and observations taken

from space. We've been able to give people in meteorology a large-scale view
of weather systems. We've been able to take some stereo.- photography
and give them three-dimensional looks at cloud formations in the areas of cyclones,
tropical cyclones, typhoons, hurricanes, and the like, and extra-tropical cyclonic
disturbances. We've given them some photographic data that we think is going to
answer a few questionsthat have never been answered to date anyway on just
exactly how the earth ard its atmosphere interchanges energy back and forth.
There seems to be quite a change - interchange of energy between the ocean and
the atmosphere, and the people in meteorology really, and oceanography as well,
haven't really understood this interchange, but some of the photos that we've
taken may well get them on their way to understandingthat interchangeof energy.
One very interesting area that we took a long look at was ocean currents. The
Faulkland current is by far the most interesting of all the currents we saw
because it was the most brilliant-colored. The main tracker we used to locate
ocean currents is the upwelling or blooming of plankton - the little organisms
that grow essentially in the deep water, and then when the water wells up from
 Page 7 - Carr

below, it brings up this green plankton, and from space, it looks like a green
stain, long serpentine stain in the water; _we took a good look at kheFaulkland

current. We could see some of the staining, this plankton blooming__ the Humble
current, the New Zealand current, and the Japanese currents.(We know for a fact
that plankton is a major source of food for fish,so therefore, it se_ that
from space, when you find large plankton blooms, you can certainly direct fishing
fleets to those areas, and the fishing should be excellent in the plankton bloom
areas, and of course, getting back to meteorology, knowing these currents and
being able to track a current from space and see what it's doing, certainly will
• i_proye our ability to forecast weather, because again, the interchangeof ocean
and atmosphere verydefinitely affectsthe weather.

Well, the red tide is sort of a universal thing, you want to talk about that?
We have one or two stills, yeah, and I don't know if the IR stuff came out wel_,
it's hard to say.

We were surprised to also note from space that we could see what was commonly
called the red tide. The red tide is essentially a little one-celled organism
that manages to get itself imbedded in, as far as we could see, in these large
plankton blooms. On several occasions, in the Faulkland current, we saw extremely
large red stains imbedded or enclosed in the long plankton blooms of the Faulkland
current, and I don't think that people really understand exactly how the red tide
gets started, and as we understand from the oceanography people, it's very difficult
to see the red tide when you're actually in the waterwith it, because apparently
you've §ot to get back away from it in order to see it, so you can see it from
airplanes,more specificallyfrom space.

Some of the photographsthat we took from space are certainly going to be of value
in understandingmen's pollution prob]ems. We saw in several occasions rather
vast indications of pollution. We were surprised to see that Mother Natureis
probably a much larger polluter than is man. The Amazon River very, very dirty,
"fullof silt, and it runs red and orange all the way - almost from its headwaters,
all the way out to the mouth of the Amazon River. Mobile Bay we noticed on one
occasion - we got some goodpictures- I didn't start that out well anyway.
Page 8 - Carr

We noticed in areas like Mobile Bay and the mouth of the Mississippi River,
and several other river areas around that you could see the silt moving out of
the rivers, and into the various harbors and bays around the world. Part of
this I think we can probably blame on man because of poor soil conservation
practices upstream, however, there are many places where man just isn't upstream,
and for instance, the Amazon, as I mentioned before, is an area where pollution
is just being caused just by Mother Nature herself, just picking up silt and
dragging it downstream. In the areas of air pollution, we saw many cases of air
pollution - I guess Los Angeles basin is certainly one of the areas that's quite
evident. Tokyo is another area where you can see air pollution if you look
carefully, and it can be seenfrom space.

It's very easy to see things like smoke plumes. These are forms of pollution
that are very valuable to the people on the ground who are studying how the
earth's atmosphere goes about diffusing things like the stack gases. We looked
at several good smoke p'iu_es along the gulf coast, and we saw some good instances
of smoke gener_tio_ ir_the area of central Africa, where people do a lot of slash
burning in the a_ea of clearing land for crops. They use the technique of slash
burning. We saw a _oK of smoke, and l'm sure the pictures we took will be of
value to people who are trying to f_gure out just how smoke is moved around and
diffused in the air.

A lot of the photography that was taken in Skylab I think is going to be very
useful in the study of population patterns in metropolitan growth. The people,
the cartojraphers who are interested in this field...

A lot of the data that we gathered from Skylab that concerns itself with
population growth and metropolitan growth I think is going to be of great value.
Photographs taken today, and compared with photographs taken, of the same large
cities, taken in Gemini and the Apollo programs, are going to give our people
,who are interested in these fields of growth, a very good handle on the manner
i n which metropolitan areas seem to radiate out. And they are very interested
in that sort of thing. We"ve got pictures of most of the major cities in the
world now, and these pictures have been repeated over the years. I think they
are going to be very valuable. Another very interesting new field that we've
been looking at from Skylab is the ways of evaluating man's water...his ability
 Page 9- Carr
(Begin Tape 2)

to interpret water resource situations. Snow cover is certainly a very important

source of water in such areas as southern California and around the Phoenix
area so people from these areas are certainly very interested in knowing what
sort of snow cover they have up in the mountains and how long it's hanging on,
because most certainly the amount of snow they have in those areas has an affect
on what sort of water situation will exist in those areas the following sunmmr.
Another very interesting area that we looked at was ice. We learned much to our
surprise that about 90% of the world's fresh water supply is in the form of ice
at the two poles, and if it were all to melt all at one time, we would probably
all be under water. People who are very concerned with the manner in which ice
is formed and moved around were very pleased with a lot of the photographythat
was taken on Skylab, because in areas such as the Gulf of St. Lawrence, we have
photography that shows the Gulf of St. Lawrence before it started to freeze, and
• en on almost a day to day basis, we have photography of ice forming and being
blown around and reforming and being blown around by the wind more in the Gulf
of St. Lawrence until it reached the point where the Gulf was almost one complete
_- ice pack. The significance of understanding the formation and movement of ice
is that well number one, in the North Atlantic, the location of ice is very important
for shipping purposes. You need to know what's a safe place for your ships and
where they should avoid trying to make the passage across the Atlantic. And of
course one area that people are just beginning to look at is the idea of using
ice as a water supply. There are even some people who think that it might someday
be feasible to someday to tow an iceberg into the temperate zone and tow it into
an estuary somewhere or some harbor, and essentially block off the harbor, and
then allow the iceberg to melt and use the water for crops. The only area I
didn't touch was fault lines, and I should have hit that When I was hitting
minerals and geology and all that.

I think a significant contribution has been made in helping to understand ...

I think another significant contribution that was made by photography in Skylab
•is that we certainly learned a lot more about a lot of the faults in areas such
as Southern California, Baja, California and New Zealand. In order to understand
earthquakes and techtonic (?) movement, the plate theory or whatever you want to
_ call that, the idea of continental shifting and moving, continents shifting and
moving around...let me start over again anyway.
Page lO- Carr

There's been a lot of significant data gathered in the determination of faults,

the Southern California, of course, has been troubled with earthquakes for many,
many years, and we're just really beginning to understand the fault structure
in that area. We also have got some excellent photography of the fault structure
as it extends on down to Baja, California, and we have some good data on fault
down in Chile, the Autacoma (?) fault, and then over in the area of New Zealand
we got some excellent photography of the Alpine fault. All of this photography
has not turned up any new discoveries or anything like that - it's merely added
to the data base that man needs in order to understand faulting better, and how
it affectsthe earth, the techtonic movement of the large plates or continents of
the earth, and we think that possibly better knowledge of the fault systems around
the earth will give us a better understanding of earthquakes and possibly we can
learn to better predict earthquakes.

Volcanoes we didn't mention. Looking down at the earth, there were two things
that rather surprised me. Number l is that the earth is covered by so much water.
I think we_ve always ui_derstood from geography classes and things that the earth
is about 2/_ water',b_Itthat really doesn't hit you - the impact really doesn't
hit you until you're _;pthere and you see all the water. Another interesting
thing was I just rea_iv didn't realize there were so many active volcanoes
going on arot_ndthe earth today. We saw an active volcano-inJapan, the Galapagos
Islands, and we saw a volcano, volcanoes in Hawaii Islands and Central America,
around Guatamala City, and the Bay of Fonseca, and it was just very surprising
to see that there are so many active volcanos going right now on the earth.

We have gathered some data that may be of interest to the people in the area
of Vulcanism,a lot of t!ledata on smoke plumes that we gathered will probably
be of more _alue to the people studying air pollution than it will be to the
vulcanist. I think that the volcano as viewed from space probably - we're not
going te add too much to the knowledge of volcanoes other than the fact that
we can see them when they start popping off from space, and if they happen to
•be located in uninhabitedareas, it will probably be discovered by a satellite
or by a man in space ratherthan by peopleon the ground.

Yeah, we made some EREP passes with sensors which sensed geothermal...theonly
way we could sense it was right after the snow - we could see which areas melted
Page II - Carr

quickest and they were obviously the populated areas or geothermal areas.
The Yellowstone area - right after the snow, it was already starting to melt off
because of all the warm ground around there - guysers and everything, so the
Yellowstone Park area blackens right up again right after a snow.

In the area of geothermal resources, I think the value from space of studying
geothermal areas is going to be gained by using sensors, heat sensors and things
like that. We did see some definite indicationsthat geothermalactivity from
space, and it was in the Northern U.S. right after the big snow in mid-December,
and the Yellowstone area is a known geothermal area - the Old Faithful guyser
and a lot of the mud pots and a lot of the _eas around there very quickly thawed
and the Yellowstone area immediately became black again right after a snow -
within just a few days.

Materials processingon our mission - the only thing on our mission was
flammability...

In the area of materials processing, the third manned mission was mainly concerned
with the subject of flammability. We put many different samples into our little
furnace and ignited these samples and studied the manner in which they burned in
a zero-G atmosphere and we studied also the manner with which you can quench these
fires. The two manners we studied was the water quench system, which turned out
to be quite effective when you could get the water to spray in the right direction.
We had a little trouble with nozzles and with water pressure, but that's a solveable
problem. Another area that was of interest to us was the idea of vacuum quenching,
that is, putting out a fire by evacuating the area. We found that vacuum quenching
is effect, but as you start moving the atmospbere_out through the hole that you're
evacuating the system with, you're pulling oxygen over the top of the item that's
being burned, and you do get a flareup until you have moved all the oxygen out of
the system and then the burning specimen does die. We fully expected to see many
specimens in zero-G snuff out their own fires because of tile lack of convection
to move the exhaust gases, the combustiongases away from the point of combustion.

Well, essentially, I think, locate, or figure out which materials we want to never
never use and which materials handle well in space. For instance, Teflon doesn't
burn well down here, it burns...when it does burn, it's pretty toxic and gives
 Page 12 - Carr

off toxic gases, but up there it doesn't burn well at all. Nylon is extremely
dangerous up there, as is polyurethane. You know that polyurethane foam that
you pack the - the gray foam that you pack a lot - electronic gear in and all
sorts of stuff? Boy, that stuff burns like mad. It burns like gasoline and
it's really scary. It flares, and you've got some footage of a piece of poly-
urethane burning and that's proof positive that you don't ever want to put
polyurethane foam in a spacecraft. I guess it's because you got so much surface
area all through that foam, and once you get it going, it just goes bananas.
Most of the things we looked at are things that are used _n spacecraft now with
the exception of polyurethane, and we just wanted to make sure how we understand
how it all burns, because as move out and develop new materials, at least we'll
have these things to compare combustion with.

The flammability studies that were done on the third manned mission were really
the crux of the materials processing experiment for thatmission. We burned
several sambles in our little oven, furnace, and the purpose of that was to study
the manner _r__Jhich various materials burned in a zero-G 5 Ibs per square inch
atmosphere. M_;stof the materials we bdrned are materials that are used in
present day spacecraft,,The one exception is polyurethanefoam. We do not use
it in a spacecraft because we know it's rather flammable and we bore that out
with tests in space. We burned a small sample full of polyurethane foam and
it really went fast. It was a very frightening thing to see that foam burn, and
I'm sure that we will never ever see polyurethane foam in a spacecraft. I left
myself an out by saying that the crux of it was flammability, so I can move right
• in and say now crystal growth.

Thearea in materials processing that received a little less attention - cut all
that. Another area in materials processing experiments that we investigated in
the third manned mission was the area of crystal growth. The electronics industry
is pretty interested in growing perfect crystals for the microminiaturized circuits
that they are putting together now. THEY have always felt that if we could grew
a crystal in zero-G it would be a more perfectly formed crystal and therefore it
would make a better electroniccomponent,and so we grew several crystals on our
mission, and we're now looking at those crystals in the laboratory down on the
ground, and we hope to get a verdict soon as to whether •or not crystal growth
in space looks like a economical and effective thing to do for the electronics
 Page 13 - Carr

f" industry.

The gyroscope experiment that we did for the TV demonstrations was probably
one of the most enjoyable demonstrations that I did. I must admit at first
when I opened the package and found the gyroscope in there with one little gimbal,
I'll have to confess to having been a little bit upset because the ground didn't
provide us with just more than one gyro, and my first impression was just how in
th_heck am I going to do a decent gyroscope demonstration if I've got a little
gyro and one gimbal, and then after a few seconds of thought, I realized that
once I got the gyro spun up, all I had to do was remove the gimbal and take it
away and I had an infinite number of gimbals in space. That is, my gyro was
Suspended in zero-G with infinite number of gimbals and an infinite number of
degrees of freedom. So once I realized that, I spun up the gyro and just had a
wonderful time with two soda straws, pushing the gyro around and demonstrating
to myself and to the people in (fades out). Graphic principles of gyroscopic
precession...other experiments that...(fades out)

_ The AMU, the astronaut maneuvering unit, was a very valuable experiment from our
standpoint. It appears that we now have got a viable way of...for a man to move
around outside the spacecraft. The AMU is essentially a backpack with a set of
gyros in it, and also some control moment gyros. This system is essentially
gyro-stabilized and gyro-controlled as well as thruster controlled. We found that
that sort of a system seems to be quite feasible - it allows a man to move around
in a suit in a zero-G situation and he can quite effectively get from one point
to another by the;most direct route. I think that we will find that in the future
that this is essentially going to be the forerunner of future systems where a man
will be going outside the spacecraft and flying over to another spacecraft or to
a satellite in order to effect repairs or something like that - or effect conceivably
a rescue. The foot control maneuvering unit was another type of unit that we
investigatedto study th: capability of man to move from one vehicle to another
outside, but using instead of his hands, using his feet as the control agent, you
should say, I might say, using his feet to control the spacecraft rather than his
hands. The concept here was to keep the hands free and allow them to beavailable
to push off or carry the equipment or things like that - or do repair work. We
found that eventually the foot control maneuvering unit is a more difficult unit
to work with - the unit that we tested up there was not gyro-stabilized, though I
 Page 14 - Carr

think we got a goodhandle on the desirability or lack of desirability of a

gyro-stabilized system, and I think we all agree that future systems ought to
be gyro-stabilized.
(ROLL 3)
Uh, I think on the average, I required about six and a half hours sleep. I
think that was about the norm. Some guys could get along with six, and other
crewmen required on the order of seven hours sleep a night in order to effectively
carry out the next day's work.

We found on Skylab that sleeping was not quite the problem that we had anticipatedc
We found that pretty much the same down here on earth, you need a little time to "
undwind before you go to bed so that when you go to bed you can get right to sleep.
You can't go to bed still lathered up from a day's work and get right to sleep.
We found that the average guy took about - required about 6½ hours' rest per
night, some of the crewmen could get along with six or so, and others required
about 7, but t_e norm see_ed to be around 6½ hours sleep. We found that the
_ depth of your sl_? seems to be pretty much the same as it is down here. The
! sleep experiments that _veredone by the three scientist-pilots indicated that
they got prett_ .j_,.,_
_n_..._
sleep. The food on Skylab was really quite good.
The water was very good, the iodine which was added to the water to keep it
sterile was not at all unpleasantto us. It didn't affect the food at all. We
found that your sense of taste and your sense of smell appears to be very slightly
degraded in that atmosphere, but for the most part, the foods that we disliked
at the beginningof the mission on our particularmission were the foods that
we dislike_ at the end of the mission.

Personal hygiene turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. We found that it was
much easier to stay clean up there than we had anticipated. We found that the best
way to keep clean was everyday to have a full body wash. That is, with a wash
cloth and soap and water. We were afforded one shower a week, and each shower
utilized about three quarts of water, and we found those to be very refreshing
and with the one shower, one body wash per day, we found we were able to maintain
good cleanliness, no odor problems, and we felt very good...
 Page 15 - Carr

We found that growilnga beard was much more acceptable to the problem of
shaving. The shaving materials that were available to us just were di(ficult
to get off. We used the brushless shave type of lather. It was inclined to
load up in the razor, and it just got to the point where we felt it was more
trouble to clean the razor and shave than it was to just let it go. So Bill
Pogue and I elected to grow beards, and found out that after you get over the
firstcouple of weeks of itching, it's not too terribly unpleasant having a
beard, and I guess the biggest disadvantage is when you're eating potatoes and
gravy, or something like that, you've got to be careful to keep it out of your
whiskers. As far as housekeeping,there's nothing much to be said there.

Offduty activity - I think the most pleasant off-duty activity that any of us
had was looking out the window. There's just a vast panorama of things going
by the window at all times, and we got more enjoyment out of sitting and just
staring at things out the window than any other sort of off-duty activity we
had. We had tape recorded music, that was very, very pleasant to have. We
had some little cassette-type recorders up there, and we used the music to divert
our mind when we were doing things like pedaling the bicycle or carrying out the
! medical exercises,medical experiments. We enjoyed goodmusic while we ate our
meals, and sometimes during the work period when we were working at the solar
telescope panel, the ATM panel, in those areas, we found the music to be very
pleasant and relaxing. We also had a small library of books that we brought
along and a fw of us in our spare times had an opportunity to read a book or
two, and give ourselves a little bit of mental stimulation away from the daily
workaday grind that we lived in up there in Skylab.

In the area of habitability we found that essentially the workshop was a rather
sterile environment. After a while, we begin to wish that we had a few more colors
in the workshop, and so I think that's something that people will be considering
in the future, and I think that is adding a little bit more color to working areas
when you're going to be in those areas for long periods of time. We also found
•that we would have very much liked to have had a television up there. Not only
for it's value for entertainment purposes, but also it would have been very
valuable as a training aid, particularly for those tasks that we had to do off
the cuff, that were entirely untrained for and in particular I might point out
the deployment of sails that was done on earlier missions. In my mission, we
 Page 16 - Carr

_"_ had a filter wheel on one of our solar telescopes that jammed up, and the
procedures had to be sent up verbally, and you had to paint word pictures, and
uplink television would have been extremely valuable for something like that.
On the entertainment side, television wouTd have been very very valuable to us.
The three of us on the third mission were very interested in football. We would
have enjoyed a football game I think, on an off-day, and movies or daily news
would have been very, very good on TV, so I think in the future, future missions,
we will probably end up with uplink TV available.

The EVA's on the third manned mission - the first EVA was particularly the
plan for that EVA was to go out and install all the film we needed in the solar
telescopes, and to effect a repair on an antenna that was used to look at the
ground in the earth resources package. The second EVA was the one done on
Christmas Day, and the main purpose of that EVA was to photograph the Comet
Kohoutek from outside the spacecraft, and also to try to effect the repair of.
the solar telescope camera, the filter wheel. The third EVA was done after the
Comet KohouCek had pa_sed perihelion, and that EVA again had a prime mission of
r- collecting data Fram cut_ide the workshop on the comet, and also to change out
the film in the so!_ _lescopes in the cameras_ The fourth and final EVA was
to recover the fiIm f_'cm the solar telescopes and one of the auxiliary missions
was to get some good footage of the workshop itself, some photographic coverage
of the workshop itself from outside, and we took a 16mmmovie camera and a 35_m
still camera out with us and took quite a few pictures of the workshop_ trying
to point out with photographs the effect of things like contamination and ultra-
violet radiation and how it affected the paint job of the workshop, and we hope
that some of the photography will give the people in the area of solar cells -
the energy-gathering capability of solar cells - we hope that we might give them
a little information as to how the solar panels, the little cells in the solar
panels, have deterior_ated with time.

Manned spaceflight is important because there are going to be cases l'm sure
forever where tasks up there are going to require the flexibility and the
initiative of man. There are a lot of things that can be done unmanned; but
there's no reason in the world to put a man in space and have him do nothing
more than look at a stopwatch and click a camera shutter or punch a button every
few minutes, because that can most effectively be done with less mistakes by
 Page 17 - Carr

a computer or a machine, bemuse afterwhile man will get bored and he will

start me_ssing up even a simple task of punchin 9 a button at the prnp_

_-_n areas where you need man's flexibility and_his i_i_ative, for instance_,
in
L
the deploymeBt of the solar wing on the first _an_l_#d _i_si%n,_a_don the \

_eployment of the sail that was used to shade, provide thermal shading for the \
_orkshop on the second mission, and our mission, where we had to reservice the
\
_oolant system, coolanol system, or where we had to actually get out and unjam

_r move the filter wheel on the solar telescope cameras so that photographs could I'
_e continue to be taken with that system. That's where you need man - you need /
ran up there when you need some pretty wheeling judgments, and the tasks in //

_pace that are assigned to man are the tasks that require him to use his mind /
and his abilities, his unique abilities which certainly can't be covered by /
_[ogramming
a computer. ___

I like to think of the Skylab program as sort of a consolidation phase in this

country's spac_ program. The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions were essentially
-- the establls_men_ of t_'an_portation systems, the development of techniques for
_ getting man wherever y_; want him to, any point you want in space, and we very
adequately proved tha_ yeah, man can be in space, and he can live in space, and
that he can go where _e wishes, so it seemed to me the next step was consolidation
of these, you might call them beach heads, in space, and that is, now that we
know we can get man up there, now let's put him up there and see if he can set
up housekeeping and exist over a long period of time in a rather normal sort of
living environment, and Skylab provided that information. We've got some good
ideas now as to how we should design future space stations. We know what sort
of systems to stay away from, what sorts of systems to try to develop further
in order to try to make man more at ease and more at home and more effective
in space...

You're walkin' on quicksand every time you try to answer that - because there's
• always somebody who says yes...

Space exploration is important to mankind I think for several reasons, I think,

I guess from a philosophical standpoint, Man is an exploratory being. He's always
seems to be looking out or prying into things very inquisitively, and I think
space is just - you might call it the last frontie_or sometl_ing like that. The
 Page 18 - Carr

_act of t_ematter i.sthat man stops really stretching himself and extending
--_himself
' then I think that's when ctvilizati.on
w_ll begin to decline. Man just_
\_as that inquisitivenature and it's got to be satisfied..I
H_ go_
be looking for something. From a strictly dollars and cents or nuts and bolts
standpoint, I think the exploration of space is certainlY important to man because
We're going to learn more from out there that we don't know now, and these things
that we can learn about how our earth was formed and what were - what we are
in comparision to what else is out there - will put us in a better position to _
better manage our lives here on the earth. I think the Apollo missions, some of
_e pictures they brought back and some of the things that those guys have said
about the earth being somewhat of an island in space, an oasis in space, a:lot
of those things. I think it most certainly has stimulated the ecological movement
that is going on in this country right now, because people are realizing that we
_e now in a situation that's open-ended. There is an end - there is a limit to
how far man can expand and go on this earth, and so we've got to learn to kind
of manage - manage our •environment, and as I've said on other occasions, man
has got to get into harmony with his environment and with his fellow man, so
I think tilat exploration has certainly done a lot toward stimulating man into
a more intelligent interest in his earth and his environment and a desire to
take better care of it.

Well, when we hit the water, we immediately flipped to the Stable 2 position,
and we were BII very much aware of the weight of our heads. As we lay in our
couches in this position, with our heads hanging forward, the muscles in the
back of our head very definitely took up a strain, and we could feel those
muscle3 pulling this big watermelon that we had suddenly acquired. When we
got hoistedaboard the ship, and the doctors got in with us, they took pulse
rates and bloodpressures lying down, sitting up and standing up, and got a
good feel as to just exactly what condition our cardiovascular system was in,
and it really wasn't too bad. We were acutely aware of the very, very heaviness
of our limbs, our hands and our feet felt very, very heavy. It was a struggle
just to roll over on your side, and to sit up, and when we felt well enough to
standi_p and walk, we then exited the spacecraft, and we had people kind of
walking along each side of us, keeping a good track of us to give us support
if we needed it. Again, we felt a certain amount of vertigo - that is slight
dizziness. It was mainly caused by head movement. If you could hold your head
still, you were less inclined to feel this vertigo problem. That vertigo stayed
page 19 - Carr

a_ourLtfor
with u_ _n an eyer d_crea_i_ll_ abq_t 14 _a_s,,and thella_ter a_owt
the 14th or so day, we begin to reallyhave pretty much lost all the signs of
vertigo. We noticed for at least three or four days the heaviness of the limbs.
From a cardiovascular standpoint, I thinkwe were back pretty much to baseline
by recovery plus 8 to lO days. And we all began running again, jogging, I think
Ed did his first job on something like R + 8 and Bill and I ran our first times
on R+lO.

I don't think there's any real limit to how long man can stay in space, as
long as he never loses sight of the fact that sometime he's going to have to
back to one-G, and if he keeps that in mind, and keeps his cardiovascular system
and his muscles and his bones toned for that eventuality, then there is no reason
to believe that man need worry about how long he spends in space. I don't think
there's a limit to that.
 ,il

X'
_2

• • ,_, '.

ASTRONAUT OWEN GARRIOTI"

L.

°
 Owen K. Garriott

"SKYLAB - THE VITAL LINK"

f'_. AV 519
ROLL l - WILD SOUND

the sail that

_mah_ ned
sunshade
flight,
orwas actually
twin-pole
the second thermal
we deployed
protection
on Skylab
that 3,
the
the
spacecraft
second
I had. The first crew deployed the parasol which brought the temperatures down

i material. It wasn't
to a reasonable level,holding up as
but there well
was thermally
some nor mechanically
deterioration as it
in the quality ofwould
that
1 have been desired to do, so we found that it was necessary to deploy an extra
i sail over the top of that, and this brought the temperatures down even further

) fromasliveable
Now to atechnique
far as the really comfortable level is
for deployment inconcerned,
the mid-70wedegree farenheit
did this on ourrange.
first "

ll-foot sections, and it was my job to bolt II of them together. There's a sort
EVA and it required the manufacture really of two very large poles. They came in
i
I of a little bayonet lock that each of the sections fits into the other sections

j with, and then there is a screw clamp and a rubber grommet (?) that fits up to
! hold all of Lh:_sesections together, and two of these 55-foot long poles were
_ put together iz_this fashloo. They were then handed out to Jack Lousma who
!
t _ mounted the_ in the Fork of a little pivot and then this large V was swung

I over the top of the old parasol and he then unfurled a large sail with lanyards
i and halyards ac!dwe pulled it up like a large flag, all the way out over the
side of the spacecraft, and so that's the way Skylab is currently flying around,
\
\with this very large sail deployed over the top of the parasol.

/Prior to the flight, we had several weeks in which to prepare ourselves for the
Spaceflight
_ploy_enL of this sail_. We went to Marshall Center where the sail
=had been manufactured, we practiced first of all in the water tank with the
deployment mechanisms, we then went out into a large bay area and actually pulled
the large sail up over the poles themselves and we went to the practice in a
pressure suit, fitting these two long poles together, making sure that_ under-
stood just how they all fitted together. We tried it in the pressure suits, we
'tried it in shirtsleeves,so we thought we were fully familiar with just how it
should go together in the operation we were to perform.
 ROLL I, PAGE 2
,_'_, GARRILOTT

It turns out that equipment handling, particularly large masses, or even your
body, that sort of thing, zero-G is a very pleasant surprise. It's one of the
things that can really be done much more easily than it can here in the one-G
environment here on earth. I am fully convinced that if we had a safe weighing
a ton, sitting here on the floor, it would be very easily handled and moved
from one side of the room to the other. The only thing that's important is don't
move too fast - you can't put too much energy into the object that you're moving
because when you're ...you do, you have to take that energy out over on the other
side, and so it's important that you move slowly for the larger sized objects,
but it's still very easy to do, very precise capability, and it's a very pleasant "
one as far as moving yourself around - you can move easily, you can spin, you
can gyrate, you can flip, and all have a pleasant experience while you're moving
your own body around. Now small objects are a little bit different, because you
fiaveto bed little more careful. For example, with a pen, I'm very certain that
this will n_ver fall out of my pocket. I have it clipped there and I needn't
worry about it until it's time to use it. But the same thing is not true of
t zero-G. You c_n't jus_ lay it on your lap or lay it on the table, because as
soon as you do that, _'_
_ o floated away and been lost. You have to restrain it
•with a little piece of Velcro or with a clip, always being careful where you
put it down and how you attach it, so it's one of the things we do without
thinking here in one-G - we lay it on the table when we're through, or a variety
of other places, and we just can't do that in zero-G. You have to be more careful

L_d thoughtful for all of the smaller objects.

_e lower body negative pressure device, _r as we use the acronym, just the LBNP,
was one of the medical tests that turned out to be rather different in zero-G
than we'd found it on earth. It was perhaps the one experiment that we found
to be more challengingphysically in zero-G than we'd experienced in our pretest-

prelaunch test on earth. This appears to be associated with the fluid changes
in our body and the fact that we have a smaller plasma volume in zero-G so that

when we get inside this can which encloses our body up to the waist, there is
I then a partial vacuum drawn on the lower half of our torso and this tends to
_-/ nolblood "
"TD
{
In our legs, moreso in zeru-_jbecauseour legs have not been used

to resisting these forces, moreso in zero-G than we'd experienced here on earth,

o there is a tendency for our body to become a little bit faint, and we'll notice
 ROLL 1 - PAGE 3
GARRIOTT

a little lightheadedness in flight as opposed to a very simple nonchallenging

task as we found it here on earth. So in a way this test allows us to simulate
inflight what our body...or how our body would react to a one-G environment
if we were brought back to earth right at that time because the differential
pressure that's drawn on the lower half of our torso, about 50 millimeters of
mercury, is about the same differential pressure that our heart has to work
against in pumping blood from our legs to our heart as we stand direct...erect
in one -G. So in away, this is a test which simulates a return to earth
immediately and allows us to foresee how our body might respond to those condi-
tions.

_The vestibular tests in flight were also quite interesting because here again
the results were somewhat differentthan we h_d encounteredin our preflight
testing. The test itself was to put the subject in a rotating chair and allow
you to spin at some speed on order of lO to 30 rpm and then go thrQugh a series
of head movements,.,first nod forward, then to side, back, left and forward, until
Scall, Inalaise Now
_what the you approach a condition, to a layman,that
' i means that you don't feel too good, and when you reech this level of being ready
! to stop becauseyou .justdon't feel too good, then that terminates the test, and
rpm
_u hormallyfound, in my own case fairly typical, spinningNow
at about 15 a
I went
50 to 60 head movements before reaching malaiseS. in zero-G, a=ter
few days of adaptation, all cre_en h_ve found that we became very insensitive
to these motion problems and instead of going at 15 rpm, we could go at 30 rpm,
the highest speed the chair would rotate and not only that, go through the full
protocol of 150 head movements with essentially no symptoms at all. Now this is
essentially a situation that was not predicted by the physicians before flight,
nor is it really fully understood, even postflight, and it's one of the mere
interesting results in the medical area to come out of the Skylab flights.

_Blood sampling was performed on all of the Skylab crewmen at periodic intervals
"throughout all three flights, whether one, two or three-month flight interval,
and we would take the samples on each crewman, then put it through a centrifuge
to separate the red from the plasma component and then freeze it and bring it
back to earth for more complete analysis. Now we also went through even addi-

onal testing with blood samples in addition to the blood withdrawals. We also
 ROLLI - PAGE4
GARR£OTT

made hemoglobin measurement_s and other tests on the blood during the time
we were inflight to help correlate with the results that were obtained when
the samples were analyzed at the end of the flight back on earth.

S_eep monitoring was performed on the scientist pilot on each of the flights
about each...about every third night, and for this experiment, the scientist
pilot would put on a cap over his head which contained seven electrodes, all
• e way across the top of your head and over here on the side. This was connected
then through a preamplifier into a magnetic tape recorder and also a little
electronic black box which telemetered back to the ground the results of the
experiment. Now it essentially accumulated the number of hours that the subject
spent at the...at each level of sleep throughout the whole night, and physicians
h_ve estab}ished several levels of sleep, although a 1 through 4_and then finally
what they call REM sleep, or a rapid eye movement condition when_the subject is
normally dreaming. And so during each of these nights, the amount of sleep at

I
each of these levels was telemetered to the ground, and then in addition to that,
a full electroencephalogram was recorded on magnetic tape. These tapes were
then brought b_ck holm so the physicians who study sleep in detail have a rather
complete'picture of just what each of us was doing every third night during the
whole flight. An rather interestingly, they have found that the amounts of
sleep at each of these levels is not substantially different from the amount
of sleep that we accumulated here right here on earth. They use a term called
sleep latency which is essentially how long it takes to go to sleep, and in my
case, I think it was 13 minutes inflight as opposed to II or 12 minutes on the
ground, so essentially there's no different in the time it takes to go to sleep
and no substantialdifference in the amount of time you spend at each level, and
subjectively,my own impressionis that sleep is very, very comfortableand
pleasant in zero-G. I almost feel that it was rather pleasant to wake up a little
bit at night, just to have the pleasure of going back to sleep again, it's a very
comfortable situation and a very pleasant experience.

(Exerciseis one of the things that each of the flights did rather differently.
IThe first flight was very busy with a number of other tasks and limited the

ount of other exercisesyou did to on the order of 30 minutes per day. It

 ROLL 1 - PAGE 5
GARRIOTT

WaAS
ctivity
concluded
and muscle
that the
toneamount
and ability
of exercise
to respond
was important
well uponin return
maintaining
to earth,
the body's
so on
four second mission, we increased that to about an hour per man per day and we did

I _ind
n thean third
improvement
flight, again
they in our ability
extended that to return
even further, to the one-G through
and went environment, so
more like
hour and a half per man per day, with again comparable_significant improvements
in their general physical condition. Now we also added new equipment with each
flight in order to be able to better perform and better maintain this muscle
condition. For example, on our flight, we pull...broughtin additional bunge (?)
cord along with us. We had other exercise devices and then the third flight
brought a little treadmill on which they could operate and work against to stress
their lower legs even more heavily than we had, so this is a succession of increased
time and increased improved equipment for maintaining good physical condition.

e earlier Gemini and Apollo flights had a very specificgoal in mind - that is
Itheywanted
I
to get to the moon, they wanted to do lunar science, bring back
b |samples, and of course, the programs were very successful in that. they did not
Ibave the objective really of studying man and how he interacts or how he adapts
|

!]to zero-G. It didn't really havethe objective of establishinghis ability to

_work well for long durations in zero-G and conduct lengthy experimental and
fscientific experiments in space.
! These are the sorts of things Skylab did do.
We were looking at how man can spend these long intervals. For example, Gemini's
longest flight was two weeks; we immediately jumped to four weeks with our first
flight more than doubled that to two months and then again to three months in
the Skylab series, all the while, studying man very, very carefully in much
and

it's really a rater new direction for our efforts and it's also the direction
Ldetail performing
ich we will b_eadin9very useful
over the scientific
next lO or and technological
15 years experiments,
in the Shuttle so
program,
so I think that's the best description of how Skylab differs from the research
objectives of the Gemini-Apollo programs.

he solar equipment, the solar studies comprise one of the most complicated and
...let me start that over. In the area of our solar studies, that of the solar
,0
f-_/I physics, we have one of the prime research areas of the whole Skylab program...

e equipment that was used consists basically of six scientific telescopes,

 ROLL 1 - PAGE 6
GARRIOTT

mounted
diameter,
tothey
a spar,
haveand
a number
these of
things
auxiliary
are about
equipment
lO feet
mounted
long and
with7 them
or 8 and
feeta in
number
of environmental control systems also on this one spar. It can be pointed with

I very great precision, as a matter of fact, you can point to a precise spot on
the sun's disc, on the way to what physicists call one arc second. Now one arc

i second is actually the size of a dime as seen from a distance of one mile. So
that gives you some sort of an idea of the precision with which these very large

could not possibly be of any value on earth, because the energy simply doesn't
Penetrate the earth's atmosphere. I'm talking about the ultraviolet and x-ray
i solar _Jescopes
radiation can sun
from the be which
pointed. They important
is very are also to
useful at wavelength
understanding ranges going
to what's which

on on
and the
our sun, but yettelescopes
ground-based all this can't
radiation is at
see it absorbed inwethe
all, so earth's
have to goatmosphere
above
the earth's atmosphere to see and to use these telescopes and we have to point
it with the very great precision that the solar telescopes on Skylab were able
'_to be used_

(There were a number o_ really fascinatingviews available on Skylab - some of

them seen for the very first * _ by the h.......
_lm_ ....
n eye and just one of these for
example I might mention was a view we had on about the second or third day of
a very large gas bubble - like a magnetic bottle expanding out through the
solar corona. Now in this case/ the question was'bout the new things we'd
seen, wasn't it?

There were a number of really fascinating views available from Skylab in the
area of the solar studies - some of them seen for the very first time by human
eye, and one of the ones I remember best appeared on just the second or third day
of our flight, or of our solar observations. When we had the chance to see what's
called a transient moving all the way out through the solar corona. In this case,
there was an eruptive prominence, as it was called, on the disc of the su!_hich
#
cast out through the solar atmosphere, called the corona, to very, very high
altitudes and expanding bubble, confined by the magnetic field an theformwas

,___] sort of a bubble or a bottle. This was moving out through the corona at a velocity
of about 300 miles per second and we couid see the expansion of that bubble on
our coronagraph, and we had a number of photographs of this taken during the
 ROLL 1 - PAGE 7
_ GARR[OTT

course of this expansion, and as a matter of fact, although vm'd only hoped
to see two or three of these perhaps on the whole Skylab flight, our mission
alone had the opportunity to bring back over 20 examples of this sort of a
transient, and our...

/"Okay, I'll just say another word or so about this bubble. So this bubble was
expanding all the way out to the solar corona, we could see it on the corongraph,
and we brought back a number of very fascinating views of this sort of events.
As a matter of fact, they have occurred so frequently and result in such large
changes to the corona that the solar physicist responsible for work in this
area indicate that their ideas of the stability and the dynamics behavior of
the corona will have to be completely revised now as a result of the photography

k_ information brought back from Skylab.

I was going to mention next so EUV bright point fluctuations, leading to a

_ flare. You do havesome flares, I suspect? I could say something about a flare.
_ares are also a transient event that was very important to study and very high
ion our priority list, and we had the good fortune to have a good deal of solar
_activity on the sun and the opportunity to view a number of these. They sometimes

seem to be preceeded by fluctuations in the intensity of the ultraviolet light

coming from the sun until they perhaps just reach this point of instability and
then the flare really bursts out in full strength and over a period of just a

a_numCOUple
ofminutes may reach its maximum intensity. We've been able to photograph
ber of these at various wavelengths in the ultraviolet and x-ray ranJnd
provide a very useful view of just how it is these things start, and we hope
we will be better able to understand the mechanism which produces this very
rapid and enormous conversion of energy into the radiation that we see.

Tsheimportance
tandpoints. First
of our
ofviews
all, the
of the
solar
sunphysicist
can be approached
- it's offrom
intrinsic
severalinterest.
different
'They're basically interested in understanding how the sun behaves, where it
I gets its energy, how it converts that energy into the forms _n which we see it,
_f_/ but there are also other reasons which are even more important to the man on
the street. Within just the last couple of years, our space program has enabled

___ find a relationship between the solar wind which blows far out through the
 ROLL 1 - PAGE 8
GARRIOTT

orona,
hat solar
eventually
wind andreaching
weather patterns
the earth's
here
environment,
on the surface
a relationship
of the earth,
between
and so
_we need to study more about this connection between solar wind and meteorologica_
phenomena. That's of course of basic importance to us all. We also know that
when these large flares erupt on the sun, they throw out charge particles which
reach the earth in some 24 to 48 hours - these produce Aurora, which we see
l}ereon earth, and we've got a number of photographsof those by the way. We
have al_o found unfortunately they sometimes even disrupt solar communications
and even power lines at some of our northern and high-latitude power locations,
so we have to understandbetter these violent events on the sun in order to be
able to see its relationship to the effects that we find hero on earth.

nge where the radiation does not penetrate to the earth's surface. One of
lu_Vementioned
r instrumentsthat mostworks
really of our instruments
in the are in and
visible range, the that
x-ray is
and ultraviolet
the range of
I wavelengths to which our eye responds. This is an instrument called a white
i light coro1_o]raph put still this is an instrument that has a very unique application
_ iLnearth orbit because w_ could again not use that on the surface of the earth.
\ The reason is on the surface of the earth we can only see the corona of the sun

maybe once or so a year, and usually off in T_mbucktoo instead of a conveniet

location
at where
the time of the astronomers
a complete solarare, and soNow
eclipse. it means that
we know we only
those have
things a few
only come along
glimpses a year, lasting maybe one or two minutes at a time of the solar corona.
Now if we look back over at how many opportunities there's been in the _est
century, there's been probably less than an hour, some very small amount, but
here on Skylab, we have this large instrument with occulting discs to block
out the bright image of the sun, allowing us to see in effect the corona of the
sun continuously, so we have an interval now of about 8 months for which the
corona is visible continuously. It's a far more valuable thing than just a fw

brief glimpses or snapshots spaced bY yearly intervals, because the sun rotates

dynamically with time by looking at it continuously as we'd done on Skylab.

in about
This is a 28 daysnew
whole andfacility
now we can see
then ofhow the corona
complete itself
change rotates
in our and
ability changes
and way in

Which we can look at the corona as opposed to our brief glimpses on solar eclipses
en from the ground.
 ROLL 1 - PAGE 9

f_: GARRIQTT

also had several experiments

IfWe smaller intended to look at the ultraviolet
I radiation coming from stars throughout the galaxy in which we're in as well as

._ radiation coming even fron other galaxies, and these experiments wre extended
out-the scientific airlock of the Skylab and then pointed their instruments at
the particular objects which had been selected by the ground-based investigator
for study and in it his instrument looked at the ultraviolet radiation coming
from the sun, allowed it to be dispersed until the image actually looks like
it has a long tail on it, and then he can see just what radiation is coming from
each of these stars to see how they are developing and what the conditions are
_n the atmospheres of each of these stars many many millions of light years away.

_Anothm - experiment that we extended from our airlock was one to look at the airglow

the earth. That's one of the interesting things that you see differently from
radiation, coming from a rather bright ring which can be found completely surrounding
orbit. When you look at the horizon, particularly at night, sometimes you can
just make out the boundary between the earth and the darkness of space, especially
i _if there is a _oon, but then just a degree or so above that, you'll find another
I little bright ring which is an airglow layer. Now this airglow is caused by
I
J
excited molecules in the earth's atmospherewhich re-radiatethe excitation

l energy that the2 have, and this radiationwill frequentlycome at both visible
l wavelengths and into the ultraviolet - near ultraviolet range, and so our cameras
_were also used to photograph the emissions coming from this airglow layer which
_rounds the earth. Let me check that angle here again...

I don't see how I can give you very much on that one really...

f them at this point. We have brought back so many thousands of pictures, and
he solar
hs is actually
physics
incommunity
the orderhas
of about
lO0,O00
five
photographs
years of of
very
the
intensivework
sun, wavelengths
ahead
which
_'were simply not obtainablefrom the earth's surface, which they have to look
Ithrough an analyze in order to better understandall of this activity that's
_j- f going on on the sun, all the dynamic behavior and the time variabilityof the sun
il i_ something that they have to spend a lot of time studying and better understanding
they will be able to see somethingabout how the energy is transmitted and
 ROLL 1 - PAGE I0
GARR_QTT

/
transformed from within the sun all the way out to the solar atmosphere until
it is radiated away in either the form of radiation which we can see or in the
form of energy of the particles as they move out through the corona. We also
are quite interested in seeing how this relates to activity right back here on
the earth in the way of meteorological conditions, weather patterns here on the
surface of the earth, or in terms of things like Aurora, power line difficulty,
radio communication problems, because all of these are related back to the

ctivity on the sun, which was the basic thing of interest to the solar physicists.

earth

he earth resources equipment was a whole new array of instruments - instead

f looking outwards towards space, toward the stars and the sun which was instead
oking backward at the earth, down at the earth, in order to study things back
l he resources
re at hone. equipment
Now these - I'II
instruments start that over
photograph again...in a variety
the earth of
..... _ different spectral ranges, all the way from visible
wavelengths and say the
I _green, blueand red, c_ear down into the infrared, which is very useful for

_ also had infrared imaging which essentially builds up

"certain studies. I_
_
----television
pictures in a number of infrared wavelengths,wnicn_
_ can be viewed
by the investigatorsback here on the ground. He had other instrumentsin the
microwave region which essentially senses the temperature and the sea state,
and the altitude of the sea and things of this nature, but it's a rather
complicated and sophisticated package of instruments, looking back at the earth,

attmptin£ to see just what are the best ways for us to study all of the many

ferent disciplines of interest to us here at home.

 ROLL 2 - PAGE II

fFood supplies are very important factor not only for this country but for the
E entire world of course. That's one of the things that we can provide some
assistance to with our earth resources package and then later on satellites,
perhaps other unmanned or automated satellites using the results of the ...
let me start all over on that...

Food supply is one of the important things that we're all concerned about.

package can hopefully be of benefit to. For example, we look back at our sources
of food supply, that is our agricultural areas where we are growing corn, wheat
and ether things
throughout and we It's
the world. can do several
also one ofthings. First
the things ofour
that all earth
we can survey the
resources

_.._m_untt°fw_and
that is devoted to the productionof these crops- we cn even
ima e at the yield is going to be, depending upon rainfall, temperature
and so on is, also we can see where there may be areas of infestation- in
_other words some disease like a corn blight may have been started, or such
as fruit trees, which may not be healthy._We can see areas where the
forests have had significant infestations, so this all goes together to help
us put together a better pattern of the total world production of food and
lumber and other things very importantinterests to people in this country and
overseas as well.

fMineral resourcesare very valuable...I'djust as soon not talk about minerals,

hat's a tough question. Let me go on to the one on hydrology, is that all right?
In the area of hydrology,water resources is a valuable national resource that
we need to carefully evaluate and see how much we've got. We need to decide
for example if it's a question of snow storage, how much we have available,so
we can decide how much of it can be released for irrigation,how much should
be reserved for recreationalpurposes, how much volume should be stored for
potential flood control, these sorts of thi ow we can all study these
"things rather well from a remote location like a spacecraft,because we can
see the entire geographic area to be surveyed. We can see just how much snow
F _ coverage there is in areas like Arizona or Colorado and estimate the amount of
water that's going to be there, how much runoff we're.gonna' have in the spring
and thereby determine how much should be used for irrigation and other important

purposes.
 ROLL 2 - PAGE 12
f-_\ f - •

/ One of the early uses for some of our earth resources photography has to do
are quite interested in finding how much of our finite volume or area of land
is being devoted to metropolitan areas, how much for crops, how much for recreation,
how much to timber, etc. Now this can of course ben done by reports from our
county agents,_but this is a very tedious and lengthy and time consuming and
expensive
with land job_ Instead
use studies - we've
people found
in ourthat we can
major take
cities andlarge area photographs,
our agricultural areas
one to two hundred miles on a slide, allow computers to scan these photographs,
and by using sensors at different wavelengths, establish automatically how much
of it is being devoted to these variety of uses, thereby providing a very
eoonomical way of studying the land use pattern all over the entire country.

rystal growingto
f our ability experiments provideThe
work in zero-G. onespaceflight
of the mostprovides
fascinating applications
us with an opportunity
to get away from the gravitational influence that many of our processing experiments
have imposed upon it. For example, when we try to grow crystals in our earthbound
_. laboratory, we find that very small thermal convection currents result in an
inhomogeneousstructure. It does not have the pure homogeneouschemical con-

_ituency that we wou!dlike it to have. I'll start that one over....

/_rystal growing experimentsprovide one of the most interestingapplications

of our ability to work in space. One of the things we can do in space of course
is to get away from the constraining and perturbing influences of gravity. Now
when we grow a large crystal in earth's gravity, we find that the chemical homo-
geneity is not anything like as nice and as uniform that we would like it to be,
in fact, one of the photographswhich we have seen provided by Professor: _
w_k:5

at MIT and his crystal growing experimentshows layers of crystal in which

although it was attempted to be grown perfectly uniform, thermal convection
currents have caused it to be a very layered structure, almost like strata you
would find along a stream bed someplace, but then when this crystal was then

i melted, and resolidified in zero-G, that half which resolidified in zero-G is

| nearly perfectly uniform, as near as you can tell by eye, it is quite homegeneous
going to earth orbit for the
\
F_ _,_rowth
and one of
of crystals
the advantages
such asthat can be achieved by
these...
 ROLL 2 - PAGE 13
f

Crystals have almost an infinite number of uses in our electronic industry.

They are used in diodes and in transistors and in electronic equipment, almost
!in every application we can imagine throughout the country today, and it's very
important for a lot of purposes to either have them very pure chemically or to
have a very precise amount of impurity of known amounts distributed homogeneously
throughout those crystals, and so that's one of the directions that this sort of
research should lead us.

You may know that we also had a number of experiments proposed by high school
students around the country. One of the most interesting one I think was that
that"
oposed ...let me start
r oneoverso I don't
flub
hername. "

be that also had onboard

You may around
students awarethe country.
we One experiments Skylabproposed
of the most interesting I think was by
thathigh school
proposed
by a Miss Judy Miles from Lexington, Massachusetts, who suggested that it would
be quite interesting to study the web formation of a spider in zero-G. Of course,
.... here on earth, they start their webs by sort of dangling down on one thread from
| the ceiling or from a tree limb until they can get the web started and complete

I the pattern. Now they can't do that in zero-G of course because they just don't
dangle down on a thread, so it would be quite interesting to see how they mentally
.- go about solving this problem of getting away without the availabilityof gravity
and generating an interesting or satisfactory web. Now it turns out the first

first webs ...when Arabella was first placed in zero-G, her legs were simply
spider we had - we had two actually - the first one was Arabella, and Arabella's
flailing wilding around as she tried to find something to grab ahold of, and after

i bouncing around
on a screen inside herherself
and attached little rather
cage for several
firmly minutes,
there, she that
and after finally got over
point, she
then set about apparently thinking about how she should begin her web construction,
because that night, the very first night, she did indeed come up with a sort of
a web - a very scruffy looking thing, but still got around the corner of the
.little enclosure. But the interesting thing was that every night after that,
the web improved until after 5 or 6 days, she was spinning very, very Dice webs,
nice symmetrical webs...radials and circumferential rings all the way around it.
f_f _ It would do justice to any sort of a web that you might find at home in your

garden, and we still didn't know Exactly how she figured out all the problems
_to solve the difficulty of this construction w_thout gravity to assist her, but
 ROLL 2 - P§. 13
F " -

nevertheless she did so, and after about a wee_ with spinning
_Sb_e_oss_Ui_a_e_°t_a_ea_u_otIt_n_t_em_t_t_i_l_ very, very nice ut

_._ound.

They certainly can improvise, no question about that. By instinct, she knew
she had to spin a web.
j.

.,.handling of liquids in zero-G is also an interesting problem, as you can

f imagine when you try to take a drink from a cup or something of that nature.
We of course didn't have cups onboard, we instead had little drink.bottles
which expanded accordion style to fill out the amount of liquid that you put
in them, so you have to do something like that to drink. You can take special
precautions everytime you handle liquids. Now we had a number of science demo-

I strations onboard in which we attempted various means of handling liquids, and

this is one oF the areas:in which it was interesting to see the evolution of

i• technique Ce:Je]oped
on the first flight,over the course
.JoeKerwin ofto
began the three a
squeeze Skylab flights.
little Forof
liquid out example,
these
bottles and ' "' it _._ith
nan_e a straw, and even to pump air into and out of the
_' water bubble, as he wished. Building on those ideas, on the second flight, I.
- then began to use hypodermicneedles to use it a little more precisely,and to
up
I blow even larger bubbles, and also sovled one of the most difficult problems,
that of restraining and confining this bubble so it doesnt float all over the
r
$ spacecraft,- a nice simple way to do that is simply on.a little string which
t
t we made of dental floss, and this is just enough force to attach it to the
I
! bubble and restrain the bubble so it doesn't fly around all over the spacecraft,
and we then generated a,number of ot_er experiments, using these sorts of bubbles,
c and then on the third flight, they did even more fascinating things such as
_ spinning these bubbles up, causing them to rotate until they finally even reached
i, the point where they would fission or separate into two separate bubbles, and
'we'renow reaching the point where we're doing experimentsthat are really of

_-_ sorts of breakups in solar systems or in cosmological problems'. It's of interest

to cloud physicists who are studying the way in which water drops interact and
combine as they
considerable are falling
theoretical down through
interest the earth's
to nuclear atmosphere,
physicists and so handling
who are studying similar
 ROLL 2 - PAGE 14

(of liquids, in space turned.out to provide a_ evolution through the course of

teresting to a number...a large number of researchers.

_the
i threeofflights,!and
Another our sci nce e!en£!ally _e££hela
d mon trations ha top!int Where
o with theY'reeffects
magnetic really in
quite
earth
orbit. Some people may not be aware that the earth's field that we use here
on the surface for say pointing our compasses and so on - actually extends far
out into space as well. Way above the altitude of Skylab even, and we can
demonstrate this in fact with little magnets about so long by releasing these
in zero-G and allowing them to float, we can see them oscillate back and forth
and from the period of that oscillation, we can actually ca@culate the strength
of the earth's field. We can also see its effect in other ways, such as providing
gyroscope
_oa ject
torque onaatorque
and spinning object,
then allowsso we in
this effect have
gyroscope a
to precess by the
in a way spinning
rather similar
to a top precession that a youngster can spin right here on the surface but
whereas gravity provides a torque resulting in the top spinning around, rotating
around in a loop, in earth orbit, it's the magnetic torque that causes the
spinning nut to tip over and precess.

Not quite so true on the water drop. We might well have learned some new things
from those water drops. I tried to suggest that.

een about 3/4 of an inch long, as well as about 50 eggs which hadn't hatched
et. We took these into zero-G in order to see what the behavior of these little
innows and the hatching of the eggs would be, and it turned out to be a very

scinating
_ experiment as a matter of fact. First of all, little minnows, when
_a e
heyalso
were
took
first
along
placed
with in
uszero-G,
a coupleimmediatelybegan
of little minchmog
to minnows,
swim in what
theyamust
pilot
have
would
swam a very tight loop
_call outside loops. In other words, they pitched down, in
l outward. This actually would seem to give their bodies negative G and why they
swam this direction is why ...is certainly something I don't understand and I

on explanationsfor this particularphenomenon. And these two minnows essentially

kept up that same sort of behavior - periodid outside loops for their entire
'don'tbelieve the physiciansunderstandeither, and they are currently working

lifetime,
hatch after
which 3was
or 4
about
weeks,
four
and
weeks.
a total
Nowofin
48addition
out of the
to 50
that,
eggs
thefinally
eggs began
did
 ROLL z - YA_E |b

f-_/hatch into small minnows, little tiny minnows, and the rather intersting
I here has been found that the newly hatched fish did no_ exhibit th! same _ncy

you find that one of the little minnows would swim in an outside loop, but normally
they swam about more or less in any orientation much as we would find here ...
fish were doing here on earth. It does seem at this point that in some way, these
new hatchlings adapted to zero-G while they were still in the egg, and so once
I to swim
they in outside
hatched, loops. feel
they didn't Veryit
occasionally,when
necessary for themthe
to bag
swimwas
inshaken could loops
the outside -

as did those fish _hich had been hatched and had lived for awhile in a one-G
ironment before being taken into space.

Really covered most of them because magnets, fish, water, web, we're gonna'
talk let's see on momentum, we ...conservation of energy and angular _nentum.
Also I might say a few more words about the sort of acrobatics that can be
performed. I think you'd want to include a little bit of that, and I would
suggest you use Alan Bean, in fact, I'll use his name in here if you don't mind
because he was a g_nnist in college and does this with more finesse with...than

L anybody else, and it Yearly is beautiful to see him flip and twist and roll as
he goes from point to point around the spacecraft.
/
' A number of physica] principlescan be very well demonstratedin space, such as
the conservation of energy and angular momentum. These are all physical laws
that we know from our textbooks have to be true. We have some good examples
here on earth, but in zero-G, in orbit, they can even be demonstrated better.
The one that comes to my mind most readily is in fact a demonstration that Joe
Kerwin performed on his flight in which he is p_aced out in the center of the
workshop, away from contact with any of the rest of the spacecraft, and essentially
stable and stationary with no kinetic energy and no angular momentum, and yet he
is able to demonstrate how he can do exercises there, and as soon as the exercise
is complete, he again becomes perfectly stationary. Another very fascinating
thing that can be demonstrated this way is how a cat can always land on his feet.
If you've ever tried this experiment, and I don't really recommend it for the
youngsters, but the experiment can be done which shows that even thoughyou drop
/_ a can upside down, by the time it's had just one or two feet of fall, he is able
to twist his body around and always land on his feet. Now that can be demonstrated

n the same way by the exmaple that Joe Kerwin does. Here he is with zero-angular
 ROLL 2 - PAGE 16

/-_ f
(momentum, yet but by twisting his hands and feet in opposite in directions...
I want to change that wording just a moment...Joe Kerwin can demonstrate in
effect how a cat lands on his feet by twisting his hands and feet in opposite
directions, rotates his body by 90 degree_ per twist, and comes back to a stable
position again, and with another twist, he rotates another 90 degrees, so this
• shows that the human in zero-G, with no contact with a structure, can indeed

change yourbody attitude, and that's in effect what the cat does as he falls

pside down into a rightsideup position.

Acrobatics is also a fascinating demonstration in orbit, and in a way, is also
a demonstration of conservation of angular momentum. Alan Bean, I think perhaps...
Acrobatics is another fascinating demonstration from space. Alan Bean I think
does this job better than any of the rest of us since he was a gymnist back in

college, but you can see how between contacts with_he wall of the spacecraft,
k__anages to do a number of flips and body gyration_which would certainly be
the envy of any diver _ere on earth, had he had the 5 or lO seconds to perform
j-_ all these ma1_euver_,and it makes a very beautifulwork of art, as well as I
think doing justice to a ballet organizationand could be fittingly associated
with appropriate sort of ballet music.
/

Skylab first we_t into it had

When
of that, apparently, orbit,
our attitude somethermal
gyros, which are used problems, and as a result
for the stability of the
spacecraft, apparently were slightly damaged so it became somewhat erratic and
every now and then one of the gyros would tend to indicate that the spacecraft
was not in quite the right attitude, and this caused a number of pertmrbations

needed all the stability we could get. As a result of that, we took up with
us
to on
the our flight
spacecraft a - new set ofitself
handled gyros automatically,
which we installed
.so asinside the pressurized
a result of that, we

spacecraft, and so halfway through our flight, on the second EVA, Jack Lousma
and I went
volume, but out,
whichJack
thentook the pliers,
required and made the
the interchange interchange
of cables on theof outside
several ofcables
the
and hooked up another little box, as required, to connect this new set of gyros
into the spacecraft attitude control system, so instead we were working on now
_ a good set which controlled the attitude of the entire attitude...of the entire

to do several more experiments,

us
i Skylab very precisely, and this enabled pointing
at stars, pointing at the Comet for example tht could not have been done with a

ulty set of gyros that we had to begin with.

J
 ROLL 2 - PAGE 17

_/The importance of manned spaceflilgEt i_ really hard to su_arize in only a fw

i minutes, but I think there are several features, several important aspects that
i could be mentioned. First of all, we're in this game for a long time. It's a
whole new sea which just been opened the last 15 years and for the next who
• ,
! knows how many centuries, man is going to be exploring the solar system. To do
that, we are going to be able to know to...we are going to need to be sure we

! can really endure and work well efficiently in space for long intervals of time,
| and Skylab has been the first program to prove that that's been possible, because
!
here we have men who have lived for a long enough time in space to allow their
bodies to really adapt to that new environment, and we found that we can still
work and live efficiently and effectively, and then again return to a one-G
environment when we're thmough, and that's one of the most important features.
Now we've also found many new ways in which we can conduct experiments of a
scientific and technological nature in the zero-G vacuum environment above the
earth. _e found many new things that we need to not only study looking away frgm

i "
the earth, but study Iookingbacka_earth for the__benefit,of our citizens
I hereat_ndso these I thinkare the importantthings- t_
- __ab and the imFortance Df man in space. We're right on the threshold o, ..... /

F _really a brand new opportunity to explore the solar systemand _uniKverse j

_and to increase t_e value of benefits back here at home. _£#le v(" .__-
/

I think Skylab is a turning point in our effort. All through Mercury, Gemini,
rand Apollo, we were working toward a single objective, that is, the design
land constructionof hardware which gave us the capability to operate in space,
_and in fact, achieve a very specific goal, that of landing men on the moon,
)erformingscientificexperiments,returning rocks and the men baGk home, and
ve met that goal and accomplished, but now Skylab is the turning point away from
ithat specific objective, and allowing us to take advantage and benefit from this
capability to operate in space, - we've seen that Skylab has already turned this.
Were obtained the benefits of living for a long time in space, performing many
scientific and technological experiments in space, and returning our interest and
.our focus back to our problems here on earth, and so in that sense, Skylab has
been the turning point and is showing the way I think for the next 10 or 15 or
_erhaps even more years of spaceflight activities.
{
ASTRONAUT PAUL WEITZ
 SKYLABOVERVIEW FILM PaulWeitz
AV519 _: S_a _
ROLL l - WILD SOUND

_On the launch of Skylab l, the Workshop, May 14th, slightly over a minute into
the flight, as it passed through maximum dynamic pressure region of the boost
profile, due to what turned out to be faulty engineering design, is that we
actually got a positive pressure through the base portion of the workshop stage
a portion of the meteoroid that's called the tunnel. This actually increased
the pressure underneath the micrometeoroid shield, lifted it out into what was
then becoming a supersonic airstream, and this thing is made of 25,000 sheet

a supersonic airstream, it carried away. Fortunately, for us, the program and
I think the world is that it didn't really do any damage to the rest of the
aluminum,
icle. so
It you can imagine
separated ratherwhen aluminum of that
cleanly.//Thatall thickness
right? is extended
I think into
I only got one
"uh" in there.

Well, this is just supposed to be completely relaxed, all right? I feel like
President Nixon. Ever notice that everytime you see him it shows up that his
upper lip is sweating.
I

Paul, could you smooth your hair down just a little...where? That's it. Hell,
I don't know, I ain't been able to in 42 years.

Okay, this will be the ground preparation as far as you and Pete and Joe were
concerned, for the parasol and various aspects ofwhat you did. Okay, ready?

In preparing for our launch, which of course was slipped I0 days to a11ow us
to attempt to analyze what was really wrong with the workshop, because all we
had to go on were deductions based on data that was being sent back from the

workshop,_ tr_yJ_i_ so_ _e_._t1_ tb___b_j_:v_one on,the center,

o_f course, all the NASA centers were working on it, all our contractor_n the"
Skylab program were working on it, and primarilywas taking an active part in
discussions and decisions that were made as to what's wrong with the workshop
and how we're gonna' fix it, and we went to Marshall to work in the watertank
with the proposed fixes, talked to the engineers that were working on it, talkec

_o the flij_lanners and_Lis_ssed it of course with management_ we actually

launched on the 25th of May, with three potentialways of covering the workshop,
to shade it from the sun.
 Page 2 - Weitz

This will be as you approached Skylab, describe the damage as you saw it...
and you might even describe some of that stuff that you did, trying to get the
wing out.

Well, as we approached the workshop, we got within distance where we could dis-
V !_ _j,_L_.,
cern it"I'"_+'-11"'I_..j_
we could see that the entire meteoroid shield from the bottom...
we did approach it from the bottom, that is the earth side of the vehicle, and
we could see it was gone, we could see all the gold foil, the workshop was
covered with gold foil underneath the area where the meteoroid shield was suppose
to be. We could see that the one solar panel was still in place, was deployed
about 15 degrees, as the ground had deduced from their voltage measurements from
the solar areas, and that the other panel was completely gone. We could see
wire bundles of about 5 and 6 feet in length sticking out of the side of the
vehicle, but the rest of it was completely gone. As we did our flyaround, I
think the thing that impressed me mostly was first off, the size of it and thB
thing was so damaged that it incurred on the gold foil on the sun side - it was
blackened, blistered, charred, you normally think of the gold foil as being
a good reflectivesurface, to reflect the solar energy, but it had really suffered,
we knew it _#asgettiT_ghot inside the workshop. So we fooled...flewaround,
_nished our inspection,everythingelse, the forward end of it, the Apollo
Telescope Mount, the multiple docking adapter, the entire forward end of the
vehicle looked I00% okay. We flew around soft dock, went ahead and ate and
prepared for our standup EVA in an attempt to deploy that remaining solar wing.
We undocked, flew around to the side during a night pass so that we were all ready
to go as soon as it got daylight, we went ahead and dumped the cabin, opened the
hatch, that first light, I went out the hatch, Joe stayed down in the lower
equipment bay portion of the command module, steadied my feet and passed me
portions of tools. We had various tools that fitted on the end of 5-foot sections
of pole which screwed together. Using this and what we call a Shepherd's Hook,
which was a large hook with which we intended to hook under the free end of the
solar panel and break it loose and swing it out, Pete went ahead and drove the
vehicle right on it, he had no problem station-keeping, which we're all glad
to see, because we really had some concerns about his ability, with Joeand I
_ thrashing around in the vehicle to control the vehicle in a pressurized auit.

_.Uh, the command modul_/hadn'tever really been flown by smmeone in a pressurized

suit before. Uh, but it turned out to be a do-able job, we went ahead and hooked
 3 - Weitz

under the beam, the portion of the straB of the remaining piece of the meteoroid
shield was still there, was wrapped up over the top of the beam however, was
much stronger and practically welded in place. I heaved on the end of the beam
on the pole, with the pole, hard enough to deflect the end of it about a foot
add a half, according to Pete, pulled the two vehicles together and actually
deflected the workshop, disturbed it from its inertial attitude, but it just
wasn't enough to break that strap loose or do anything with it, so tired and
discouraged with night coming on us, we then...our assessment of the situation
at the time, mine and Pete's, was that we did not have _he right tools on board,
I did,..we gave up on the hook and moved up to the strap, and we had a small
tWo-prong tool onboard that actually we actually tried to then pry the strap
loose, but we just couldn't get ahold o4 it and couldn't get enough leverage
on it to pry it loose, so we then went, as we say, very discouraged, gave up,
went back, redocked or attempted to redock, and that's when we got our next big
surprise of not being able to make a successful capture, and that's the time when
you really get down to the fourth-order backup procedure, which we never expected
to use, and it was only kind of by chance that Pete and Joe really knew enough
about it to go ahead and use it.

Describe the parasol...

Excuseme - I didn't get you in the ears with that one, did I?

_ur first choice of the method to use is to erect some sort of sunshade to
try to protect the workshop was what's called the parasol, and it was our natural
first choice, because it was deployed through a scientificairlock that already
existed in the side of the workshop,
L
it can be done completely from the inside
in a pressurized vehicle. Pete and l went down into the_workshop, installed _Eh_'_

_ster that containedthe parasol in a sci_k, the tem_erature_)yJ_

_rksho_ was.verY ho.t but_dry l_eminded me of the desert - it Was_a_bout
130 degress Farehheit in there, and this approach was to go down with minimum , .
clothing on, but the heat was being radiate_at us from the walls of the workshop
and from the water tanks primarily. We found out they were great 9ource of heat -

f
_ it took them a long time to cool off, and they were radiating heat and we actually
wound up going like the Arabs do, we put on more clothes to help protect us from
cap
I theheat. We put our jacket on over the top of our shirt, we put our on and
wore gloves. It wasn't that uncomfortable, as I say, it was a very dry heat,
 •4 - WeitZ

_ r_we'd worked on there for 15 or 20 minutes and then retire to the MDA where the

t
I MDA temperature was about 55 degrees Farenheit, we'd cool off for about 5 minutes
J or so there, and maybe have a drink of water out of the command module, and then

go back down. I forgot now how long it took us to do this, a couple of hours, _'c,_
after which we had completed the task and deployed the parasQl. Joe wasobservin_
thedeplojnnentof the parasol from the command module,,ff_--C-_Id
see that_t did-
no_ep_ completelY
0n the first try, it dep_F6_yed
much the same fashion as a
beach umbrella. We went ahead, jiggled it and shook it and spun it around as
best as we dare, since it, too, was erected and screwed together sections of
pole so we didn't want to spin it too much for fear we'd unscrew one of the

sections and lose it. We deployed it as best we coul_.pulTed:it-_c_l_-It_

w_r_about lO feet off the side of the workshop w_n R_as deployed, wo pulled /
i_k dotal_o _wb_reit's abau_a_f_t off and uh, that was i_ite
well for the rest of the mission. It turned out our post-undockingflyaround
photographs showed that it had not deployed completely,and we could tell. You
could map out, just by feeling the side of the workshop, ever_n_here
that the
parasol was, because in the space of 3 inches, you could feel it was hot, hot to
the touch, I'd esthrate 90 to lO0 degrees, and 3 inches away where it was in the
1 _ shade, the wall of the workshop on the inside was cool, 70 degrees or whatever
was about ambient.

Cut, Charlie, keep rollin', Les...tell me when you first started feeling the
temperaturecoming down, when you first felt the thing was having some effect..•

Now when we could tell...whenwe first noticed the decrease in the ten_oerature,
of course, the ground was keeping us advised, and I think that had a lot to do
with it. They said the temperaturecame down 3 degrees, and we'd say yeah, and
we're glad, but of course while it was that hot, we were sleeping in the MDA and
the command module, and you're biggest differencewas you'd come out of the work-
shop in the evening, turn in for the night, get up the next morning and go down,
and you'd know it was cooler then by 5 or 6 degrees or lO degrees or so, but we

could tell.,-.I think on about Day"4_or 5, we definiteiy"_tha_i_t Was "o longer

BWB s

_uncomfortable environment,it warm, but certainlyn6"thing-thatyou couldn't ./

Okay, let's skip over that solar wing thing...okay,the next thing is describe
 5 -Weitz

the _sensat_o_of _oyemen_ _n_pment handling,your reactions to it, Charlie

let's just make it...let's get about 30 seconds in, we'll cut the camera, and
won't have to distract anybody, okay?

As far as moving around ourselves and equipment in the large open volume of the
workshop, that was very pleasant. It was a very pleasant surprise, in NASA's
own inimitable way, we'd approached it conservatively and we had many tasks
that were spelled out in our procedures to be two-man tasks, some that were
even required three. We found out that as long as you could fix your body,
stabilize your body position, there was practically no task you couldn't do
in weightlessness. As a matter of fact, the smaller the task, such as when
I took apart the SOl9, the UV Stellar Experiment, and it had many small screws
in it, the smaller the piece of equipmentyou were working with, the more diffi-
cult it was, because they tended to float away on you and drift off, and we had
to stick small screws and springs and small pieces like that and make sure we.
stuck them to a piece of tape that we had taped to a locker wall. But the
mobility was, I like to refer to it as the "Peter Pan Mode" - you could really

i ==--just
push off and move around within the workshop/he, thing that surprisedme
most was how quickly we all adapted to being fairly precise - within a matter of
a day - I'm talking about - you could by pushing off with one finger, if you
wanted to combine a translation, that is moving from one point to another within
the workshop, and you also wantedto rotate, to change your attitude by the time
you got there, this was a very rapid learning curve and you could learn to do
this quite rapidly - you just pushed off from the wall, you went in the right
direction at the speed you wanted, and was pretty near the right rotational rates
you wanted. Of course, the secret in rotational rates you wanted is like tumblers
and ice skaters and that, you just change your moment of inertia by pulling the
legs and arms in or extending them and you could change your rate of rotation
this way. Large packages were no problem, of course, these have mass and still
have inertia, but all you had to do was move slowly and my technique, personally,
for moving a large mass, was I'd push it off in the direction in which I wanted
it to go, and then I'd let loose of whatever I was hanging on to and I'd just
hold on to the mass or piece of equipment, whether it was a camera or a bunch of
._. film, or what have you, and just let it tow me along.

In a long-duration spaceflight, Paul, would you like to see the ship have

artificOal gravity or do you think the weightless environment would be better?

J
 Page 6 - Weitz

For long-duration missions, weightlessness has attractions, it has drawbacks.

It's like everything else. Gravity has attractions and it's got drawbacks, too.
Especially to the man who falls off of a 30-story building. But as far as
working, moving about, handling equipment, gravity's an asset. When it comes to
everyday living chores, the shaving, the brushing the teeth, the going to the
bathroom, the eating, the lack of gravity is an inconvenience. I wouldn't say
it's a hindrance, I think it's a nice to have thing on long missions, and by that
I'm talking about missions of 6 months or more, but it's expensive, it's gonna'
cost us something to have artificial gravity, we're gonna' have to have a large
enough vehicle to spin and a lot of technical problems that would have to be
overcome to utilize it, so I think it would be nice to have thing for the living,
sleeping and eating areas.

Okay, we'll skip over the medicai. Okay, just give me something on the solar
physics, briefly describe solar physics equipment and experiments. Here agaiW,
let's cut _ut after about 40-50 seconds...

! r'fhe solar physics portion of the Skylab experiments, which of course were almost
on our flight, w_s cc))ductedslowly with the Apollo Telescope Mount, which was
a battery of 6 solar telescopes, and of course, we used them on Sky!ab to get
these telescopesup above the earth's atmospherewhich does a wonderful job of
filtering out what has become to humans the harmful radiation from the sun, but
it also filters out radiation and wavelengths that would help solar physicists
understand more about the process that's going on in the sun. For example, we
brought back more data'on the corona, that is, the hot gases that surround the
sun, on our flight, which was only I/6 of the totalmissionflight time than had
been gathered in all the study of the sun previously, because the only time we
could get it was during totdl eclipses before, and they,re
#
rewriting;atextbook

w
on solar physics as a result of these Skylab flights./We've learned a lot about
the corona - we've learned a lot about the radiations that come from the sun,
;from the...during these so-called solar storms that affect the earth's weather,
and atmosphere, and you can see that if we can predict the affects of solar
radiation, changes in solar radiation, on earth's weather, this will give us a
_ leg up on forecasting weather, and agronomists and agriculturalists say that an
accurate 5-day weather forecast can save farmers in this country 3 billion - 3 to
5 billion dollars a year. Uh...Skylab was a unique vantage point from which to
 7 - Weitz

to study the sun, and as a result, we've learned an awful, awful lot about it.
I think Ed and Owen can give you moredetails on it.

Yeah, I remember details like in the past century we've had a chance to loek at
the sun uh...it's real low, I've forgotten now, uh, so many minutes.

Yes, that's right - there's some of it that's minutes, cumulative with lO's of
rocket flights, and I think Ed's got that information.

Anytime you want to break now, Paul, ...naw, it's all right.

Okay, you say UV Stellar you don't -

That's right, we only did one experiment, I already told you everything I knew
about that when I said that I took it apart once.

How would you describe function and purposes of EREP experiments?

mmmmm_

We had on board, of course, EREP, which is an abbreviation for Earth Resources

Experiments Package. The primary purpose in flying this group of equipment
which much like the Apollo Telescope Mount was a conglomerationof six different
sensors that we used to look at and study the earth's surface. The primary pur-
pose of this package was to evaluate the techniquesand equipment to be used in
studying the earth's surface. Now incidentalto that we brought back data and
this is what is going to turn out to be very useful, but it's an important
technical point to keep in mind is that the primary purpose of flying EREP was
to study the sensors themselves and what will come out of it that's most useful
will be evaluationof sensor performance,but in order to evaluate the sensors,
we do in fact have data informationon processes that are going on on earth.
Now from this hopefully,some day, we will be able to determine what for instance
the amount of snow in the mountains left by the winter storms, the winter soow.
We can be able to determine hopefully the rate of melt of these snows in the
spring, and I think from that, then, you can see that we would be able to if
we can predict the amount of runoff, how it will affect the flood plains along
the rivers and with proper implementationof this information,we can have the

good schedule for opening the flood control devices along the river drainage
 8 - Weitz

more warning and can minimize it. We're helping to find where fish are, so
I system. This boats
that fishing will not
don'teliminate
have to floods, buthunt
go out and hopefully it can
for days give people
and days, hopefully
one day we'll be able to give more effective utilization of our fishing fleet in
this country and tell people where the fish are and where to go to get them.
They can just go out, fill their boats, and come back with them without having
to spend days at sea. We hopefully will be able to determine sources of pollu-
tion and by analyzing the pollutantsthemselves, potentiallycome up with better

_ys to control this pollution.

Let's see, what else you got down there, we got uh...I wouldlike, if you can,
...all right. Naw, I don't think we'll use this, Charlie...okay?

Two of the potentially most useful experiments in EREP were a multispectral

camera that took simultaneousphotographs in 6 differentwavelengths and a
multispectral scanner which is a digital data information gathering system,
and it took- measured the radiation in 13 different wavelengths. Now what makes
this type of information so useful is in the results - and the results aren't in -
NASA and the principal investigators are still working with this information,
or with the data, trying to get informationout of it, but you can combine, for
instance with the multispectral scanner, you can combine as many of the 13 channels
as you want, depending on how you combine them and what combinations you use, you
get different types of information, and you can imagine how many different com-
binations of 13 you can make. You can use any two, any three, any four, and mix
them, that way, and the results unfortunately just aren't in yet, we just don't
know what we can do yet, we're still working on it, but it's a very useful tool,
as far as trying to...I lost my train of thought - I was thinking what I was
going to say next...yeah, signature's a good word...

...so by combining these different wavelengths in what is called a signature of

a particularphenomenon,whether - and what they hope to be able to do, for
"exmaple, is in the spring, if we want to know how the wheat crop is doing in
the United States, well, it's very difficult with our present state of the ark,
_ to tell newly sprouted summer wheat or spring wheat from barley, oats, from other
greens, but we may not want to know about barley and oats. What we're trying to
do is find out how can we mix these things so that we can differentiate. What
 9 - Weitz

_' is it that makes the signature of wheat different, of young wheat different
from young barley and young oats, and young rye, for example. Uh, we saw
several instances of pollution, both manmade and natural - the Amazon river,
for example, is a large natural pollutant, if you consider silt and sediment
pollution. It extends from lO0 miles into the Atlantic Ocean. A__far as man-
made-pollution,I think that probably the most outstandingvisual evidence of
this is
in_I_c_i,_k_ndd it starts at the source of the Great Lakes -
the western end of Lake S__i_-we-_c_lel_Q___a_eddish color, which I assume
comes from steel mills in that region as it flows by populated areas - you can
see the pollutantsalong the southern shore Of Lake Erie/Yob can see where
eye, large creek or small river en_otiesinto the lake practically.

Uh...mineralshortages...lhave these all in context, problems...

As far as what Skylab and EREP and remote sensing in general of the earth can
do toward mineral supplies, and that includes oil, and metals, is in many cases,
you know, you have to send a man or a crew out there to look at it and say yes,
P this is a good place to explore, it's not. But in many cases, the big picture
is worth months of exploring. For instance, in Wyoming, from one picture of our
flight in Skylab, there...they're are upgrading all the geological and topigraphic
maps in a section of Wyoming. To do it by conventional means, that is by ground
and by airplane would take at least a year, and they're updating these maps
from one photograph. There's a section in Nevada, in central Nevada, where it
hasn't been proved yet, but using different aspects - one is a photograph, a
geologist vYno is familiar with that area thinks that there is a potential for
massive copper deposits in that region, because he's seen on a scale that's very
very large that never showed up in aerial photographsor in exploration by foot
or car of that region...is that here's a geologic formation that is similar to
ones that they know have gotten copper from before. Now here's the example where
we feed in the multispectral data - an analysis of the multispectral photographs
of that region show that the plants in that region emit in a signature that's
indicativethat they have...or are living in copper-rich soil. So these two

...... things in combination lead us to believe that there is probably copper in that
region. Now what well...we'll also do is reduce the amount...in oil for example,
which is very important nowadays. As far as finding deposits of oil is reduce

the exploration necessary to find a profitable yield and profitable deposit of oil.
 I0 - Weitz

P
Energy needs, _ guess youKye coye_,edthat, too. Ub, populationpatterns.

All right. Another use of remote earth sensing data is determining population
patterns and population density. I don't know what's been done with it so far.
Visually, you can discern large areas, large cities - they look up as they appear
...they appear to be a gray patch on the surface of the earth. You can't see
any buildings, you can't see streets, interstate highways and freeways show up
quite plainly, mainly...sir?

Interstate highways and freeways show up quite distinctly, for one thing, they're
usually in high contrast with their surroundings, plus they're typically pretty
much straight lines, so even thoggh they're relatively narrow, they're quite
discernible to the human eye from our orbital altitude of about 270 miles, and
they typically lead into the population centers, but it's quite easy to determine
where the large cities are. We could see Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Boston,
for example - this is tempered to a certain extent by atmospheric pollution. We
tr_'edto find the city of WashingtonD. C. one day - when the meteoroligical
conditions reported on the ground was clear - that is, no clouds - and seven
miles visibility. And, unfortunately,there was Bnough of this hazy-type,
smoggy-type, whatever you want to call it - I call it pollution - in the area
that we just could not find Washington, even though there were no clouds in
the sky. Did I give you enough on that?

4
 rau! wel_z

SKYLABOVERVIEWFILM
_ AV 519
ROLL 2 - WILD SOUND

Uh, you might cover one other thing under EREP and that's meteorology - weather
business, want to touch on that?

Uh, yeah...no, I don't know much about it, and we didn't do any of it, as a
matter of fact, the main thing on ours was to stay the hell away from the clouds.
All we did was incidentallytake some radiometerdata on that hurricane,and uh...
that's right, they did get into some of the weather stuff, but we didn't.

Okay, briefly describe the hardware...wouldyou like to take a break, Paul,

coffee? Okay, don't let us push you now.., briefly describe the hardware and
purpose of materials processingexperiments,and the next question is describe
the purpose of the following processingexperiments...andyou say you did sphere
forming and welding, so you can just run all that together, but I would like for
you to explain electric furnace (garble)...okay.
All right.

Part of a large family of experimentswe had onboard was what was called the
multi-purpose furnace or the materials processingfacility. This was a chamber
- a spherical chamber in which we could insert different setups for evaluating
what was going to happen to the materials under different conditions. This
sphere could be evacuated, it could be dumped to a vacuum so that we could
actually study what happens...let me start all over again.

Another group of experiments that we performed onboard was the materials processing
or...let me start over again on that. What the hell, I keep getting MPF as
multipurposefurnace which we didn't really use, and it was a materials processing
facility, I guess'that'swhat we call it.

We also had onboard a setup that was called materials processing facility. What
this did primarily was determine are there...is it technically feasible and in
some cases, is it economicallyfeasible to perform certain materials processing
functions in space? Now why do we want to do it in space. We have two major
I advantages. One is the absence of any significant amount of gravity and the
_her is the availability of a large, near-perfect vacuum, so those processes
 Roll 2 - Page 2
Wei.tz

which require or potentiall_ can...may take use of these two advantages of

orbital flight or evaluateS_,To_C,
do this, we had a sphere which could be evacuated
and we had an electron beam gun as a heat source. Now on our flight, we tried
...made the first attempt at forming ball bearings. The results were somewhat
disappointing to us. To the actual metallurgist who we_ technically responsible
for the experiment - they were quite delighted with the results. It turned out
we didn't get many spheres - spherical spheres, that is, because of technique
problems, more than anything. In other words, we had to melt these cylindrical
slugs and then let them _ without touching anything else. This didn't always
work. Sometimes they stuck to the wheel on which they were ...had been originally
launched, sometimes they would come off it with too much velocity and impact
the side of the sphere, but it did show that there's definite promise in making
perfectly spherical and homogeneous ball bearings, as it were, for those specialized
applications where it's worth the time and effort to form them in space. We
also evaluated welding. Wondered if there would be any advantages to we._ding
i.nspace or any disadvantages. The results , the preliminaryresults, so far,
' show that we get nice, even beads with good cooling, good welds. Uh, I think
from what I've heard, there are no distinct advantages, no major surprises in
that. The other was crystal growth, a portion of the experiment that we per-
'formed. I think that this probably shows the most potential benefit. We grew
some crystals in.the various crystals ...in the various flights, which were up
to lO times the size of any that have been successfullygrown on earth. As far
as metals melting, we melted some combinationsof metals to form alloys, and
' these turned out that they met the greatest expectations of the experimenters

earth
i who in working
were the presence
with of a gravitationalfield,
this, and the advantagesofisweightlessnessesthat
that some of the portions
on
of the alloys will form first, and so doing, as they solidify, they settle
to the bottom, and you either have to keep it agitated, or some other means
of keeping the thing stirred up, or in some cases, you just can't do it. And,
of course, in weightlessness, there is no bottom for these particles to settle
to, and they are very excited about the results of this - they are getting good
homogeneousmaterials out of these.

Uh, let's see - something crossed my mind - oh, are there any dollar figures
you could place on this?
 Roll 2 - Page 3
_- Weitz

No, not that I know of.

Okay, yeah, that was good. Yeah, this is habitability, Paul - sleeping, per-
sonal hygiene, housekeeping, off-duty activity, just briefly, anyway you want
to.

_/}J_l_r_ght.
A_nother area with which everyone was concerned and interestedwas
what's called habitability - that is, howwas it living for extended periods
of space inweightlessness. We found that it was quite pleasant - thatmoving
about was no problem, initially, there is a feeling of fullness in the head.
This is caused, we think, by the fact that for 40 years, your heart has been
maintaining a five-foot pressure head from your feet to your head, and you get
into weightlessness and it doesn't need this anymore but it keeps providing
it. I can liken it best to hanging by your knees from a tree limb - you feel
your jugular vein is distended, you just have a fullness in the head. I think
f- the effects of this diminish, plus you get accustomed to this, so that after
about lO days to two weeks, you really don't notice it much anymore. As far
as eating, we had no problems with eating. We used fruit trays that were similar
to old airline-type ....As far as eating, we had food trays that both heated the
food and retained the containers in which the food came. Uh, there was no
problem eating, it was a pleasant surprise. We had frozen food, we had what's
called thermo-stabilizedfood...likecanned food that you would buy_on earth.
And we had rehydratables. That's food that was mixed with water - to rehydrate.
We had very few problems handling the food, and it was very pleasant. Sleeping
was no problem. We had what we called sleep restraints - it was a me_al frame
over which was stretched _ bed - more like a sleeping bag into which you crawled.
' We had multiple covers you could put on or take off as many covers as you wanted.
We had expandable stretch straps that held you in this bed, and it also helped
to give the illusion of lying in bed, as it were, and this....
you could lie on
your back, or on your side, or on your stomach, or any attitude that you wanted,
and it was no problem at all in sleeping. Personal hygiene - of course, what you
I miss most is going to a sink and turning the water on and washing your face
!
or
brushing your teeth. Well, we didntt have this. Our water, we dispense_ into a
' washcloth,l
if" you're going to use a washcloth, and you got rid of the water by
 Roll 2, Page 4
Paul Wetiz

absorbing it all in a towel. So you kind of missed the niceties of gravity.

As far as the waste management compartment system...as far as the waste manage-
ment system was concerned, it worked quite well. We had an air entrainment
system for both urine and feces, and it worked extremely well. We had no
problems with the system, we had no spills, it was not unpleasant, as has been
reported from previous flights.(General housekeeping in thevehicle was quite
easy. The one area that we always had to stay on top of was the food area.
mentioned previously that there wern't many problems, but what you did have
was small spatters which at home on earth wind up on your placemat, on the
tablecloth, or under the table where they're easily wiped off. In weightless-
ness, a spatter goes in any direction - it can go up to the ceiling, over to
the wall, wherever - we took a damp towel and wiped down all the walls and the
floors or what have you in the eating area once a day, in an attempt to keep
it clean. We had an excellent pattern of ventilation through the vehicle. In
essence, it came up in front of the...it came up through the floor of the work-
shop, and went toward the dome, toward the top of the workshop, and there entered
a large plenum - a large mixing chamber that had a fine screen over it. If you
! lost something, we soon learned that you didn't worry about it - you just forgot
about it for an hour or two and then you went and looked on the screen and...in
the dome of the workshop, around the plenum, and 95% of the time, that's where
we'd find it_

As far as recreationand off-duty activities, there was no surprise to me anyway,

having spoken with people who'd participatedin TekTite, the underwaterexperi-
ments, we found that the most useful - uh_the most used form of recreationwas

looking out the window." In 28 days, we never got tired of watching the earth
jgo by. Uh, we read some toward the end of the mission, but as far as playing
games, we had cards on board, we had darts, none of which we used. We broke
Ithemout and looked at them, just to see what they looked like, but we never
really used them, because between looking out the window, listening to music,
we had tape cassette music onboard, we listened to that a lot. Each man has his
own tapes and own tape recorder, cassette player that he could use. One of the
most useful items however that we did use a lot was a small rubber ball - a
little blue ball, and we got a lot of hours' enjoyment out of that, just throwing
it around, back and forth to each other, or we had one where we saw who could

getI the
as most skips around the dome lockers. I think I held the record with 12,
remember.
 Roll 2, Page 5
Paul Weitz

At the time, I don't know if that's been broken or not.

Okay, cut. Yeah, I remember the footage of the ball.

That's right, yeah. At first, I thought you were talking about the darts,
couldn't figure out what the hell you were talking about, then I remembered.

How they might be improved on a long'duration flight...or what you think of a

long-duration flight (fade out)...take care of their off-duty hours.

As far as what I think we can apply from what we learn in Skylab to future
long-term missions, it was quite pleasant, again as I said. We had the...
the vehicle did have an up-orientation,because,.we
trained in one-G in trainers
for 1000's of hours, and you still tend to associate that "up". We walked
around in it, and up was always toward the dome, and this was no problem.
Another surprise was that many people had visualized that in moving about in
weightlessness, you v.soulddo like you do in water - that is, you would move
f

from one point to another headfirst. We found this wasn't so. You'd push
_ •off your hand, and you'd maintain _,isup
_L. \' uorientation,
withyourheadtoward
the dome, and if you'd have to, you'd go feet first if you were going down,
you went headfirst if you were going up, and if you're moving across the room,
you typically just went sideways, in a standing or "vertical" attitude. As far
•as...so for future flights, I think we don't have to provide any special means
of locomotion- we had a lot of what we called mobility aids on the vesicle.
You don't need this -you don't need these special aids to get from place to
place. You learn very rapidly to just push off and soar - fly from one place
to another - unless you're doing work. If you're doing work, then you must
have some Means of stabil_zingyour body, and the most useful way to do this
is with your feet. The triangle shoes that fit into the grid of the workshop
that we used for...were quite useful. From that, the dutch shoes, so-called
dutch shoes that sta;-ted back in the Gemini days and that weused were quite
" useful and easy to use. As far as maint_ance tasks in the future, we're gonna'
need some better way than sticky tape, I think, of holding the small p_eces
; when you're working on a piece of gear, piece of equipment, but I think the
i message that comes across loud and clear is that anything you can do on earth,
! you can do in space if you just give a guy a place to put his tools and his
 Roll 2 - Page 6
_ Paul We_tz

and restrain his and there's

_n:rts
thing thatyou
a placeto
can't do. body, reallynothing- there's

As far as recreation, off-duty activities, looking out the window will always
be I ti_inkthe prime mode of rec_ation,and that's based on not just Skylab,
but every other flight that's ever flown. Therefore, any vehicle that goes
and the longer it goes, I think the bigger the windows ought to be and the more
w__indowsthere ought to be--_soyou can look out, and this is not only useful from
a recreation point of view, it's going to be useful scientifically. People are
g6ing to be able to see more, they're going to be able to make more observations,
and report on more phenomena. Uh, our tapes, our tape music was very much used -
was very useful - we ought to have this provision. However, the one thing that
we didn't have that I think will be useful and maybe even a requirement in the
future, is our live - essentially live - current news broadcast - at least radio,
if not television. Television, I think, from the ground, would be very useful
on future flights.
t

...why is man important up there, ready?

Man is important in space flight because he's very flexible and relatively
cheap-to-producecomputer, is what it boils down to. Some things a man can do
better than a machine. Some things a machine can do better than a man, but
when you're performing an honest to goodness, real live experiment, if you're
going to do it with a machine, you either have to know everythingabout the
experiment,that is, be able to predict every possible path down which that
experimentcan proceed, which are based on the results of the experimentsup to

that point, or y_u have to be able to change the paths down which the experiment
will proceed, _ remote control from the ground, so that means that a tremendous

$!
amount of data flow back and forth - in some cases, it's not practical to do this.
_It's cheaper and easier to send a man along. Even though in so doing, you have
_ to provide for man's comfort and well being, and you have to provide an environ-
_ mental control system, a temperaturecontrol system, food, water, uh waste

it's worthwhile sending a man along to do some of these jobs. Not every job
management,
can a man do.
butNASA's
still,message
I thinkthroughoutour
as we've demonstrated,both
exploration ofon
space,
Skylab
our
and
total
Apollo,
 Roll 2 - Page 7
_-- Weitz

themselves, and a lot people lose sight of, was a mix of manned and unmanned
portions of
program, hasspace
been exploration
a mix of manned
- the
and
ALSEP_
unmanned
the Apollo
flights.Lunar
The Surface
Apollo missions
Exploration
Equipment, that was set out on the surface of the moon - they were in place
by man, because man was along, but the equipment themselves that they set out
there as part of ALSEP was an unmanned station - it's a monitoring station, kind
of like a lunar weather station, as it were and they're sending back data -
L_,c_
the Apollo 12 stationAwasin place in 1969 with a lifetime of one year - year
1974, it's still sending back data. What the challenge is to the managers of
these programs, is finding the right mix of manned and unmanned endeavor in
space to best utilize the advantage of both, but man definitely has a place in
Space exploration, primarily because of his flexibility and his own capabilities
to determine which way an experiment or an investigation should proceed.

Uh, okay, cut, Charlie - let's apply that to Skylab.

mm.i

Man's usefulnessin sp_,:ehas been demonstratedI think on Skylab. First off,

if it ha_t been fo_ _an, we'd have never fixed the vehicle, it would have
Ibeen a lost mission. Some of the capability that we would have lost was
the habitability of the vehicle, making it liveable for man to begin with, of
course, but not as much of the film and many of the experiments could not have
continued to operate in a high-temperature environment which the thing had been
seen for lO days or so, and also, as we learn more about living and working on
Skylab, performing the experiments, our flight was primarily an evaluation of
what can we do? Can a man live comfortablywith little if any ill effects for
28 days, and can he do experiments? Can he move around, can he work, and that

was primarily what we did. On the second flight, the_extended this a little
Lbit, they got into a little more of how can man be best utilized to work on his

own in flight. I _hinklh_

this culminated in the last flight, where Ed Gibson was
{tape fades out)...utllization of man, as far as Skylab was concerned, was f._o_
pointed out by Ed Gibson on the last flight. By the end of the mission, when he
really knew what was going on with the ATM experiments and based on what he had
learned from our flight and the results of the second flight, Al Bean and his
crew, and he said there...in quotes, "remained at the panel, looked at the

ldisplays, saw the information and data that were coming in from the experiments,
 Roll 2 - Page 8
Weitz

and he utilized man's capability to take all this - these inputs and something
he may have learned or been exposed to years ago comes into play and you don't
realize it I've been told in making_any of these decisions. He put this all
together in a way that no machine could have I think unless potentially it was
the machine itself was as large as Skylab. You'd have to build a thinking
machine, a computer that knows everything, and a computer only knows as much
as the guys that build it and program it an_ay, and he put this all together
and actually the ultimate goal in ATM was that Ed picked out a spot on the sun,
watched it, was monitoring it, was taking data on it and we got a flare, a full
flare, right from its conception, from the birth of the flare, and I think that
this is an example of just how much man can do. No machine could have done that.

flowabout (garble) problems...yeah, let's cut...

I mentioned SOl9 - we talked about...we skipped the solar beam - we talked

about gyro six-packwhich we didn't do anyway...

t Why are Skylab missions so important, Apollo-Gemini mission of the future (??)
past and the future together.

Skylab, as it turns out to my way of thinking, is one of the most important

spin-ofYs of the Apollo program - we refer often to unexpectedadvantagesor
gains in knowledgeof the space p_ogram - the spin-off. And Skylab, I think,
is truly one of these. We achiev_our lunar exploration program with less
flights than we thought we would, than we had anticipatedyears ago, that left
hardware, unused hardware remaining,so how to utilize it? Put it to some good
advantage, and from this evolved Skylab, and Skylab is an important step in
man's long-range, long-term exploration of space toward extended missions. The
primary purpose of course was originally to determine how does man react in
extended periods of weightlessness. For years, we've been looking - NASA, the
medical community - has been looking at the physiological data that has come
,back and the people who have flown spaceflight, and what they have beenlooking
for is this magical plateau - some body functions have shown a change, and we've
never known until Skylab - has this change ever decreased - does it drop off -
will you die after a certain number of days in weightlessness, or what happens,
f-/ Roll 2 - Page 9
Weitz

and Skylab found this plateau - it turns out that it's right about 28 days,
which was when we came back. We came back at about the worst time you could,
as far as your medical condition is measured by response to certain medical
experiments and stresses. It's opened the door, I think it's shown just how
much man can do, given the right equipment and a place to move around, a place
to work, we know now we can put extensions of ground-based laboratories in
flight. You can liken it to the corporate jet - I think, is that airplanes
have evolved over the years from the l_right Brothers flying machine to the
place now where the jet is ...the corporate jet is an extension of the office.
Give a man the right accoutrements on the airplane, and he can do anything in
the airplane he can do on the ground. The same thing applies to the spacecraft.
We can,..not business...but from a scientific point of view - it's an extension
of ground-based laboratory. We can perform experiments, we can analyze data,,

nd information.

Okay, good. Okay...(fade, Bill)...real philosophical.

I think it's a natural question - why explore space? And some peopl: ..\\.
different people have different views on this. Personally to my way of thinking,
!
part of human nature is to reach out and explore -we cgnting_that on/
__t_h__we hadn't,whatwouldthe UnitedStates
- be now. It would still be concentratedeast of the Appalachians if we hadn't
followed Daniel Boone down through the Cumberland Gap, you know, what was West?
Indians and vast grassy plains - that's all, and that was no good, but people
did. But people did - we advanced west and look what the western part of the
United States is worth to us as a country. The same thing was the acquisition
of Alaska, for example. It was looked upon with much debate and hooting, and
it was called Seward's Folly, but I think everyone will agree that Alaska was
a bargain - especially the Russians now that they sold it to us - so it's for
two things: it's for what we can use to benefit mankind from a scientific and
a technological point of view, and also I think it's to satisfy man's basic
_.
• yearA1ng for exploration and reaching out beyond the confines of his present
environment, and the space program - in the space program very few people get
to do it, but a lot of people can participate in it vicariously by watching
the reports of the space program and reading the results. That enough?
 Roll 2 - Page I0

Paul Wei.tz

Uh, one other thing...something to cover recovery, and just kind of give me
your reactions when you first got out of the command module, how you felt,
_hysically and...

on deck of the carrier

IAll right. When we stepped out of the Command Module the
Jand it wasn't exactly a light springy step out either, because we had been in
_an environment of course where we had not been influenced by gravity for 28 days
and here we were essentially all of a sudden subjected to it again - and what it
waslike to me - subjectively - was just like being on a centrifuge in a 3-G
environment, that is where everything - you're living in a gravity that's 3
times as strong as the earth's - everytimeyou tried to move your arm, it felt
like it weighed 3 times as much as you rmembered it weighing. You had to get
used to again to using muscles you hadn't used. For instance, the human neck
isAfairly large muscle to primarily hold your head erect. But we hadn't had
i to do that for four (?) days, and we found that if for instance you nodded.your

!head or tipped your head to one side, it tended to keep on going, because you'd
i ! forgotten how to go abcut stopping it, and the muscles weren't just as strong
as they had been before, and by the same token, when you walked, you tended to
overshoot and lurch a little bit._I think that's why in the movies I've seen
in the TV clips that show that you kind of walk spraddle-legged and in a lurching
fashion and that's just because you're essentially learning the fine points of
walking over again. There was a little...I'm trying to think of the word to
use because we got into a big flap over this before on this orientation, dizziness,
vertigo, veu know - they all mean different things to different people, and I
certainly want to make sure. I think I won't use any of those words.

Well, let me say something about it - I'm just thinking about...so then I'm
gBing to get into the recovery.
 Paul Weitz

SKYLAB OVERVIEW FILM

_ AV519
ROLL 3 - WILD SOUND

...and also when...in our first re-exposure to one-G, we found that it's a little...
there was a little disorientationwhenever you moved your head, and by that I
mean that whenever...ifyou moved your head rapidly, up and down, for instance,
as in nodding yes or side to side, or that...it wasn't dizziness or certainly
wasn't a sickening sensationat all, it was more as I say a disorientationand
this sensation, both the...andthis orientationwould stop as soon as you stopped
moving your head. It had no lasting effects, it wasn't like getting sick from
spinning around in the chair or what have you too much. Now this sensation of
disorientationof vestibular, inner ear disorientation,and this heaviness in the
limbs kind of went pretty much together as far as their dissipationand disappear-
ance, and the morning of the second day aboard ship, for example, I likened...
when we got out of the command module to 3-G environment,the morning of the second
day was about 2-G's until it took just about 48 hours for this sensation, in my.
case, to disappear, so that by the morning, the second morning aboard ship, was
a little more than l-G, I didn't notice that...thedisorientationon head movement
anymore, and by noon or early afternoon,I was back completely in a l-G environment.
!

That covers it, Paul, unless there's anything else you'd...

No sir, as i say, Sammy gave me that list there last week, and I thought
ASTRONAUT
_LLIAN POGUE
 William Pogue

"SKYLAB - THE VITAL LINK"

AV 519

We launched in November - the workshop was in good condition, it was an

operating workshop, but we did have systems problems. The primary coolant
loop, which is a plumbing apparatus in the loop, was malfunctioning, but the
secondary loop was up and functioning properly. We had experienced some
difficulty on a prior mission with very sensitive gyroscopes which are essential
to maintaining proper attitude in the vehicle, and these gyroscopes of the
original equipment had been replaced by a separate item which had been carried
up by the second crew. As far as the physical condition of the workshop itself
when we entered it, it was very clean, there were no problems, just about
everything was in the proper position as far as stowage was concerned, and
we could not really complain at all about the condition of the workshop when
we launched.

Well, as far as working in zero gravity and moving yourself or moving pieces
of equipment, it was a delight in comparison to similar work which was conducted
in training in one-G on the surface of the earth. We found, for instance, a
piece of equipment which weighed 175 Ibs on earth was quite easy to move with
) two fingers once we got into orbit in zero-gravity. It's very easy to move
the pieces around, it was remarkably easy to control them, although it was
also sort of interesting that an item of equipment, however.light or heavy,
it was very difficult to stabilize in open space, so usually ended up with a
small velocity, and if you were trying to more or less suspend an object in
space while we were preparing something else, it would always have a slight
drift velocity to it that you'd have to continually manage it with no big
problem, but we found that there were no problems associated with zero-gravity
which were very serious.

That required a lot of planning - the problem of stabilizing your own body
in zero gravity in order to do useful work is somewhat of a problem.. We
of course took full advantage of the triangular grid structure which was
throughout the spacecraft, located throughout the spacecraft, and this matched
or mated with the triangular cleat on the bottom of our shoes. When we did
not have this sort of facility available at a work station, we resorted to
either holding with one hand, wrapping our legs around something, or in some
cases, once when I was doing a fairly intricate repair task on the coolant
Page 2 - Pogue

loop, I actually took straps and lashed my legs to hand holds so that it
would hold my body in the proper position so that I would have a good purchase
at the pointTof application of forces.

We had one rather interesting experiment which was conducted in what is

called a lower body negative pressure device, called LBNP for short, which
consisted mainly of sort of a drum or cylindrical container which had a rubber
d_aphragm or collar on one end. The crewman was placed with his body in the
cylinder up to his waist, and then during the experiment, the pressure was
removed on the lower body, hence the term lower body negative pressure, and
this was continually test the astronaut for any cardiovascular problems,
that is, any problems with the heart or the plumbing associated with the
circulatory system.

The metabolic analyzer was a device which measured the amount of air inspired
by crewmen during exercise and the amount of air expired during exercise
with the additional added factor that the expired air was analyzed for its
chemical constituents to see what kind of actual performance the body was
maintaining as far as its ability to process oxygen. We had one experiment
which was related to problems of vestibular nature in the crewmen and
consisted of a rotated chair, and in this experiment, a crewman was placed
in the chair and rotated at a certain rate while at the same time he was
rotating, he would perform head movements to see exactly what degree of
motion sensitivity had evolved during the flight, and we found almost uni-
versally that all of the crewmen demonstrated a remarkable adaptation to
rotations, that is, they were very insensitive to the rotational effect,
and although they were aware of the tumbling sensation and so forth, there
was no nausea or any tendency to get sick.

took blood samples periodically throughout the flight, mainly to make

'sure that the blood was maintained at the proper level, and that the body
was responding properly to lowered levels of hemoglobin, or red blood cells,
to make sure there was not some sort of subtle effect taking place in zero-
gravity that would leave us more or less open to infection say. The blood
!

was - all these blood samples were returned and theywere subject to post-

_t analysis for other things than just the red blood cell count.
Page 3 - Pogue

We had one small device onboard called a specimen mass measurement device
which was used to measure small items, measure the mass of small items.
Of course, in weightlessness or zero-gravity, there is no weight, but of
course, the body or small object still has the same mass that it possessed
on the surface of the earth. And we used a device to measure this which
essentially involved very accurate determinations of the period of oscillation
of this mass when it held in a certain way.

The body mass measurement device was used to determine the weight, if you'll
pardon the expression, of a crewman each day. Of course, we can't determine
weight in weightlessness, but we can determine the mass of the body and the
mass of a crewman who is located in a device which is free to swing on a
very carefully calibrated spring. The period of this spring balance will
vary with the mass of the object in the device and of course, this is - has
a direct relation to the weight or what is equivalent to earth weight or the
mass of the body. This is how we weighed ourselves everyday.

During the course of the flight, we conducted periodic examinations - ear,

nose and throat, also the eyes. We had a small amount of eye irritation
early in the flight but that cleared up and we were never concerned with it
again, but we did have to occasionally look at the ears and throat.

After looking at the results from the first two flights, it was rather
obvious that the more you exercised, the better off you were in spaceflight,
so we cooperated fully - in fact, very willingly, in increasing the exercise
regimen onboard our flight. We increased it from - well first, there was 30
minutes a day roughly per crewman for the first flight, an hour a day per
crewman on the second flight, and we resolved to use an hour and a half per
day per crewman for exercise. We did this and used an additional device,
which was not used in the previous flights, which was called a treadmill,
and this enabled us to exercise the lower legs, the calves, and the large
muscles of the thighs to the extent they were not exercised on previous
flights. This together with the fact that we followed this regimen very
religiously, we feel this is responsible for our good conditon upon return.
 Page 4 - Pogue
,F

We feel like that a crew could probably stay up for a longer period than
We did if we followed an exercise regimen similar to the one we followed.
However, it was my own personal feeling that zero gravity sort of permits
a detrimental effect to set in. I personally think that long duration
say on the order of six months to a year - long duration missions should
require some sort of artificial gravity.

Of course, the medical experiments onboard Skylab were a natural outgrowth

In many cases from the medical experiments conducted on Mercury, Gemini and
Apollo flights. Uh, for an example, the bone demineralization problem or
speculation was very carefully examined on the long duration flights in
Skylab. Very simply stated, one asked the question, "Do you lose an irrecov-
erable amount of calcium or phosphorus or some other mineral from the bone
on a long duration spaceflight?" The answer appears to be, "No, you do not."
Tb_s question was not fully resolved until our flight got back, and they
looked at the data. Now the other - many of the other medical experiments
quite naturally follow and sort of expansions of examinations in Mercury
and Apollo - some of them are quite new. But I think that what you have is
a developmental larea of expertise and knowledge and you would just naturally
expect for the medical experiments to become just a little bit more grandiose
as you go along.

One of the added bonuses on our flight was the scheduled appearance of the
Comet Kohoutek during our flight. The comet was observed early in February
1973...

In February 1973, an observation was made of a new comet which was entering
our solar system out near the planet Jupiter, and the discovery was made by
a gentleman in Germany named Kohoutek. There were several things more or
less unique about this comet - one, it was observed very early out in the
solar system so that they had a good chance to track it and determine the
path it was actually going to take. Another was it appeared to be very bright
according to cometary standards, and third, there was a unique opportunity
to martial a lot of forces to get correlated observations of the comet. In
addition to having an unmanned observatory in orbit which could conduct
some observations, we were scheduled to have our last Skylab flight up there
Page 5 - Pogue

in just about the period of time that the comet would come closest to the
sun, and it gave us a lot of time to get everybody geared up so that we
could coordinate observations. This we did, and there was a plan called
Operation Kohoutek which did coordinate'all these efforts. We were very
pleased to be able to participate in the program. Now the comet did not
achieve the brightness - the degree of brightness which had been originally
forecast, and it was considered more or less a disappointment to a lot of
people on the ground. I think also some bad weather in the United States
helped that, but from the scientific standpoint, it was a I suppose quite
a _uccess, because they had a lot of data that they had not gotten before,
they were able to observe the comet in the kind of high-energy light which
_s not ordinarily possible because earth-based observatories and observations
are shielded by our atmosphere which prevents a lot of very useful data from
coming through. We started our observations in the last week in November,
we first sited it by the unaided eye the first week in December. We were
taring pictures with handheld camera_, with certain astrophysics devices
cameras, devices we had onboard - astronomical-type cameras, we were making
observations with several of the solar telescopes which were a part of the
Apollo Telescope I_unt, the large solar observatory, and we also were taking
pictures with a brand new camera which we especially took up to look at
Kohoutek. This was called an electronographic camera, and we took pictures
with the electronographic camera from inside the vehicle, and we also took
p_ctures from outside the vehicle on EVA during two occasions, one of which
was Christmas Day, and it was sort of interesting because we actually
maneuvered the vehicle around and used one of our solar pauels to shileld
the sun because thecomet was very close to the sun. We used the solar panel
to shield the sun while we aimed the camera sort of by guess and by golly
in the area where the comet was supposed to be and then took pictures and
later on, ,in fact, just after Christmas when the comet got just a little
further from the sun, we were able to see it by unaided eye while out on
EVA.

They're very pleased with them. If you look at the photographs, of course,
they don't look very impressive, but the thing is, you're registering a
response in the spectral region around IO00 Angstroms which is well down
in UV - this isn't - you can't get that kind of picture from an earth-based
Page 5 - Pogue

observatory, so also apparently the photometric data is good. They're able

to take dissections, just on light intensity, shaded gray intensity, with
the plates and they - by doing these false-coloring, color-coded slices,
they're able to come up with some very intersting pictures, and they are
able of course to see the hydrogen cloud, among other things that are
associated with a comet which they couldn't see before, because these
particular spectral lines are concealed or filtered out by the earth's
atmoshpere.

Thornton Page is the guy that you ought to call - tell him that you want
that, I guess, color-dissected- I don't know if that's the right _ord to
use or not - that you want to use the - see the picture of Kohoutek taken
on Christmas Day whichhas been color coded. He'll know what you mean.
He came to the office one day and showed it to me - I'd taken the shot.

I think I'd also add on an additional approach, but...

Well, we feel the Skylab observations are important to science because

this is the First time we've ever been able to take long-term synoptic,
that _s, sort of historical sequential photographs of the sun in ultraviolet
light and in the x-ray light becauge the earth's atmosphere filteres all
these rays out. We can't see any sort of x-ray evidence or any ultraviolet
evidence if we look at the sun from the surface of the earth, So there's a
lot of information that would be revealing about the innemost and the outer-
most reactions and processes in the sun which we can't see from the surface
of the ear, but which we can see from orbit, and these instruments are all
designed to record this data. They've done so - they've done it over an
extended period of time, just to give you one example - of course, some of "
these x-ray and ultravioletphotographswhich were taken werecompletelyunder -
unavailable,but one example is, the photographstaken withthe white light
coronographof the sun's outer atmosphereor corona. Now this is a very
_nterest_ng feature of the sun - it's not really very well understood because
tbeytre really very many interestingprocesses in energy transfers that take
place which, if understood,would immeasurableincrease our ability to
understand the thermonuclearprocesses on the sun. Very much of interest to
atomic, nuclear and plasma particle-typephysicists. Up until the time Skylab -
Page 7 - Pogue

the sum total accumulated time duration of coronagraph or corona photographs

consisted of something like eight minutes, and that's all we had since the
time people have been taking photographs of the sun which would have been in
the 19th century up to date. Well, you can compare the eight minutes to the
amount - number of observations that we got in one pass in Skylab which of
course was exposure time and in roughly 50 minutes. So, just one orbit in
Skylab - we completely leap-frogged all the photographs that we had taken
and the evidence that we had taken at the time of Skylab.

Well, the benefits that mankind can derive from the solar studies, of course,
tt probably could be broken down into several categories,one of which of
course is that man is increasing his basic understanding nature, natural
processes, and phenomena. The long-term practical advantages from making
the solar studies will probably rapidly accrue in the area of energy management
and understanding. I think that certainly whether one accepts the desirability
of having nuclear power plants or not, if you were told that you could perfect
or produce a power plant which had no harmful effects at all, was in no way
going to pollute the atmosphere or environment, but which could be operated
cheaply and economically over a long-period of time and which required very
l_ttle maintenance and personal attention, then you would agree that this
would be a good thing to have and if the proper waderstandingof the solar
_rocesses can lead to the generation of such a power producing plant, I think
that the whole idea of problems, shortages of energy, or if you are going to
call it an energy crisis, I think that this whole area is going to reap
enormous benefits, both in a short term and in a long term, based upon our
solar observations.

The UV stellar astronomy studies were conductedwith a small telescope designed

by one of the astronauts, Dr. Carl Henize. The primary purpose of that
experiment is to examine certain very hot stars in our own galaxy, the Milky
Way. A sort of bonus, too, with Carl's experimentwas the fact that we
would also be able to study some of the instellargas and dust which was
between us and the star. The unique part about Carl's experiment was that
we'll be able to examine these stars in a spectral region which was impossible
to do from the surface of the earth.
 Page 8 - Pogue

The UV panorama experiment, very closely related to the UV stellar experiment,

I think that probably the main difference was that it was slightly more
sophisticated instrument that came along a little later, once again will
enable us to do very sophisticated spectrographic studies of some of the
more interesting stellar objects in our own galaxy and actually studies of
other galaxies, as well as intervening dust and matter and gas in space.

The UV horizon airglow was a very interestingly conceived experiment in that

We were trying to observe some peculiar and poorly understood phenomena in
our upper atmosphere.. There are layers of oxygen and ozone and other gases
high in our atmospherewhich give off peculiar rediationwhen they are sub-
jected to intense radiation from the sun, or just normal sunlight as far as
tbeytre concerned. So we wo_Id like to understand just exactly how they
react to this stimulation from sunlight. Again, we can't tell from the sur-
face of the earth just exactly how the ozone or oxygen or whatever gas it is"
ilsreacting to or responding to this solar stimulation from the surface of
__ the earth. We can't see it from the surface of the earth so we look at it
from Skylab.

Earth resources provided us with the opportunity to conduct surveys with

photographic cameras and other types of imaging devices which enabled us to
analyze and more or less take inventory on large areas of the earth's surface
which lay in food producing areas. One typical example would be the salt
verde water shed area in central Arizona, and of course, somewhat different
from that, but related in the long run, would be the photographic coverage
of an item such as the FaulklandCurrent which runs along the east coast of
South America. Quite briefly, if one can properly track the current and observe
and detect areas of plankton blooming, then one can also tell fishermenwhere
large catches can occur. The plankton is sort of the bread of the sea, and
._t starts the life cycle in the sea, and if you can track the plankton,you
can track the smaller fishes which will attract the larger fishes wi_ichwill
attract the larger fishes, the food fishes, which are good for commercial
o. people.
Areas as diverse as taking a look at water or say one of our desert areas,
-- which is a very intensely top-rated agriculturalarea will all provide help
insofar as proper managing the earth's foodstuffs, food supply.
Page 9 - Pogue

Earth resources provides us with a good capability for analyzing the areas
for energy needs, energy capabilities or possible certain natural resources
which are good for providing energy. For instance, if you can locate deposits
of oil, or coal, from orbit, that would ,be a good idea. One of the more
interesting things though howver is the application of our earth resources
package for canvassing for geo-...potential geothermal sources of energy.
Now very simply, geothermal energy is taking the heat from the interior of
the earth and using that to generate power. The nice thing about that is
it's nonpolluting, it does not in any way deplete the fossil fuel supply
_bich should be used very judiciously or very carefully for very carefully
Selected applications of energy, and it should be in the long run a sort of
self-sustaining and very economical. We conducted a geothermal survey all -
down r guess it was the west coast of Italy. We also examined data of the
United States and the central plains area of the United States for possible
sources of geothermalenergy. Geothermalenergy is used in the San Francisco
area, for instance, for generating power.

Geothermal - that is, potential sources of geothermal energy do not show

up on a photograph in a way that is very easily recognizeable. One thing
we d_d notice that was recognizeable was snow melt patterns. Now this is
something you can see with the eye, as an example of how a human operator
cold recognize a possible source of geothermal energy. We noticed a very
suspicious area just to the northeast of the Black Hills of South Dakota.
We noted that after a heavy snowfall, this particular area melted faster.
Okay, that's one way you can notice it just with the eyeball. We also had
some very sophisticated sensors which generate an image very similar to the
way at,
televisiongenerates an image, and these have to be very, very care-
fully analyzed by experts in order to recognizepossible sources of geo-
thermal energy.

Lake Superior, the Rio de la Plata, and Red Tide, okay, I'II mention those.
During the course of our earth resources studies, we were able to identify
sources of water pollution which will enable people to better managetheir
own equipment in industries and also enable people to take action in case
people aren't responsive in that area. Just to give a few examples, we
noticed in the northwestern tip of Lake Superior a rather significant area
Page I0 - Pogue

of water pollution which was occurring as a result of mining operations

and smelting operations on iron ore. This was near the city of Deluth.
Also, it was rather significant that we should point out that Mother Nature
does her own share of polluting the waters. We have some fairly striking
photographs of the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, which is between Uraguay
and Argentina, Monte Vidao on the north and Buenos Aires on the south, and
there were certain times when the whole bay just filled up with sediment. Now
I don't know whether this is good or bad, but certainly it wasn't what you
would call nice clear water and was an example of sediment moving from well
_nland out into the ocean, and associated very closely in space with the
mouth o_ the Rio de la Plata when it was heavily polluted and probably in
no way related was the registration and the pictures taken of a large area
of red tide, again with Mother Nature doing some polluting on her own. Now if
_e can locate these areas of red tide regularly and on a systematic basis,
it would certainly help fishermen, because the red tide is thought to poiso:
shellfish and wreak havoc with the fishing industry in general, and the
a_rbore aerosols generated by this red tide are thought to cause respiratory
ailments in humans.

Some of our observatons related to earth resources in the area of air pollu-
tion varied from the very careful observation of volcanic plumes to the actual
photographs of large metropolitan areas which had pollution problems, say
Los Angeles, New York City area. The volcano we studied was the volcano in
the southern island Kyusu in Japan called Sucoorezema, I think is the way
it's pronounced, and the significant thing about some of our photographs was
that it illustrated for the first time the mix between the trophispheric-born
gas or aerosol, that is in the lower level of the atmosphere, and that mixed
into the stratosphere which is the uppper layer of our atmosphere which is
consideredvery critical to long-term studies of air pollution, and of course,
the studies of the metropolitan areas were of interest simply to indicate the
gross extent of the problem. Another thing that of course was of interest
to us was to notice the extent to which large dust storms in Africa are
_pread out. We noticed a couple of times some rather large dust storms -
one time _ne of them was a goodlSO0 miles long, another dust storm we noticed
and recorded on Our earth resources imagery and filmwas a large dust storm
moving off the east coast - correction - the west coast of Maritania, and
 Page II - Pogue
/=__.

this dust has been tracked as far west as the Carribean area and the Antilles.

During our earth resources observation, we did concentrate on several areas

for specific purposes of trying to develop techniques for managing our water
resources. One specific area was the salt verde watershed in northern and
central Arizona. Quite a large agricultural interest exists in the valleys
around Phoenix, Arizona. Water is in critical supply, and we took several
photographs in this area to try to indicate sort of seasonal trends and
snow cover, the amount of water shed tha_ they can expect. In other words,
sort of conducting a water inventory. Another more general activity which
was related to managing our water resources was the emphasis in concentration
on conducting snow surveys. In general, what we were trying to do was to
determine what we could tell and how accurately we could tell how much of
the water was tied up _n our snow cover in the mountains, particularly in
the Rockies, and just to give you an example of one of the problems involved
_n that, is nne, you asked the question, how can you tell exactly how much
area is covered by snow,and well, you'd say just look at the picture. Well,
it's not always that simple because s6metimes the shadows in the valleys.
conceal the snow so if you're trying to make the computer do the work for you
you ...maybe the computer will be confused and interpret a shadow as being
no snow, or it may be confused by cloud layer, so we're working in that area.

One of the areas in our earth resources studies which was related to water
conservation, of course which is directly related to water management, was
that we are able to tell quite accurately using certain types of films just
exactly what the water runoff pattern is in a given area. Or to say it
another way, what is the actual drainage pattern in an area. One specific
area of interest is an area to the west of Orlando, Florida, called the
green swamp. This particular area was going to be developed by real estate
investors and speculators and was located in an area which was fairly low.
Now to make a long story short, although these people were well intentioned,
the attorney general of Florida took them to court, and in the course of
the litigation, a space photograph in particular, from Skylab, was used to-
.... gether with certain area photographs to settle this litigation to the satis-
faction of both parties. They not only were able to develop the area and
provide places for people to live, but they would do it so it was compatible

with preservation of the environment.

Page 12 - Pogue

During the course of our earth resources investigation, we were also

encouraged to look for and examine fault lines. One fault line, or what
a fault is is a big crack in the surface of the earth. One fault that we
examined that was of considerableinterest was the large African Riff Zone
Which extends all the way from Lake Victoria in South Central Africa up to
the Dead Sea in the Middle East, so it goes righton up through the eastern
portion of Africa into the Gulf of Agaba and into the Palestine area. This
is consfdered to be of considerable interest to people who are interested
in continental drift.

I'II concentrateon the gross and the microscopic. One is the occurrence
of the large storms outside of equatorial regions which are of considerable
interest because of the localized damaging effect they have, and the other
is the influence that man can have in generating local weather conditions.

During the earth resources observations in the area of meteorology, we had

an opportunity to cover a rather rare event insofar as meteorological occur-
rences were concerned in that we were able tophotograph and record with our
sensors a large, so-called extra-tropical cyclone in the north Atlantic.
This was a very rare occurrence and provided us with a unique opportunity
and we got very good coverage. We're quite proud of it, as it's of particular
_nterest to meteorologists for two reasons. One - it's very rare, and secondly,
when these things do occur, they usually wreak havoc, in this case, in
western Europe they had some rather severe weather out of it. Also ocean
traffic was very seriously affected. Going from the large areas to the ver_/
small areas, we also used earth resources investigations to examine very
small-scale effects that man has on the weather. I say small scale because
locally, they may be actually quite large in their effect, and just to give
you a brief example, we have photographs which show certain areas of heating -
apparently where heating is taking place, say in the city of Toronto, causing
the generationof a cloud which subsequentlycauses a fairly large snowfall
to occur in the city of Rochester, New York. Now this is just registered
in one photograph. We have other cases of this where it occurs across the
Great Lakes and other areas.
Page 13 - Pogue

£'ye got one_hi_ _ call _y StFeak_ng P_otograph It's a streak of snow.

Obviously not naturally produced, because therels a snowfall, a snow pattern,
and then there's just one streak, all by itself, and I got to checking on
the map, and it looks like it's being generated by the city of Lincoln,
Nebraska. It goes all the way from just the east of Lincoln to well the
South and East of Des Moines, lowa. So, you never know, and this is primarily
a handheld photograph.

During the course of conducting some of cour so-called science demonstrations

which were quite interesting and very pleasant to do for the crew, we
examined a general area of fluid dynamics, or fluid mechanics, and so far
as I was personally concerned, this involved forming large drops of water in
free space and seeing how they behaved when they weme jiggled or upset or
otherwise disturbed. The primary thrust of this was trying to determine a
period of oscillation of a bubble of given size, or a drop of water a given
size. Of interest also was exactly what happens when two of these bubbles "
collide in Free space. Do they bounce off each other? Do they coalesce?
Turns out that _oth things happen on occasion, and this was of interest to
people who are nterested in dynamics of fluid mechanics. It's also of
interest td people - by the way, to meteorologi6ts who are interested in
raindrop formation and the actual mechanism that takes place in thunderstorms.
And strangely enough, some of the people were interested in the dynamics of
- in these fluid mechanics experiments - wre atomic physicists because they
were - apparently two drops of water in free space colliding will form a
very good analogue model for two atoms, or two nuclei which are attracted
or coll_de - so we had an awful lot of fun in doing these. One of the other
very interesting effects was trying to get a bubble or a drop of water to
rotate. In rotating a arop of water again, one quite accidentally creates
a model of the nucleus of an atom which is in motion, and we were able to
get drops to fly apart under their own centrifugal force, and this was
considered to be quite intriguing and significant to atomic physicists.
That was awful hard to do - man, that was frustrating. It took four hours
one day - four and a half hours to get a 25 minute sequence. Was a nervous
wreck when thet was over.
 page 14 - Pogue

i Re: Gypsy Moth

Uh, I never did understand it. What we were told was - they wanted to
know if zero gravity would some way cause the eggs to hatch with sterile
offspring, and what they would try to do would be to somehow or another
create some kind of sterile breeding mate so that they could put these in
a colony and sort of zap the gypsy moths with people of their own kind,
and I never could see how you could do it on a scale which would actually
solve the problem - l'm sure there was more to it than I told you.

The large internal volume of Skylab provided us with a unique opportunity

to test and evaluate a device called the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit. Now
this is really a small spacecraft which you sort of strap on your back. Now
the _ which we used was not designed for work outside the spacecraft,
although the - implication is that such a device wouldbe ultimately used
outside and to do useful work outside the vehicle, in say in terms of per-
forming repairs or actually constructing and assembling a space station.
We did perform an evaluation of this - it's looking good, and there were -
several recommendations have been made Which we consider valuable in terms
of leading to a better design.

As far as sleeping in Skylab, or in zero gravity in general is concerned,

there was no problem. We slept in a sleeping bag-like device which had
straps across it at certain distances and which could be tightened to give
one sort of a snugness and a feeling of being in bed. We also had a small
strap to pull down over our forehead, but once you were in the sleeping bag
and all snugged up, so to speak, you felt like - it was very close to what
you feel like in bed in one-G or in earth, so that was no problem. In fact,
I had very little sleeping, and the only trouble I did have could be
attributed to factors other than the sleeping device itself. We got about
6_2hours sleep a night on the average.

_ood and water on Skylab of course were all onboard when the workshop was
o_g_nally launched. We had a prepared diet which rotated on a six-day
cycle. In other words, we ate the same food starting - in speciallydesigned
menus - starting every six days. Water, of course, was available for just
dr%nking purposes, as water, or it was available for reconstituting certain
types of foodstuffs, which were called freeze-dried foods. Freeze-dried
 Page 15 - Pogue
food required water for the reconstitution. The food, in general, was of
excellent quality, although all of us got tired of it after a period df
t_me and would like to have been able to sort of inject a little random
variety. The food was actually prepared in a food tray which was located
near the food preparation, or on the food preparation table. It consisted
of small cavities which wre placed the food items for the meal which was
going to be eaten. This provided easy access and also helped to hold the
food down while you were eating say several different items at the same
tilme.

Personal hygiene was not too much of a problem, although we found in general
that washing or going to the bathroom took quite a bit of time. You more
or less allowed yourself this time, so we didn't - after we became accustomed
to the procedures that were involved with whatever we were doing, this didn't
presant too much of a problem, but we did have to allow time for it.

One of the personal hygiene tasks which was more difficult than we had
thought that it would be was shaving. It's difficult to wash the razor,
: it's difficult to kee_ the blade clean so that you have a nice sharp cutting
edge that's not all clogged up with the whiskers. Because of the problem
we had with shaving, Jerry and I both decided to grow beards which we did,
and found that it was quite a time-saver, and usually only needed to take
say only 15 minutes every three days to sort of shave the neck and then
just let the rest of it go.

Generally, housekeeping was not too much of a problem. Housekeeping in

general required periodic cleaning and cleaning with a hygienic solution.
Certain areas - the areas where we kept our food - we had places where we
put waste cans of food. This area got a bit messy and we had to clean
that up quite reqularly, and we would also clean the area in the food -
in the general area of the food preparation table or in our wardroom
because food spills and food spatters occurred occasionally but regularly.

All loose - as far as items - managing housekeeping items, everything tends

to float around in zero gravity and come loose if you don't tie it down.
This is not a big problem, but you do have to sort of take measures to
stow things and have places provided for temporary stowage otherwise you
Page 16 - Pogue

have a cabin full of items sort of floating around in the air. We collected
a large bag full of items which were to be discarddd or thrown away - we
would put them away in a device which was called the trash airlock, and this
essent%ally gave us the capability of taking a bag of trash and throwing
it _nto a large waste can which was located under the orbiting workshop.
It was actually an integral part of the original booster. This was an
excellent way of disposing of these items and if we had not had the trash
airlock, l'm afraid we would have had trash sticking in every corner.

One of our most pleasant offduty activities actually was looking out the
window. _le of course engaged in all kinds of physical activity insofar as
moving around, tumbling about, running in certain areas where we could gener-
ate enough centrifugal force to keep our feet down, but by and large, the
thing that gave us the most fun was actually looking down at the surface
of the earth, looking at the map sort of seeing where we were, trying to
notice new things, new interesting things, and taking photographs of these
areas, which we did. _we took close to 1800 handheld photographs of the
surface of the earth, and this is considered to be quite an added bonus
to the earth resources observations taken by the remote operating cameras.
Again this was - we considered this a delight and a pleasure instead of a
piece of work to do.

On long duration flights, I should add by the way, insofar as our recreation,
we did some reading, we also had tape recordings which we used quite exten-
sively. We used them during our exercise periods and during our offduty
time. This was very pleasant to have. So far as for long duration space
flights, I think that a specially designed earth observatory, sort of both
for work and for recreation, would really be a pleasant addition to the
facility onboard. This would provide you with the capability of making
some rather detailed observations and alsoprovide good data for the
people on the ground.

During our extravehicular activity, sometimes called an EVA or more generally

known as a spacewalk, we not only took observations of a scientific nature,
we also replaced film and repaired cameras in some cases, but we also did
some hardware repairs, too. On the first EVA in which I participated, we
 Page 17 - Pogue
/

repaired one of t_Elarge earth resources antennae which was providing

information about the surface of the earth. This required several hours -
in fact, the total EVA took about 6½ hours, but at the same time, we were
taking some photographs, too, which could not be taken inside. The EVA
or spacewalk itself is an awful lot of fun. Of course, it's always nice
to take a walk outdoors, but of course, in order to do this is space, you
have to get prepared, and it takes several hours to get ready to go outside,
and it takes several hours to clean up afterwards, so it's a very full day,
but it's well worth the effort. You get out, you're able to see much larger
areas of the earth. It, s very impressive - it's almost impossible to describe
the physical beauty of the surface of the earth and the panorama that's
possible when you're up that high above the surface of the earth, so we look
forward to this as sort of an unforgettable experience. Now I was only out
twice myself...l was out twice on EVA, once on Thanksgiving Day and once on
Chr%stmas Day. The main activity on my first EVA was the repair of the
socalled S192 antenna which was one of our large earth resources antennae,
and on the second EVA on Christmas Day, the prime activity there and the

prime interest at least was in getting photographs of the comet Kohoutek

which was very close to the sun at that time andcould only be seen from
Skylab, or at least from orbit. Of course, on the Christmas Day EVA, we
also repaired one of the major telescopes in the Apollo Telescope Mount.
Generally speaking, the EVA or spacewalk is very pleasant, and enjoyable.

There really is I don't think too much competition now between socalled
unmanned spaceflight and manned spaceflight. In fact, I think now we've
matured to the point where we're doing space exploration. Some of this
space exploration can be better done by a piece of automated equipment, that
is to say, an unmanned satellite. Some of the o_her observations can only
be made by human observer. If you are looking for data which can be highly
categorized and characterized prior to observations, then certainly I think
an automated satellite is the answer. If you're trying to actually probe
mysteries, if you're looking for new things, if you're looking for things
that you're not aware of before the flight, then there's no substitute for
-- the human observer, the eye. In fact, in many respects, the human eye has
much better capability than camera, and in certain ways a camera is better
than a human eye. Just tomention a couple of things which we saw which were
Page 18 - Pogue

unknown prior to flight, the extent and visibility of the Faulkland Current
was not at all appreciated at all prior to our flight. Neither was our - the
area of the current near New Zealand and the South Pacific. There were large
areas of red tides which were observed for the first time by human observers
on our flight. This was not only on the east coast of South America, but
also on the west coast of Central America. Certain very peculiar meteorological
patterns were also observed by the eye which had never been recorded on any
of our weather satellites, and we had excellent weather satellites in orbit.
So all things considered, we need both manned and unmanned, and did I say
I think we've matured to the point now where we're just doing space explora-
tion and we use the best thing available for the task at hand.

Well, I think that Skylab is an important link between past and future
m_ssions. It sort of occupies a 6ignificant sort of crossover point. First
spacefligh_s which were very short in duration were merely to prove that you
could actually get a man up and bring him down. You weren,t really concerned
W_th whether or not he could do anything useful - just that you could accomplish
that task. Then as we developed that capability, we asked more and more of
the system - that is, the man doing more work, the system providing more
capability for the man to do more work. Also, as we kept a man up for
longer periods of time, we asked questions about man's surviveability himself,
how long can he actually stay up there, and we sort of feel like Skylab is
giving us answers in several areas and indicated directions to go, in other
areas. We've answered questions that were raised on Mercury and Gemini,
how long can a man stay up, does he approach irreversible points in his
physiology, that is to say, can you send him up for two weeks and no longer,
is he going to be really safe - well, we put a lot of these bugaboos to bed,
so we've established man's presence in space. Also, we have operated very
extensive and complex equipment in Skylab and established that this is a
viable operation and that you can do it - it will provide good data, in fact,
excellent data, and that we have indicated we - we have learned from Skylab
exactly what features are best, what features to avoid in the way of designing
say a spacecraft or space station itself, or even certain pieces of scientific
equTpment. So we have sort of inherited certain things from the past,
developed on them and now we have sort of indicated the directions to go in

the future.
 Page 19 - Pogue

In fact, projecting on from Skylab, we see Shuttle coming along which

provides us with an immense capability to take large space stations or
...cut.

Projecting on from Skylab, we see coming over the horizon the Shuttle,
and wilth the Shuttle the capability to take u_ large modules for the
C " . ft .
onstru,_tlon of a.....sp__ace.s_tlon A space lab itself is presently con-
/_eived, it will provide us with a capability which grows on Skylab, expands_
on and
I Skylab provides us with an enormous capability to conduct research

Well, I believe that space exploration is important to mankind for many

reasons. You could l'm sure document many material reasons, but I think
that ultimately what you have - you have man involved in exploration, and
the end result of all exploration is self-discovery.
 MAJORJACK LOUSMA

7
 Jack Lousma

"SKYLAB - THE VITAL LINK"

AV 519

The twin pole sunshade was erected on our flight during the first spacewalk.

The purpose, of course, was to shelter the spacecraft from the heat of the sun.
The first crew had put up temporary parasol, as we called it, which was a gold
foil material, and the engineers were a little concerned that it might not last
for the entire mission, so on our flight, we put up the twin-pole sunshade,
and it took about three hours to put this sunshade up. Basically,it consisted
of two long poles which were fastened to a base plate at the foot of where I
was standing. Owen Garriott put these poles together. Each pole had II five-foot
sections and with a clothesline attached. When he got them together, then I
would rotate them together 90 degrees and place them in their base plate, extend
it in a V_fashion out over the spacecraft, and when they were finally constructed,
We attached the sail to the clothesline on the poles and kind of ran the sunshade
up the pole like you would run the flag up the pole and lowered it down over'the
critical area in the workshop, which we wanted to shelter from the sun, and we
laid it down over the parasol, and when it was in this position, it was then
secured by means of ropes through other places on the spacecraft and held very
securely in place, and it did the job very well. The temperatures within the
spacecraft although they had been fairly comfortable from the use of the parasol,
lowered further a few degrees to make it more stable inside the workshop and
more comfortable than had a lasting sunshade. We practiced putting a sunshade
up in the water tank prior to the flight. I think we practiced it two times
in the water tank in Huntsville,Alabama, and we were able to understand the
problems of putting it up and further refine the proceduresfor doing so, and
I think the direction ofthe twin-pole sunshade was one of the highlightsof
the flight as far as I was concerned.

Zero-gravityis a very pleasant, comfortable,enjoyable sensation. I think

everyone would enjoy it. The only time it became an annoyancewas when we
wanted to fasten ourselves in some location and were unable to hold on to some-
thing, and this was very seldom. Basically,zero gravity is a very pleasant
sensation. Zero gravity is a very pleasant, enjoyable,comfortable,relaxing
environment. It's very easy to move very large objects around. You could
take a piano by one hand and suspend it in the middle Of the room. Objects
that weigh very much on earth could be moved very easily up there. I guess
 LOUSMA
Page 2

you could liken it to relaxing in a swimming pool, below the surface but yet
not touching the bottom. Just completely relaxing yourself and simulate the
feeling that you experience in zero gravity. We train for zero gravity by
Working in the neutral buoyancy tank or the water tank at Huntsville, Alabama.
The only time that zero gravity was ever an annoyance was when we were trying
to fasten ourselves down or stabilize ourselves in some position to work on a
Piece of equipment, but it _tasvery seldom that we had any difficulty at all
stabiilizing ourselves, so zero gravity is an experience that everyone I think
Would enjoy. Usually when we went from one place to another in the space
station, we did tumbles. We did flips, and...I'm sorry, have to start that one
Oyer again.

Whenever we went from one place to another in the workshop, of course, we

floated, and after ten days in flight, it seemed just as instinctive and just
as natural to float somewhere as it was to say walk on earth, as we know it now.
Normally when we went from one place to another, we liked to do some flips, or
_mble in the air. We could arrive at a position on the other side of the
Spacecraft in exactly the right orientation by either tuoking our legs and arms
_n and sp_nning rapidly like a figure skater, or spreading our arms and legs out
and slowing down so that we just instinctively arrived at the place in the right
attitude like a cat landing on his feet.

We used the lower body negative pressure device to test or to simulate one gravity.
Normaliy_ when we're standing on earth, the blood flows down on our legs andis
d_stributed differently in our body than it is in zero-G. In zero-G, your blood
does not go down into your legs as readily as it does when you're standing up
here unless it tends ...and thus it tends to pool in your abdomen area. In order
to compare what was happening to our cardiovascular system in flight with the
way it's performed on the ground, we had a device known as the lower body negative
pressure, into which we inserted our lower bodies and were able to seal it around
ti_ waist, and then a slight vacuum was pulled inside this tank to permit - to
cause the blood to flow from our upper extremities into our legs, thus simulating
the same blood distribution Qp there as we have down here in this condition...
and in this condition, our cardiovascular system was measured by checking our
/_ heart and our response to this kind of a stress over about a 15 minute period,
and we did this three times a day...maybe I should start over again. We did
 LOUSMA
Page 3.

this three times...we did this experiment every three days so that the doctors
could monitor the changes in our cardiovascular system over the entire flight.
The doctors also wanted to check the changes within the pulmonary system, the
lung breathing apparatus over flight and see what changes had occurred. To do
this, we had a device which measured the exhaled air, measured the inhaled air,
to dtermine their change. This was known as the metabolic analyzer, so every
third day, we performed an experiment in which we rode the ergometer, or the
bicycle, at very high work loads, thus causing us to breathe very rapidly, and
our exhaled breath was measured for carbon dioxide and water content, nitrogen,
O_ygen and so forth, just to see how this air exchange mechanism within the
; lung was performing and how it was changing, if at all, during the period =of
the flight.

/_t_a_also considered importantto check the response of the vestibularsystem_

f OF the little balanci,g system within the inner ear during long-term space k
/ flight, and we did this by means of a rotating chair. Now normally, when you
_ i _it in this chair and rotate on the earth and move your head, it doesn't _ake _
I

_yery__ long before you experience motion sickness. However, up there, we noticed/
_hat after we were there a few days, it was possible to siu in this chair and /
r_tate almost all day long, with no sensationwhatever of motion sickness at /
/
all. However, after returningto earth, we noticed that we returned to our //
normal level, so there is a phenomena that occurs within the inner ear and_j

vestib_ _-s
_ing investigatedat this time._We-knnowt_at_=during
spaceflight,the blood system has several changes which are undergone...

We know that during spaceflight, the blood system undergoes several changes.
We wanted to study these as well, so every few days, we sampled each other's
blood by, as you might in a doctor's office, by getting out the syringe and
filling it with blood, but then we wanted to separate its various components
_.ntod_fferent parts within the little container and we put it in a centrifuge
to separate out the components of blood in which the doctors were most interested,
and we froze the sample in that condition and brought it back to earth for
analysis.
 LOUSMA

Upon the recommendation of the first crew, we increased our daily exercise,
and we exercised muscles that they didn't have the equipment to exercise.
NOrmally, our daily exercise routine was to ride approximately 30 or 40 minutes
on the ergometer or bicycle at differing workloads so that we would be able
to exercise our lungs, our heart and our pulmonary system. In addition to
that, we spent an extra 20 to 30 minutes approximately using muscular exercise
devices. One additional exercising device that we took on our flight was the
friction type of Wheel which permitted us to pull on a cord and adjust the
level at which we might pull to exercise our legs and our upper body. We also
b_d some other spring type of devices that were able to exercise our upper body
And our arms with. We found that the exercise made us feel better, we were
gore efficient and that we stayed in better shape for longer periods of time,
and as a result of our flight, the following crew decided to spend more time
in exercise in flight, and they also took an additional type of device to
perform this exercise.

we have found in spaceflight that man changes physiologically while he's in

space , and up until Skylab, of course, our longest flight had been about 14
days. With our first flight, we doubled that to 28, the second flight, the
one which I was on, went even more than double that, and the final flight, of
course, was 85 days. Up until this _ime, the medical aspects of spaceflight
bad not been...oh, I better not talk about that.

From our Gemini and Apollo experiences, it became clear that we were going to
have to know more about man and his physiological response to spaceflight, if
we were going to go for longer and longer periods of time, and so Skylab was
a step in that direction, to determine what happens to man's body while he's
in space. Although I don't believe we're ready to jump off on a year and a half
_ss_on at this time, Skylab experience has been the first stepping stone.

From our Gemini and Apollo experience, ti became clear that if we were going
to go on for longer and longer missions in space, which hopefully we will do,
it became clear that we were going to have to know more about man, his physiological
_ response to spaceflight, so this is what we attempted to do on Skylab, and we
had some very thorough medical experiments to determine this response physiologi-
LouSMA
Psae 5

cally in long-term flight, and although we're not ready at this time I think
medically to go for a flight which is a year and a half in duration, I am
confident that we've taken the initial steps in that direction and that the
Skylab information will go a long way toward helping us to understand how man
will respond to longer and longer flights as time goes on. On Skylab, we looked

On Skylab, we looked at the sun in a way that we've never done before. We had
several telescopes which operated in various wavelengths, which the eye is not
able to see in. We looked at the sun in the x-ray wavelengths, ultraviolet
wavelengths and several other wavelengths and took photographic data on the
phenomena that were occuring on the sun. We were able to point our instruments
yery_ very precisely at the specific feature of interest on the sun's surface.
_e_ye been observing the sun for many years from the earth, except there's
relatively little known about what makes it operate or perform the way it does.
Of course, we know, that when we're on the earth, the atmosphere absorbs or
blots out much of the information that comes from the sun, and it's a good
thing it does, because much of this information is very high-energy radiation
that would f_v us to a crisp_in a moment. But that information is what is
needed to understand the sun better and you can see that up above the atmosphere
--i._space,we're able to get an unobstructed view of the sun and to get I00% of
the information that comes from it, thus permitting us to know more about it
and understand its function better.

We're all well aware of the fact that the sun controls our climate and our
environment, and so the more we know about its interreaction with the earth
and _ts environment,the more we will know about the world in which we live,
and so to know about the sun is important from that standpoint. On the other
hand, we might also determine some new types of energy process, or some new
type of mechanical phenomena that we can put to good advantage here on Earth,
which is currently unknown.
 LOUSMA
Page 6

We had a variety of experiments onboard the Skylab which were known as the
earth
resources experiments.(The purpose of these experiments was to look at
the various resources on the earth - agrdculture, forestry, oceanography,
meteorology, pollution, minerology, population growth, all of those types of
th_ngs and many more are earth resources-related_ We had a battery of cameras
that was able to take simultaneous pictures in six different wavelengths to
highlight the particular resource in which we were most interested, whether it
b_water or agriculture or fault lines in the geologic structure of the earth -
we had the variety of other earth resources experiments as well, one of which
included a telescope which we could point at the ground at some specific site,
perhaps it would be a farmer's field, or a body of water, and we could track it
a_ _e were going over the earth at 18,000 miles per hour, we could focus in
on thCs particular site on the ground, magnify it and track it very closely
until the spacecraft of course passed over that area, but we could track
#
an .
area which was a smaller...smaller than a quarter of a mile square,(and most

of this data was put on magnetic tape whichlwas later returned for --analysis,
and I think between all the Skylab missions, we used approximately50 miles
P of th_s earth-resources,28 track tape.

We all know that the earth resources are limited, and in order to enjoy the
benefits of the resources of the earth that we have enjoyed in the past, we are
go}_g,to have to manage what we have more effectively and more efficiently. We
are going to have to learn how to find new resources to improve our quality of
life here on earth, and this is the purpose of the earth resouces program. One
of the areas which we studied was agriculture, and agriculture, for example -
here _s what we can do from space. We can determine a different...different
types of crops, for example, we can differentiate between barley and rye or
wheat or corn, or you name it. We can also tell you what stage of development
that crop is in, or whether it has a disease even before the farmer can tell
...can determine that in the field. You can see if we have this kind of informa-
tion available, that we can manage the earth's resources more effectively and
Fore eff_c%ently into what to plant, when to plant, how to control our markets,
and so forth. Now if you apply this same logic, rationale, to the other earth
resources, you can see what a great benefit the space program can bring to the -
welfare of the people, not only in this country, but around the world, and that's
LOUSMA
Page 7

our objective with the earth's resources program, and you can also see that
from a spacecraft flying around the world every hour and a half, you can cover
a lot of territory in a hurry in a way in which it can't be covered in any other
manner. We had several industrial experiments on Skylab as well, and I'm confi-
dent as time goes on, we'll so more and more areas in which industrial applica-
tions can make their way into the space program. Some day we're going to be
joining large structures in space, and we may want to weld them together, so on
Skylab, we had a welding gun which was not the conventional type we have here
on the ground, but it was high intensity and electron beams which formed the
heat and melted the metal. One thing that is unique about space is of course
that_there's no gravity. In metals that are melted today and crystals that are
grown, many industrial processe s are dependent upon gravity, and up there where
there is no gravity, perhaps we can formulate a better alloy. We know we can
grow better crystals, and a better crystal of course can be used in electronics
and...heck, I don't like any of that that I said...

Many metallurgical processes including the solidification of melted metals,

and the growth of crystals are dependent upon gravity on the earth. We believe
that in space, perhaps we can develop a more pure crystal or a more pure alloy
or metal, simply because there's no gravity there to influence the way the metals
and crystals form, and these metals and crystals have wide application on our
earth today, so we believe there's a way we can use space to improve industrial
products here on earth.

Some day, instead of going outside our spacecraft, spacewalks, by the use of
an umbilical, we're going to be flying from one vehicle to another vehicle
without the use of an umbilical. In order to do that, we are going to have to
have a kind of Buck Rogers type of maneuvering device, so before we use one of
these outdoors, we want to insure that it's properly evaluated and that it's
reliable and safe, sn in Skylab, we had a couple of maneuvering units that we
were evaluating inside the workshop. Now we had a large area in which we could
fly these maneuvering units around, and this is what we did on Skylab. We found
that living on Skylab was very pleasant and comfortable and aside from the
fact that we were weightless and floated everywhere, we might haveimagined that
we were working in the trainer in our training building. We of course had to
 LouSMA
Page 8

sleep just like you have to here on earth. We had all the same needs up there
as we have here, mostly...in most cases, we slept about tilesame amount of time
as we slept on earth, but we slept very well. One way in which our sleep was
different however was that we were mounted on the wall in a sleeping bag, and
instead of sleeping horizontally, as you would see it on earth, we slept in
a vertical fashion - the sleeping bag just kept us fromfloating around - and
we slept very well and usually didn't have any trouble getting to sleep.
Personal hygiene-wise, it was necessary for us to perform up there abQut the
same way that it is here. We brushed our teeth, we combed our hair, we shaved,
we washed. One thing about the Skylab environment that was different than some
Of t_e places we were acquainted here with on earth was that it's very dry and
_eryclean up there, and it didn't require that we wash quite as much as we might
have to on earth. We did have, however, a shower, and we did use the shower.
We found however that we could almost keep clean enough by using sponge baths;
by washing ourselves off with a washrag, although we did use the shower on
several occasions, and I think for future space stations, the shower would be
_ a good _dea. Our food was good. We had the same menu, repeat, every six days.
T_e food was very closely controlled because this was a part of a medical
experiment. Every bit of food that we ate was measured and logged very carefully
and the vmter that we drank was measured and logged very carefully. Most of
the food came in cans - some of it was frozen, each man had one frozen item
per day, and this included meat, which was precooked, or ice cream, various types
of frozen items. Our beverageswere mixed in small plastic collapsiblecontainers.
Ne wQuld just add water with them and shake them up and we were ready to drink
our beverages. We had hot and cold running water. Some of our food was also
mixed with water. For example...

It was necessary to mix some of our food with water, and other food items
came pretty much as they do off the shelf from the grocery store, for example,
peaches and pears ano fruit items looked the same up there as they do down here.
We looked forward to eating our meals. Another thing we enjoyed doing very much
was looking out the window. We didn't have much time to do it, and I think if
I were to go again, I'd want to plan more time to look at the earth, because
the earth was always beautiful. We crossed most of the land mass of the earth.
We crossed all the land mass south of the equator, except for anarctica. We
LOUSMA
Page 9

went as high north as the northern border of the United States, crossed all
of Europe, the southern part of the Soviet Union, China, South _merica, and
A_y_ca. The earth was always beautiful. And after passing over the earth
for several days, it became almost possible to look out the window and to
know immediately where you were. One of the things thatimpressed me most
_n looking out the window was that the earth is in fact as our teachers tell
us three-quarters covered with water so that much of the time when we looked
Out the window, we saw water. We're used to living here on land, and not
realizing that there is so much water in the world, but when you get up there
you indeed find out that the earth is about 75% covered with water.

Of course, like in any laLoratory operation, it was necessary to clean house

up there once in awhile, too. All of our air was filtered through a big screen
_i%h_ii_the orbital workshop, and as the air went through this screen, little
particles would collect on the screen, thus pieces of paper, small items that.
needed to be vacuumed up, so every day or two, we would get out the vacuum
cleaner and vacuum off the screens. We also had to dump our trash. We had
di_ty food cans and dirty towels and other types of equipment that had to be
thrown away. If they were left inside of the spacecraft, they would grow
bacteria, and eventually the bacterial would take over the spacecraft, so we
bad to d_ise a means to get rid of this trash. The way we did it was to put
it into small bags and to place it in the airlock. Now we were living in the
hydrogen tank of the third stage of the moon rocket that had been modified for
q_Y _se. So down below this was the oxygen tank, and it was a perfect place
to dump our junk, and so rather than dumping our junk out into space, we dumped
it down into this oxygen tank by means of the trash airlock, and there it is
until this day. Of course, the tank down there was evacuated, and if we were
to open up the hatch and dump something down there, we'd lose all the air in
the spacecraft, so we had the trash airlock to circumvent this problem, and
t_at_s w_ere we put all of our junk.

Eac_-man on Skylab had his own food tray, and in this food tray were several
c_rcular slots in which we could put our food cans, and they were held in there
w_le we were eating our food so that they wouldn't float around. Three of
these slots had heaters in them with a little timer such that we could put
 LUUbMA
Page 10

food that needed to be heated inside of this food tray, turn on the timer, and
turn on the heater and go away, and when we came back for our meal, the food
would be heated and ready for our use. It became a very efficient way in which
to have our meals and we looked forward to meal time in most cases. My favorite
meal was steak and ice cream. I think I could eat steak and ice cream every
day. There were of course other items besides that, but those are my two
_avorite items.

Basically, the whole Skylab space station was very well designed from a human
standpoint. There were a number of small things that we made suggestions on
i_mprovingin future spacecraft. One of the things that I think I would enjoy
on another spacecraft would be to have more and bigger windows, so that we
would not be so limited where we could look at the earth, or at space, or at
the stars...someplace that we could look in all directions. This is one of
the things that I enjoyed the most about the spacewalks, and when the space...
This was one of the things that I enjoyed the most about spacewalks. When
that hatch was opened, it opened a oompletely new world, a completely new
perspectivefrom what we were experiencinginside the spacecraft. When we
went out the hatch, we could look down and we could see the whole earth, blue,
green, brown, white ball, and we could realize our great speed over the earth
as well, and so T t_ink in the design of the future spacecraft, I'd like to
see more windows so that we could have more of that perspective from the
inside. When that hatch was opened for a spacewalk, everything took on a
completely new and different perspective. It's hard to make a comparison, but
I think I compare it best like this - to say, when we were looking out of the
window from the inside at the earth below, it was much like riding along in a
train and looking at the window at the countryside in one direction as it
• goes by'. Your view is very limited. But on a spacewalk, when you're outside
standing on this big space station, looking over it, looking down at the earth
where it's a complete, big round ball, and you can see all 360 degrees of it,
it's more ICke being out on the outside of the locomotive that's pulling the
train by, pulling that train along, and watching the countryside as it goes
by from that vantage point.
LOUSMA
Page II

Early in the mission, we developed some problems with some of the gyros in
our control system. We had a couple of failures and some others that were
behaving somewhat unpredictably. We could have probably gotten along all
-rightwith what we had, but we weren't sure, and we decided that the safest
bet was to take some new ones along, so some ingenius engineers got together
and devised a set of gyros which we call the six-pack, because it included
six gyros, and we took those up with us on our flight and mounted them on the
wall inside of the spacecraft. Now there had been no plan to ever do this
before, but we devised the way to do it, and then we had to hook up some cables
on the outside, so that electrically, the output from these gyros could be
_fed _nto the system, and so during the second spacewalk on our flight, we
hooked up this cable that permitted us to use these new gyros that we took
up, we plugged in the cables and turned on the gyros and they worked perfectly
and they worked perfectly throughout the whole mission. I think the Skylab
flights demonstrated very clearly that man has a definite role in space, for
he has the capability to evaluate, to assess, to make decisions, to analyze,
and then to do something completely unplanned but constructive about solving
a problem. Or about applying new knowledge...

think that man has a very important role in space because it's only m_n
who can assess, evaluate,analyze and take corrective action, which is some-
t_mes unplanned, and I think this was clearly brought out and demonstrated
in Skylab. I think we probably wouldn't have had any Skylab missions had it
not been for the fact that Man was able to get to the Skylab and to make it
Bab_tab!e and to repair it in such a way that all of the missions were
completely successful.

I envision America's role in space in the future to be one in which we spend

most of our time near the earth on large space platforms for long periods of
t%me. Unless...thus Skylab was the forerunner of this type of operation,
w_ereman learned what he can do from a space station. The results were
favorable. Medically, we looked at man to know what's going to happen to
him for these long-term spaceflights. We also determined what he can do from
these space platforms. Skylab, I believe, was the stepping stone from the
Apollo and Gemini type of operation to long-term operation in earth orbit.
The benefits of any space program are numerous, and our manned and unmanned
 LOUSMA
_agel2

b._oth - we've been looking at the earth and at its resources.

dren and our childre,_s chiidren are going to enjoy the same_
quality of life here on earth as we have enjoyed here in the past, we're _C_, #_"
going to have to learn how to find new resources and manage the ones we have(
more efficiently and more effectively, and we've found we can do this very J
efficientlyand veryeconomically from spaceflt's also important to look-
a_e'sun, to try to understaCd_hoW It influences ...it's also important
to look at the sun and to understand how it influences our environment and
our climate. The space program is introduced...has introduced maay new
products and processes into our everyday life, most of which are unknown to
most people. The space program always requires bigger and better and more
of everything, and once they are developed by the program, they are somehow
u_ed _n our everyday life. If you were to go into a modern hospital today,
you would find many innovations within this hospital that were an offshoot
from the space program, and this same type of logic applies to many other
areas of our American life, in materials, in processes, industrial equipment,
| _tems in the home. The space program is also a great channel for international
cooperation. Up until this time, 75 or 80 countries have been involved with
us iln a worldwide weather network. Many have been helping us analyze our
lunar rocks, and they've also been involved with us in communications systems.
In July of 1975, we're going to have the joint flight with the Russians. The
space program has opened up a tremendous channel for international cooperation.
The space program also has been a stimulus to progress in many areas of our
national life. I recall that when the first Sputnik was launched that educators
around the country wondered why we weren't smart enough to do the same thing
and wb_ our engineers weren't trained to accomplish a similar feat, and it
_evamped, changed our educational techniques, our methods of teaching, and
this same idea is applied in other ways in our American life as well, where
the space program stimulates progress in many areas. We all enjoy the benefits
of worldwide color television, live by satellite. If you call across the
ocean, your phone bill is a third of what it used to be before satellites
were available, so communication-wise, the space program has opened up a new
era _n fnternational communications. In the area of weather forecasting, the
space program is al_o leading the way. Now indirectly, this doesn't - directly
this doesn't affect everybody. In the area of weather forecasting, the space
LoUSMA
Page 13

program is leading the way. Weather forecasts don't affect everybody

directly, but they affect the farmer who grows our food. If he can know when
to harvest and when to plant, because he has better forecasts, this is to the
advantage to all of us, and if you ever lived in the path of a hurricane, you
appreciated the advance warning that you got because you had time to move away,
to go to a different place, or to protect your property, so the space program
has a way of influencing many areas of our national life, which most of us aren't
really aware of, and I think it is a bonus for our country, and I'm confident
that the time will come in 20 or 30 or 40 years when people will wonder why
anyone ever criticized the space program, and I'm confident that it's here to
stay.

Space exploration is also...has also raised our national prestige around the
world. Other countries around the world have recognized that we have a tmemen-
dous capability...that's all bad, I don't like that at all.

I'm confident that the space program is here to stay for many reasons, but
aside from all of the benefits that we normally ascribe to the space program,
one reason I think it's here to stay is because of man's innate desire to explore
new areas. This is particularly true of _mericans. Americans developed this
country. They pushed west. Wherever there was a place to ga, Americans went
there if they could. We now have the capabilityto go further into the solar
system, and I think that man's innate curiosity about the world and the universe
about him will drive him further out into space, if he has the capability to
do so, and at the present time, we have no plans to go to Mars, but I am per-
sonally confident that ultimatelymen will _and on Mars because it will be
good for a nation to do so, but also because he has an innate desire to go to
any place he has the capability to reach.
CAPT. PETE CONRAD
 Pete ¢onrad

'"SKYLAB- THE VITAL LINK"

AV 519

I think if you'll look at the overall programs, we started out with Project
Mercury just primarily to find if man could exist at all in space, and as
_t became apparent that he could and the country began to focus on the
atlonal objective of golng to the moon, Gemlnl and Apollo wer_ th_lJ_llow-on;
_Femini proved the rendezvoustheories and worked out a lot of the operational
Y

/ informationthat we needed as we were building Apollo. Of course, Apollo went

\
k
IIQn-to tak) us to the moon, but it also left us with a tremendoustechnology f
to look towards ti_efuture, and as far as Skylab is concerned, it represents //
_nite turning point_.... __ ' _!J ................... -"

Let's see - the workshop launched on what...the 14th...

Well, on May 14th, of course, Joe and Paul and myself were at the Cape to
_atcE t_e launch of the workshop, being we were to launch some 23½ hours later
to go up to it and we were out with our families watching the launch, and as
soon as ?t lifted off and went out of sight we inTnediately
left that area to
..... get in our cars and go back to the crew quarters where we could listen to
Mission Control run through their functions to get the lab into shape for \
our occupancy the next day. So we were actually in the cars 15 or 20 minutes
in the traffic getting back to the crew quarters and had no.idea that something
_ad h.appe course,"as soon as we-- got up to the crew quarters and we
--
coul_
__ - i
I1_stenin on the flight director net, we realized that something had happeneds_i_ )
to the lab, even though it looked like a perfect launch from where we had been 1
observing it' And as most people may remember, the meteoroid shield which was /
i to remain tightly strapped about the_______worksbop_ztil
it W_._n. orbit ripped off_
the flight_l_when it did, it unlocked the solar wings
and one ofthem came-of{_w]_en the vehicle shut down in orbit, and the other one
Was jammed by some metal that had wrappe_ around it, preventing it from deploying
all the way.

he_eteoroid shield gone, this gave us tb_e__Iz_QJ_lem

of overheating in they

_w_c.Sj}.Q_soman.v_cti_fS_rent____idea
in the intervening_,
lO days_o_;._
_f__.
_;_L,. .
_, C_tht f_rc_ COL_ _f Aavs/'_'re--p_outas different means of being _-__

f_ _-_'_S___"
_-ig-a. _ _--------_-heat
temporary shield or a]_Z_a_w_J_._shield which would-allow"_
us to salvage the vehicle._k'Wealso felt looking at the telemetry that this one
 CONRAD
Page 2

solar wing, would be capable of delivering power, or if we could free it, and
we were hoping that the debris that was ,hOldingit was of a small enough nature
and easy enough nature to clear to allow .us to do that from the command module
so the initial plan of attack was to look at three different methods of rigging
a beat shield, and then looking at various tools that Paul could use while hanging
out the command module hatch to help open the wing and clear the debris so that
the wing would open all the way.

In the interveninglO days, it became apparent that therewere certain objectives

in rigging this heat shield that we wanted to do. We wanted to do it in the
most simple manner that would do the job, and also the safest manner, so the
one device that Johnson Spacecraft Center was working on ws the parasol. In
the meantime, because we had done a great deal of extravehicular training at
Marshall Spaceflightand we were familiar with getting in and out of the vehicle
and there were good handholds and pads out to the solar telescope,Marshall came
V_ w_th what we call the Marshall sail, and at the same time, Johnson Spacecraft
Center was working on the parasol from within the vehicle through the airlock.
Marshall was working in the WIF in the water facility, learning how to put
together these poles and rig this sail, and so right at the end, we got the
fCnal configuration of how the parasol would work out of the scientific airlock
and on our way to the Cape for the launch, we actually stopped in Marshall and
d_d our f_nal inspection of that gear and our real and only training task in the
W_F to rig the Marshall sail. Then we had one third method which I had spent
a great deal of time on, and Paul was to rig a sail by flying the command module
to...around to damage...the damaged workshop, with Paul rigging it in varjous
places and me guiding him aroundas he hung out of the hatch, so we actually
took off on May 25th with three different ways of rigging a heat shield, and
all of them being different methods and of course there were several_other
• schemes, but they were discarded along to somewhere along in the lO days.
The thing that's amazing to me is that all the teams could design, put together
the procedures and functionally test to a relatively high degree each one of
those systems, have them completely manufactured and made in flight configuration
and into the command module in lO days.
 CONRAD
Page 3 ..........

_" /About 7 2 hours after llftoff, as we were rendezvousing with the workshop,
/extent of the damage w_..ic__ _ lot of iL :,a_b==,,_.,jz:t_c, became apparent 1

/ to us very rapidly. We first confirmed that the one solar wing had completely i

laeftthe vehicle and was no longer around and we could see the damaged wires !
/ at the hinge line, and ofcourse, all the gold foil which normally would have /
1 been under the heat shield and meteoroid shield was exposed to the sun light /
\'__andit haddarkened on the sun side considerably_/T-h__thing whic-_-'--_we --+
_to s_-._--_e_e-_e_'_ne-d't_at if the solr panel which weighs
over a ton had departed the vehicle, that it might possibly have damaged it.
We would see no large dents in the workshop, or we could see no great structural

da_+a_qg_+ILg_
workshop itself,,and then as we got aroUnd_t_ th_ide_ith the

_a_ed solar wing, it became irrmmdiatelyobvious that thls _it_le t_ metal

(strap, so to speak, had torn off the heat shield and meteoroid shield had jammed}

--
_wing,/_Bd _ first looked...it appeared to us we would-be able tO
open that wing by having Paul get outside and hanging out of the hatch, use one
of the tools to free it, then it course...after our flyaround, we went around
and we softdocked with the vehicle and went through our preparations for doing
t -- t_s EVA, and we got this all done and we undocked and we were very hopeful that
_e were going to get the wing out, and after much struggle which I'm sure everybody
remembers, we failed in our first attempt, and we were a little bit upset about
that. However, that changed very rapidly when I found out I couldn't redock.
And so here was a problem that we hadn't even anticipated,and immediately,we
went to work on that one and we tried every method in the book until we got down
to the very last one which again required extravehicularactivity, and I had
-madethe remark which I'll never make again some three months before, that if
we ever had to use that procedure,we were going to be in so much trouble that
we probably woudlntt be successfulat all, and I wasn't even sure that I
wanted to bother to take the time to train to do such a wild procedure in my
mind as this having to disassemblepart of the docking probe out the hatch, and
sure enough, there we were, right all the way down to having to use tht procedure,
and the ground gave us the opportunity to either back off and spend the night
or at our option, continue to try and successfullydock, and I felt that we would
get so far behind and that I might as well get the answers to the question and
we were all of course keyed up and obviously we were tired but we weren't aware
of it and I elected to go ahead and try the EVA procedure, which we did, and
 CONRAD
Page 4

that at the moment of docking I was having trouble getting good alignment in
the daylight, r couldn't see the alignment marks in my alignment site, and so...
elected to wait until night so I could do it at night and I could get better
alignment using the lights on the lab and using our alignment site in the command
module and at this time, we were out of ground contact, so when we attempted it
and slid in and all 12 docking latches popped shut and we had a hard dock, the
•ground didn't know it, so we were very very happy to report, after an extremely
long day - I think we'd been up about 15 or 16 hours inflight and 4 or 5 hours
before that - I think we'd been up almost 24 hours at this point - I think...
that we had at least successfullydocked with the lab.

Of course, before the flight, we'd been wondering whether we would be able to
_ust whistle around inside this great big workshop as we hoped we could, and
_e also were relatively guessing at how well we could move heavy equipment -.
we thought we could move it very, very well, and so the morning we opened the
hatch, I still had many tasks to do in the command module, and Joe and Paul,
I think, were a little bit nervous in the sense that they were going to be the
- f_st ones inside, and they weren't sure how things were going to go, and after
they'd been in there about lO minutes, all I could hear was a bunch of laughter.

So _ couldn'•tstand it - I had to take a look myself, and they had already at

just a very few minutes found that it was very easy to get around and they were
having a great deal of fun going about their tasks of activating the multiple
docking adapter. Of course, we hadn't at this point even gotten down into the
workshop itself which was the biggest area, and by the time 28 days were over,
why it was just as natural to whistle all over the vehicle - nobody ever went
anywhere in a straight _ine - they always had to do a slow roll or a somersault
or worR out however they wanted so they landed feet first after talking off
from the opposite end feet first and do a nice little roll on the way, and you
got to where your...it didn't make any difference that there wasn't any up and
down - you knew if you started down from the ATM and you wanted to go to your
bedroom, you could just take off and do all the necessary attitude changes en
route, maybe ricocheting off the fireman's pole to accomplish this, or change
your direction of flight and go right to where you wanted to, and arrive heads
down, if that's the way you wanted, or feet first, or however you wanted to do
it. It just turned out that the biggest ...the bigger the piece of equipment,
the easier to handle. The only time it got frustratingis when you had a lot
 a_e, 5

of little pieces and you were trying to keep them all contained and they'd
start getting away somewhere or moving about:the vehicle...

Every evening after dinner and all the work was done, we always had to take
a trip or two around the workshop...water ring lockers or just go up there and
free-fly, and we always had a lot of fun doing that - never got tired of doing
that,

In the systems where we do local originations, there's one outfit that we use
called Fort Network, and they've bought a whole bunch of televisionand movie
Stuff that they syndicate, and then there are quite a few independent ones
that have movie packages and of course you know you gotta' - what you have to
do is run a computer run to see who's got the rights - the local airway stations
and clear that you're not overriding them on what they have rights on - and they
get those rights for like two years if they buy the film package, and uh...we
do do local origination - we have some systems that are larger systems, do a
_ Iot of c_m,unity stuff, some of them do their own news, but very low budge -
r and _t loses money. Of course, this was required by the federal government
and then it's been fought in court, and now the FCC's looking at it again,
because local origination has cost them a lot more money than they envisioned
them costing. We use...well, our most sophisticated setups use Sony and
Panasonic equipment, but it's primarily designed for cable television - it's
nothing like an RCA color camera - God, what do you get, $60-80 thousand dollars
_n one of those jabberdoes (?) and we'll spend maybe $15,000 on a good (garble)
and that's what cost the bucks - the Plumicon (?).

Some of our systems - some of our bigger systems - Reding, Pa. - we've got
almost 30,000 subscribers, and we do a let of local origination. The other
stuff that we do - we don't originate, but in a lot of these places, in our
two-way systems where we have two-way video capabiliti4es, they'll wire all
the schools together and they'll - they can broadcast to each other through
our head in - we provide that service for free. Uh, they'll have their own
studio facilities - they're just using our cable. Couple of places there's
CONRAD
Page 6

Interestng things - and the high bands will give the doctors in town a converter._.
and then we put very, very high grade medical-educational programming on in the
evenings and the only guys that can get it are the doctors and get it in their
_Ouse and Mother can look on the other set and watch the network and these guys
can sit in there and get two hours of cornea transplants or bladder semethin'or
Others, or whatever - we're working a deal in Jackson, Mississippi right now - the
_A hospital there is building a microwave system - with the microwaves to our
head in, and then again on the high band, we'll put out to five hospitals in
Jackson, and they've got almost eight hours a day programming they want to put
into these hospitals - home medical stuff - I don't know, primarily educational,
I_guess,for doctors,nurses,hospitaladministrators,
-

Well, the FCC is restudying the local origination requirements rightnow - the
big problem is that you - with any of these movie packages, as you know - even
normal airway television, the losing operation is the news operation - it just
doesn't generate much bucks, and we're allowed to sell local advertising on our
local station, but we're having a hard time from what's available, and then
the communities vary so much, Now we've got a tremendous operation in Fayette-
ville that*s a big flop - the guy is a super programmer, he's done a hell of a
job, but Fayetteville is primarily military, transient, they don't give a shit
about Fayetteville, so they're not interested in the women's club or the local
baseball game, or whatever thatyou could do. In other places, like Redding,
there's tremendous community interest, and then we have in addition to local O,
other channels which we call public access, and we give them portapacks and
Sonies amid train them - anybody can come in, the blacks, the queers, the babies,
the ladies, the church, they can do anything - any Goddam thing they want, as
long as long as they don't destroy the place, and that's - that meets with...
I tell you what happens - the city will write that in the franchise, and you
go out and buy all this goddam gear and here comes everybody in the community,
and they find out (1) you just don't point the camera, you know, so they got
to go to class at night, and then they do one show and they find out nobody
watched it except them, and about three or four months after you get operational,
this shit's sitting over in the corner collecting dust, and you've got 80-I00 grand
wrapped up in a studio and portapacks and all this stuff - but it's there, and
I think people - yeah, we do city council meetings, we'll do it all day long,
and another thing we got tied in now with Civil Defense, boy I'll tell you,
CONRAD
Page- 7

this last set of tornadoes that went through...every system...been on our

back - wire into city hall and Civil Defense will buy the gear and no matter
how many channels you're broadcasting, they can punch a button down there in
city hall, and they can have video on every channel, or audio - either one, or
both, or they could havejust audio and it will blank the channels and you could
leave 'era blank, and you could say, you know, there's a storm warning, switch
to Channel 6 - yeah, it blanks out everything - and see, it'll get everybody's
attention, no matter what channel you're looking at - you can get 'em over on
the channel you want and tell'em a goddamn tornado is comin' so get your ass
out of the way. We've got one little gimmick some guy in one of our systems
invented. He took one of the old weather skin cameras, put tht in a water proof
box and mounted it on our 3600 rotor, and it turns out our 500' tower is pretty
much in the center of town, so we just put that on an empty channel, and that
thing just sits there and does 360's around town all day long, and if you want"
to see where the hell the thunderstormsare - this is out in Kansas - see where
the thunderstorm is or where the goddam tornado is, all you gotta' do is tune
to that channel and watch the camera go around.

I'm vice-president of operations and chief operating officer of the cm_hoany,

and my problem is running the systems that we got and building the new ones.
We would like to stay as far away from that, and we don't want - all we want
to do is anybody wants to come in and program, we'll lease 'em the channel or
whatever...and we don't want to get in that business. Albany's got 30-channel
capability into the home, and four channel video back, or if you bust up video,
if you just want to send data back, we can have a digital terminal on every
house. Yeah, we bicycle stuff- our own packages. We'll go to somebody and
say, Okay, we want to bicycle this stuff between four systems, and they'll run
the computer runs...

You can either can film and get on a film train, or you gotta' do dupe it on
3/4 - most of the stuff that we use now is 3/4" video, and we use those Sony
machines or panasonic - well Sony machines are a little better they tell me.
 f
CONRAD
Page8 ....

Of course, on our flight, being the first ones to be up for that kind of duration,
the medical experiments were very, very important to it, and of course, having
Dr. Kerwin along, he was vitally interested - this was his area and his field,
and exactly what was happening to us, so Joe kept a pretty good eye on us and
on himse'if,- we use to have a little medical exam from Joe about every three
or four days - check all the normal things, and we were in our regular routine
Of running medical experiments - the lower body negative pressure - everybody
bad a run in that about every three days, and we were of course all interested
in watching ourselves to see what our own reactions were going to be to it
and compare reactions on the ground, and then the bicycle ergometer and metabolic "
analyzer were very important, and there ws something in riding that bicycle
where each of us could objectively tell by riding the bike what kind of physical
shape were we in - our legs and how well we were doing and what our heart rate
was doing; and so forth, and of course, we learned a lot of early lessons with
that. In the first place, we found the restraint system was hindering us in
doing our work. We thought we needed to be restrained on the bicycle seat,
J and we finally discovered that we could ride the bicycle better, and alm6st
l_Re we d_d before by just not only eliminating the restraints- you really
didn't need the seat for that matter. You could lock your feet in the petals
and bold onto the handlebars and ride away merrily, and of course, it also
turned out and it was again subjective, but I know in my case, it became very
very obvious that the exercise was necessary, and I got to where everyday I
rode that bicycle and I could tell after sitting at the solar telescope for
three ou_ four hours I didn't feel bad but I felt lethargic and I'd get down
and get on the bicycle, and after three or four minutes of_xercise, I could
just feel myself getting a nice pleasant feeling of well being. You know,
I think I described it during the flight - I really wanted to get up there
and pump hard - work hard and make my heart pump that blood and it just made
me feel good for hours after exercise, and I think the succeedingflights have
shown that their physical well being got even better inflight and they did
more and more exercise. It's almost directly related - the amount of exercise
as to how well the crew's doing physically

t_
 Page 9
coNRAD

...up to that screen and be stuck on it, so we never lost anything either.

Of course, as far as off-duty activities went, the first 14 days of the flight,
_e didn't have any time off. We were in a semi-powered down mode and it wasn't
_nt_l Day 14 that we got our other solar wing out and got full electrical power
back on the vehicle that we got into a normal mode of operation. Now of course
we_d been learning every day how to do tasks better, and after we got to about
Day 16 or 17, we got into a very good routine, the amount of flight planning that
the ground gave us to accomplishwe could get done, and I think we would wind up
in the evening with a little spare time 0n our hands, and one never ceased to
Want to go to the window and watch the world go by when you got done doing whatever
it was - you wouldn't know exactly where you were in the world, but you could
quickly find out by looking out the window, take the map, and match up something
and you'd know you were coming down over Japan or you'd be out over the Pacific
running down the island chains, or over South America, and finally at the end_
•
actually got a chance to read some of the books that I took along. I remember
the first one I read was Johnothan Livingston Seagull, and I managed to read two
F _Ore books . and I'd get a chance to listen to my music. Now the other thing
that we found was that we really didn't need as much sleep up there as we needed
on the ground, so we actually didn't...did a lot of our off-duty and recreation
sort of things after we were supposed to have gone to bed. We kept a regular
8-hour rest period, but Joe and I found that we really only needed about 6_
hours sleep and Paul found that he only needed only about 5½ hours - 5-3/4 hours
sleep - we used to call him the night wanderer because we'd go to bed before he
.Would. Be'd still wander around doing something,and it was pleasant. You'd
go to bed at your regular time and take the book with you and read for a half
an Bout or so, put your earphones andlisten to your own music, whatever your
tapes were, and you were quite comfortable,you were in your own bedroom. I
think the other thing a lot of people didn't realize about Skylab is that it was
a trememdously big vehicle - it was over 90 feet long, and it was compartmentized
so that in the morning you might go off and work the solar telescope and the
gther two fellows would be down doing something else and you really wouldn't
see them until it was lunch time. It was sort of like routine on a large ship
or maybe even in an office building. They'd go off and do something in the
afternoon or you'd get with one of them and do something and the other fellow
would go off and work the solar telescope, but you know, you wouldn't see him
again until dinner.
 CONRAD
PAGE IO

So we werent really in each other's way, and so that made it pleasant. We -

everybody got along well with each other and of course the other thing that
people forget is that they always want to know how you got along for 28 days
or 59 days or 84 days, but they forget that you lived, eat, slept and breathed
together for 2½ or 3 years before this training for the flight. We used to
travel together, train together and so we were constantly with one another, and
obviously if somebody weren't gonna' get along, that would come out a long time
Before you got in the vehicle, and so you know, Joe and Paul and I - we had a
Super time - we got along well with each other - we never got in each other's
hair, and we did have enough off-duty and different things to do that it was
always interesting.

Well, Gn a longer flight, I have the feeling that you could invent a lot of games
to do up there that you can't do down here. I know one of them - we had a rubber
ball up there, and gee, with that rubber ball and all the different angled corners
and protuberances and so forth in the vehicle, we used to play a game of seeing
_ bow much - how many times we could ricochet it off the water ring lockers and
i into the ceiling and back to the floor and exactly tell where it was going to
_ind up and then we used to do a little intercept game there where somebody'd
press off from the floor and he'd be whistling through the middle of the vehicle
and you'd see if you couldn't throw the ball in such a manner that he could
intercept it as he was going, because of course once he was free-flight,he
couldn't change his direction. He could change his attitude, but not his
direction, so we found lots of things to do that were different up there with
the bali and with ourselves and all, and it was a great be_ when we finally
settled once and for all that youcould run fast enough to get enough centrifugal
_Orce to bold you on the water ring lockers and actually run around the vehicle.
Of course, on the first day into the vehicle, our major task was to deploy the
parasol, which was the first of the three different methods that we had, and when
we first opened up the workshop, it was still extremely hot down there - I think
the temperature was on the order of 125 degrees in the workshop. Now it was
quite cool up in the multiple docking adapter - was in the very low 60's up
there, and Paul and I were the two that had the task of deploying the parasol,
_d we found - of course, there was no humidity in there - the vehicle had been
empty, bad been charged withdry air - and so the heat didn't bother you very
 CONRAD
Page 11

much - we did get hot down there, and a lot of the things that we touched were
hot, so rather than stripping down, we found that we wanted to put on as much
clothes as we could so that when we were leaning or jamming ourselves against
Something to work on this deployment, we wouldn't heat ourselves up too badly
or burn ourselves, so to speak, on any of the hot equipment, and we could work
for about i5 or 20 minutes and then we'd whistle up into the MDA where it was
nice and cool and then we!d cool off for 4 or 5 minutes and then'd we'd go
back and work on the deployment. Now this whole thing had been put together
lO days, and we didn't have a lot of opportunity to train on it, so we were
eztremely careful in going through the checklist and we were_very,very careful
_D._ak_ng sure that we put it together exactly right and operated it exactly
I_.them anner in which it was supposed to be operated, so it took us quite a
w_ile. I think it took us 3 or 4 hours to get ready for the deployment, and
_ben we were ready, of course, Joe filmed and observed this from the command .
-_odule- he could see the outside from there - and we deployed it and it came
out _t didn't deploy quite all the way...

t -_ Of course, we deployed it through the scientificairlock, and we got to the

point where we could put it out and Joe was observing this from the command
-_odule. He could see it sticking out through the scientificairiock, and when
_t deployed, it didnlt deploy quite ell the way, so we spent a little while
trying to shake the wrinkles out of it by pulling the pole in and out where it
went through the scientificairlock, and we finally got itout as far as we
could and we pulled it back down to where it was very close over the vehicle
_Ite.w_ _t was designed to be, and the ground could tell us right off the bat -
t_e_ could see the temperaturesbeginning to drop on telemetry,so we didnt
know how low they would drop, but we knew that we were at least going to get
tt down out of the high 120's which wou_d have preventedus from ever really
using it, and sure enough, it took quite awhile - I think one of the interesting
things is that the outside skin of the vehicle cooled off right away, but we
had all the water stowed in the water tanks, and water is a great holder of
b_at, and for days afterwards,whenever you passed by the water tanks that were
on the sunside of the vehicle, you could feel them still giving up their heat,
and it really took the vehicle 5 or 6...
 CONRAD
Page 12.

-v_ It took the vehicle 4 Dr 5 days to give up all the heat. Now also, depending
on the time of flight - where we were in the flight - we actually had a different
heating condition on the vehicle due to its inclination of the orbit plane to
the sun. And uh, so we - some periods of time had more daylight on it than
others, so actually the temperature cycle down below, because we didn't have
perfect control of the heating - once.the meteoroid shield was gone - so I
th_nk the lowest temperature I remember down there - I remember it got down
to 72 degrees, and right at the end of the flight when we left, it was getting
back up to its maximum temperature,and it was about 88 degrees down there
when we 1eft the vehicle.

e up there, our first 14 days we lived like moles. Wewere always"turning \,

lights
course,out
notbehind
havingus, we had
gotten theto conserve electricalenergy
swing out - we really
on our first attempt when had.
we "\\
a "
i about _alf of the electrical capabilitythat we should have had. So it was _,
i

I _ery. very important to attempt to get that jammed solar panel out. and the 1
_.ground, in the interveningtime)n-_ la,nch and)nsuccessful attempt to ge_
)_ - T_Out, spent a great dealf_me taking the televisionpictures_that_s_ent-
back and analyzing themand figuring out exactly how that wing was.jammed by
_,,estrap, and then they worked up a set of procedures. Now this was really
fun for us, because the ground sent the proceduresup on about Day II, and we
_bad to manufacture all this equipment and they told us you know how to make it,
what to make it out of and then they left a lot of little innovationsand wrinkles
up to us, so Joe and Paul and I spent three very long evenings assemblingall
the gear that was required and putting it all together and trying it out inside
the vehicle and figuring out better ways to flip the roping along the side of
the cutters and we tried rubber bands and we tried tape and we finally decided
- we finally found a way to flake it out with tape that allowed it to oome out
very well and not jam, so we had ourselves worked up to a high pitch there to
go out and we were determined we were going to get the wing out, but I had the
one concern that we were going to be working in an area where we did not have
good foot restraint and handholds, and I had had a bad experience with that on
Gemini II - Dick Gordon had gotten in trouble and we knew how important it was
to have the right restraint - and we had good restraint around where we had
/_ _lanned to work, but of course, this was over in an area that we hadn't, so I
 Page 13

had reservations that we might not be successful. I thought the methods that
- they came up would work, assuming that we could hang 6n in the right manner.
Yell, our first - after we got outside - at our first daylight pass at it,
Joe was having a great deal of difficulty in getting himself anchored to attach
the cutter to the strap. And actually: he got quite frustrated trying to do it,
and _t d_d, it reminded me very much at the time of Dick getting frustrated
out on the end of the Gemini where he didn't have good handholds,so night time
came, and Joe and I shot the breeze for awhile, and I told him that we were
•going to have to tare a strain, and we'd have to take a little different approach
to it, and we got to thinking about it, and I think Joe got the idea up of tiding
this tether had on his chest tighter than we had, which would give him a good
anchor point to pull against with his feet, and as we came out the next daylight
pass, as soon as we got that organized and got him well anchored, why he got
the cutter fight on the strap and I was able to go right up the cutter pole and
attach the rope that needed to be attached out there that would allow us to,pull
_t open.once we cut the strap. Then Joe tried to cut the strap and tried ...
and was having some bit of difficultyand _s I was going out there to see what
_d happened, he gave it one more tug and it left me free-floatingup there -
we had a little thrill with that one - or at least I had a little thrill with
_t until I got ahold of something again, and by golly, we had it free. Now
the question was to break the actuator that was frozen by again pulling on this
rope that I'd attached, and they had a method where I'd get underneath it and
stand up, sort of like the way you'd stretch a bow, and I tried and I tried,
and _ _toodup as far as I could, and I still couldn't.get__be_i_eak,
fso Joe tr_ed and thenwedecided
t_°tig-bten _it up again, and_I'dtry and I got_
_ _ r
lunder it and boy, it broke, it let go in one big hur_andt_e e I waslaunche_
\into _, free-floating,hanging on the end of this string_you know, \
and all I could see was I dlsappeareoln_rommlngwas tne w!nq c_In_at=_me, j
aIot_ foste
thanthought
shoul ell.
e.j,
bythe
timegot
stralgh ,,
ou_a6_n and looked aro,nd, why there it was. out and deployed../Nowof course.
the solar panels themselveswere'_their dampers were frozenand they were going
to have to heat. and they had just crept out a little ways. but at least weknew
we got the wing oDen and we knew that they would eventuallyget out and we'd
•9et the electricalpower back. so we got inside and by the time we got inside
_J_two of them had crept down quite a way. matter of fact. they crept out far
_-_ enough that they were supplying enough power to startcharging the workshop

.. . • •

i.--
 CONRAD
_ 14.
bettery system, and sure enough, by 6 or 8 hours later, why they all three of
tb_ sections were all the way out and we were now back in a nice normal mode
_nd we hadmore than enough electricalpower to do the rest of the mission for
the rest of the fellows, so that was kind of a high point.

Of course, there's always been the big argument - that of why man in space -
and I think Skylab should have settled that once and for all - of course, really
those of us that worked closely in the program recognize that you have to have
both man and unmanned flight - we couldn't have landed on the moon without the
_n_anned satellite studies and work that was done, and certainly such things as
our Mariner probes are going to give us the preliminarydata because I'm con-
#Tnced someday - you know, Man will go to Mars or Venus and so forth. Now Skylab
Would have been a total loss had man not been involved in that inflight to salvage
_t, and of course I think we're going to reach the ultimate in melding manned"
and unmanned flight with the space shuttle, because man will operate the vehicle
_nd the payload in the _back will be either manned or unmanned or a combination
of manned and unmanned doing whatever the task is that's required, and I think
man _S ...has more than paid for himself by being in space.

Space exploration I think is just an extension of any kind of exploration.

Somewhere way back when, man got curious to what was over on the other side of
the hill, and he really wasn't sure what he was going to find, but he mute
wanted to find out what it was, and to me, flying in space is just going in a
_fferent direction than those Who want to study Underwater,or out in the ground
and man will always continue going in all those directions. He's gonna' learn
more about underwater and more about his own earth, and I think we've seen that
space flight contributes to that knowledge also, it helps man better understand
his own environment,that's when spaceflightis used to look back at ourselves,
on earth, and man's not going to be satisfied with just going to the moon.
So_edayLhe_s going to go further. That's the question - of when - you know,
technically,we could go further right now, but we need to focus on ourselves
for the moment, so he stopped looking past earth orbit or past the moon for
the moment. Not everybody. You know, somebody's thinking about going further,
I know I am. And I think I'll see the day maybe that man goes to Mars.
 CONRAD
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Well, all these flights added up to Skylab, I think. I flew a long-duration

flight in Gemini, it was very cramped, we were gaining the knowledge we needed
to go to the moon, but the technology that we built in the large rocket in being
able to go to the moon and what I learned about operating flights and training
and so forth all contributed to Skylab which again had a different purpose, but
the information that ...and experience that I gained in Gemini and Apollo allowed
me I think to more effectively do my job in Skylab, and I don't think I would
have traded any of my flights for any other flights, but don't get me wrong, I
enjoyed going to the moon, but I think Skylab was probably the best one.
.t ,

CAPTArr_ALANBEAN

\
 Capt. AI an. Bean

vSKYLAB- THE VITAL LINK"

AV 519

We knew that we were going to have to deploy a sunshade on our mission, because
the one that was deployed on the first mission just was not - we did not see
that it would be able to maintain the environment in the workshop as long as
it - as long as the total three missions, so we wanted to get out a sunshade
that would be permanent and permanent in terms of staying out there as long as
the three missions went, so we went, we did a lot of water - a lot of work in
i;h__ater tank in Huntsville, developing the procedures and techniques for
delployingthe sunshade. We knew we ...

We knew we were going to have to deploy a sunshade on our mission, even though
the first mission had deployed a parasol-typesunshade, and the reason we knew
th_s was because that sunshade was made of materials that didn't appear to us
to stand the total three mission usage. We then set about developingthe
J_ater_alsand the techniquesof deploying this...whatwe call a twin-pole sunshade
_n the water tank at Huntsville,Alabama. We used the water tank because under-
water it sCmulated the zero-G and allowed us to learn how to do it before we
j _ actually left the earth. As it turned out, the same techniques that we used
in the water tank worked just perfectly in space.

Inflight we wanted to deploy the sunshade - probably the... I'll start over.
I_flight we knew that deploymentof the sunshade was one of the most important
things we had to do on EVA because this deplojnnentdepended on keeping a good
habitable environment for the total of the three missions. When the time came
to deploy it, Jack Lousma and (}wenGarriot went outside and working as a team,
they assembled the pole, put the poles in position - there were two of them -
and then they took a bag that contained the actual sunshade Which was folded
up _ by the way, the sunshedewas a cloth, large cloth awning is about what
it a_nted to, rolled up in a bag. Jack was actually near the twin poles
that were deployed. He hooked the awning or the sunshade on it, and using
some small ropes, pulled it all the way out until it covered the entire workshop
on the sunny side. He tied the lines off than...thenwe had a nice little
sunshade for the rest of the mission.

Lower body negative pressure device, or the LBNP, wassort of a large can
with a rubber seal. This rubber seal allowed you to slip down inside the can
 BEAN
Page 2

and then seal up around your upper waist - upper body. You could then take
t_e can and vent it partially, put a suction on your lower body and cause
the blood to want to come to your legs and lower extremities. Of course, your
heart and brain realize this was occurring and so it had to pump this blood
against the forces of the suction of the vacuum, back up to the head._tokeep
you from fainting. You could put the amount of vacuum or suction on the lower
extremities that you wanted and thus load your heart and measure to see how
well it wasgoing. It was an excellent test in flight to determine the health
and state of the cardiovascular system, although I personally thought in flight
it was tougher to pass than it was on earth. The first few days we ran it,
_t was difficult. It was difficolt throughoutthe flight, and then the first
day we returned back on the ship, we found it ws fairly easy to do once on
the ship.

Metabolic analyzer was a unique device in that it allowed you to do a certain

level of work and while doing this work, measure how well your cardiovascular,
your heart, and .yourair-breathingoxygen exchange system is doing. It consisted
of a bicycle, an ergometer, a bicycle that you could vary the load on, and then
some sensors on your chest to take an electrocardiogram to check and see how
your heart was doing, and also a ure_J_g system that measured the oxygen
that you used and the CO2 that you expelled, so the purpose was to get on the
b_cycle ergometer, start working at specified rates, and measure how the heart
reacted, how your oxygen interchange system, or the lungs, reacted. Now it
is interesting that we did this quite frequentlybefore we launched, we did it
inflight, and we did it after we landed, and through this information which
was telemetered to the ground, we were able to keep up with our health prior
to flight, during the flight and postflight rather accurately.

Vestibular function was an experimentto determine what happens to man in...

man's inner ear under zero gravity. We do know that without gravity keeping
the fluid in the ear in the right place, it will float around and send unusual
stimuli to the brain. Now the brain has the ability to afterwhile ignore
these things, but what we have noticed in previous flights, particularlyin
Apollo where we could move around quite a bit, was that as the flight progressed,
-_ _e were able to move more rapidly and it would bother you less, so we wanted
 BEAN

to determine just what affect motion - movement had as the flight wore on.
llt turned out that we measured - we were able to measure certain levels of
tolerance prior to flight by rotating in this chair and moving our head back
and forth and left and right, and by doing this a certain number of times, we
could determine when we weren't feeling good. Inflight, after just four or
five or six days, we could take any number of movements and any number of
speed - any amount of speed, whirling around movements, and it would not bother
us at all. This continued throughout the flight, and then when we returned
to earth, for at least a little While, we found that we weren't very su6ceptible
_o motion sickness problems at all.

Blood studies - the majority of them were done pre-and-postflight, however,

on our flight, we did do some, as were done on the first flight, we did do
some inflight blood sampling. This turned out to be very easy, and Dr. Owen
Garriott would generally get out the equipment the night before, we'd...in
_b.e_Qrni_og
just before breakfast,we'd float into the...our wardroom, he'd
...... take blood from Jack and I, and then we would, in turn, either Jack or I,
would take blood from Owen. This turned out to be a very simple, straightfor-
ward precedure--a!though then the actual carrying for and centrifuging the
blood, and measuring it, putting it in vials and the like to bring it back
home was time consuming,but we got back the data that could have been accom-
plished no other way.

Body mass measurementwas essentially a scales. I didn't realize personally

myself before we started working with Skylab how important it is to keep an
accurate measure on a person's weight if you want to know his health. It is
one of the first signs of change, or the first thing that will change when a
person is undergoingstress, physical stress, and by having an accurate measure
of weight on the ground with a spring scale, and up in flight by vibrating back
and forth in a chair, and measuring the period of this vibration, as you can
imagine, if youtre heavy, the vibration is going to be slow, and you can time
it, or if youLre light, it will be much faster and you can time it, and you
can tell how much you weigh - by weighing ourselves each morning before we
/- ate, we were able to determine our state of weight and eat the right amount of
food to keep it at a low level condition.
 BEAN
Page 4

The exercise regime that we practiced on our flight was sort of a personal
thing. We knew as a result of the first Skylab flight, that Pete Conrad had
really done most of the exercise and came back in the best shape. From that,
we sort of took into account that we wanted to do as much as we could. Jack
Lousma was on our flight and he could do quite a bit more exercise than either
Owen or I because he was stronger. We did each day as much as we feltwould
_ep us _n good condition. We did it on the bicycle ergometer,we did it on
a device that was like a spring attached to the floor, and in fact, this ws
the first mission where we had that and we used it quite frequently. When
we returned, we found that we were in better condition than the first crew,
and we also found that some of our lower back muscles had not been kept in as
good a condition - our leg muscles were not in as good condition as we would
have liked. The follow-on crew, SL-4 crew, took up an additional exercise in
t_e fQYl_of a treadmill,and using this treadmill,they were, in addition t6
the other devices mentioned, they were able to keep their lower body in exceptional
Shape as a result they came back in better condition than the other two crews.
_ Of course, that's the name of the space business - if we knew all the answers
to begin w_tfi,we wouldnLt have to go. So we try to build on each flight, and
in this case, with personal exercise, we think we did. We think if we sent a
crew up tomorrow, we could give him exercise equipment that would even be
superior and even bring them back in better shape.

_mmm_mw_

Skylab medica_ experiments were perhaps the - one of the most important things
we did d_ri6_ the whole Skylab mission. We attempted to take a look a man

as he re_ctedlunder long-term weightlessness. As you know, we had a maximum

of 14 d_ys in Gemini in a rather confined space, in Apollo we had...
................. -_-_-_-_--_ ...............
The Skylab experiments were one of the best experiments and most important ,
experimentswe did on the mission, for the simple reason that in Gemini and \!
Apollo, our maximum time in orbit, for man, was about I¢ days. We knew that
!

to go to the planets someday and maybe even to the stars in some more distance/
\ futu_, man is going toblt 0 understand_an
d be able tosurvivehis
_c_tion./_It__ wouldbe nice if he could survive it with zero gravity
_- and not have to spin up to space stations and furnish some sort of artificial
gravity. Our tests showed to date, or at least _he missions that we flew,
BEAN
Page 5

showed that he did rather well. Our first mission, 28 days, our middle one 59,
and the end one 84 days indicated that Man degraded somewhat for the first
several weeks, but after the first several weeks, he begin to stabilize. It's
interesting to note that the crew on the first mission came back in a physical
Condition that wasn't quite as good as the second crew, and of course the third
crew came back in even better condition. We believe that most of this is caused
by improved exercise regime and equipment, however, it did demonstrate that at
least for that length of time that we had no large problems. Whether or not
we can extrapolate that 84 days out to several hundred_ days, incidentally, it
takes something like 400 days for a typical Mars mission - we don't know right
now. But it does indicate that we're on that we're on the right track in
a_sum_ng than man can assume...can exist for long times in zero gravity.

ge did quite a lot of work with the Apollo Telescope Mount while we were in
orbit. We had two complete sets of film for our cameras, and this allowed us
to take quite a little bit of data of just normal everyday typical events on
the sun and it also allowed us to keep some in reserve for the more special
eyents, l_ke the solar flare, solar explosion of some type. We spenf as much
time as we possible could at the ATM panel. We tried to divide it equally
among the crew members_b_!twe soon realized that Dr. Owen Garriott, ,_howas
our scientist, was probably the superior observer, so we then asked to maybe
put him at the panel. I think maybe this was true in all flights, that the
scientist-astronautwas able to demonstrate his most - his expertise most
obviously with theApollo Telescope Mount work. We had some excellent flares,
or solar explosions on our mission which we wereable to record. We had some
uh...quite a nun_oerof filaments that lifted off the surface, we had just -
some coronal activity, we had essentiallyquite a bit more solar action, if
you will, than was even forecast in an optimisticscientist before the mission.
If you total up all three missions, I think that the scientiststhat were
concerned with the Apollo Telescope Mount were extremely pleased.They were
not only enthusiasticabout the way the sun behaved, but they werevery happy
about the total amount of work and improvisionthatcould be done by the
scientist astronautsand the rest of us onboard. We were able to modi(y the
Use of the equipment when it didn't work perfectly as it should have, and
we wre also able to further optimize some of the techniquesthat had been
dreamed up prior to flight. One of the things that I recall on our mission that
BEAN
Page 6

was very useful was that it was the first time that we took up a small camera,
and using this camera, we could photograph the display of the ATM, thus giving
us some information on how the exact details on the sun are at any one time,
and then we could prepare that photograph in an hour or so, and the next man
comes on. It allowed us to better understand the transient events on the
surface of the sun and the corona - we got some pictures it would not be
possible to have obtained any other way.

The studies we did on the sun I think are particularly important, because
they - the sun is probably our best laboratory of high-energy, very hot plasma
physics. There's a lot of events taking place on the sun now that man on earth
just does not understand. We understand the fundamental things that are going
on, the basic things that were going on, but a lot of the more subtle changes
that are occurring on the sun on a daily basis or even less frequently than
that, are not fully understood. Because the sun is such as huge energy source,
_t would probably be to our advantage on earth to understand all the things on
earth that are happening there, becauee we're gonna' be able to use some of
those techniques or principles to harness perhaps nuclear energy here on earth.
As you know, man first observed nuclear energy on the sun long before he knew
exactly what it was, and knew - was able to harness it here on earth. Now
it's not inconceivable that the same thing could occur again. We would take
a look at the sun, find some things occurring on there that we don't understand
which we know that's true at the moment, we would learn to understand them
better, and then maybe we could somehow duplicate them to our advantage dow_
here in a world that's fast using up some other forms of energy.

UV stellar experimentwas an excellent one and it provided a lot of flexibility

_n what you could look at and what exposures you ...were used so you could
pick up what we call dim ultravioletstars or very strong ones. It mounted in
the airlock, you could take it out of its box, stick in the airlock, open the
window, extend it out so that it could view different stars, point them at the
stars, and then take exposures of a length depending on what we thought the
strength of those particular ultravioletstars were. Of course, in some
cases, we would over-expose them purposely per plan, and some under-exposed
in the event that they weren't perfect. We didn't know everything about the
 BEAN
Page 7

stars. As a result, we go back quite a lot of information, quite a lot of star

fi.elds that should enable a much more thorough and complete mapping of the
heavens as we are able to do right now with the ultraviolet equipment.

UV panorama...I didn't use that.

The astrophysics experiments were important because through a better understanding

Of our universe, we're better able to See the energy sources that are at work
at ....
in the universe. We were well aware that there were other larger forces
at work in the universe some years ago before we understood atomic energy that
were not explained by chemical energy means, although we didn't know that atomic "
energy itself was...existed, or how we might harness it. Through observing these
energy sources and trying better to understand them, we were able to duplicate
an atomic energy event here on earth. As you know, we now use that as one of
our most promising sources of energy in the future. Now we are able to look
out in the universe right now and find events taking place of such an energy

f_
that they're not explained either by chemical means or by atomic power release,
so there are other forces at work in the universe than man needs to understand
so that he can use them for his benefit. How long it's gonna' take to do this,
no one knows, but it's important to start building a foundationand start under-
standing these things better, so that some day in the future, as our planet uses
up its natural resources, we can call on improved methods for generation of the
energy that we are going to need.

The earth resourcesmultispectralcamera is.ijusta battery of six cameras all

pointed at the same place on the ground. Now through using suitable filters
on some of these cameras and putting different kinds of film in there, some
susceptiple to visible light, some tha_twillmeasure infrared light, some that
will measure other frequenciesof light, you're able to record what is being
radiated from the ground in these different frequencyranges. By doing this,
you have a permanent record at one time in these separate ranges, these
pictures can be brought back to earth and are at the moment here being studied
byscientists and being used to ...let me back up a little...The
UbAN
Page 8

..othe_e _ctures were brQug_ back to e_rth and are being used now to try

to determfne some of the things that will help man on earth in the future in
his use of the natural resources he_on earth. For example, we do know that
certain frequencies ranges will make visible...let me go back.

For example, we know it's much easier to tell a person's health if we don't
just look at him, but we actually take his temperature. The same thing is true
in some cases of looking down at the earth and wanting to know if a plant is
healthy or not. If we just take a picture in the visible range, we can see
what it looks like - it's either green, light green or dark green. Oft' times
this isn't as important as being able to look in another range, such as the
infrared, which allows us to infer the temperature of the plant. It's much
easier we know now to...

For example, we know here on earth, in addition to a doctor looking at you to

see how you feel or how well you are, he's sometimes able to tell much more b,v
taking your temperature. Nov;the same thing is true from orbit, looking down
at a forest, for example. You might be able to tell the health, to a small
degree, by the color, the vision factor. If you have some infrared film, you'll
be able to essentially take the temperature of the plants or trees and from
that, infer its health also. Now the same thing is true for ore deposit. Some-
times a copper deposit will not show up as well in the visual frequency, as
it will in some other frequency, and by using computer techniques in a variety
of different photographs, superimpose one on the other in certain sequences,
you'll be able to locate mineral deposits, tell the health of trees, find
where schools of fishes might be. Now this whole science is in its infancy.
It's the same as long ago when we started trying to determine what's beneath
the ground, for example, in the explorationof oil, by using explosivesand
sound microphones. No one in today's world would think of going out and
searching for oil without using that technique, because they've learned to
understand that it will pinpoint the strata and the formations that...give
oil much better thar.you can on the surface. The same thing is going to be
true with this science of earth resources. The day is not too far distant
where a person would not even consider going out to hunt for a mineral deposit
without first doing some very serious study of the area with multispectral camera
information such as we brought back from Skylab. We took some excellent pictures
of the drought area of Central Africa while we werein orbit, with the idea
Page 9

that from these pictures, we would be able to find ground that was not being
used that was...did look like it was cultivatable, we would be able to find
somehow some surface water or slightly subsurface water that was being used
so that it could be tapped and used for irrigation, and it was also pictured
with the idea of trying to discover a total pattern of the drought to see if
could be stopped in some way by suitable planting or suitable cultivation or
preventing cultivation of certain areas, so although we don't know the full
techniques that would be used in this case for food production, we do know
that it does provide the tools so that at least we can get sort of a handle
on food production and enhance it in some way. We're all aware that at least...
just this year...we're all aware that in the year 1974, the total population •
of the world has started to exceed very rapidly the total capability of the
world of produced food, and if we don't do something about one or the other
...we're headed for some very difficult times _n the years to come. Earth
resources can help add to our ability to produce food. Earth resources h6s
great possibilities in the energy field, not only for ...from discovering,
for example, slightly subsurface heat sources which might be tapped to generate
steam, probably even more useful looking down at the ground and noticing fault
structure in the surface that are similar to those in other parts of the world
where coal, oil and other important minerals are found. By using this technique,
right now men are out in the field looking in areas of these similar structural
conditions, to try to locate additional minerals and energy supplies for us in
the future. We think that this technique is going to make quite a lot of energy
sources available that just haven't been discovered yet because of the vast
surface of the earth that would have to be walked by individuals...by man to
discover it. It's much easier to take a picture or look down from orbit and
try to survey the situation and try to find the areas most likely to'be sites
for future oil fields, for example...

Pollution is more than just a localized problem. It turns out that oft times,
the air pollution that is generated in a city in Japan, with the right winds,
can come over and bother the northwest coast of the United States. The same
thing is true with things generated in the northwest U.S. - the winds can blow
them into the central U.S. and even further. By using earth resources systems,
we hope to be able to pinpoint the problem and take steps so that we can say
solve this pollution problem on a global basis.
BEAN
Page 10

Population patterns - we were able to take through suitable camera information

or multispectral camera, look down and tell quite rapidly on a repetitive basis
of where people are moving as-far as the city is concerned. We can tell which
way major building is moving, we can a_so tell which is perhaps more important
the change in vegetation which accompanies man in his motion, and from this,
we can perhaps predict ahead this change in vegetation patterns to prevent any
sort of a dust bowl or atmospheric change that is not desirable. We know that
man as he moves about makes changes in the weather, andthrough observing him
very accurately and recording it, we can perhaps head off any change he might
make that would be detrimental in the future.

Water resources - film such as that sensitive to the infrared which measures
surface temperature rather accurately can be determined ...used to determine
underwater resources. It's also possible to determine areas that have not only
springs, but where rivers go partially undergroundand are not at the moment
even known that that part of the river is being diverted in some way. With
this sort of knowledge, you can tapthese underwater sources, you can dam the
ones you don't feel are as productive, and then can keep the total amount of
water in a useful condition so that it can be used for irrigation, or whatever
else. Essentially you'd be able to tap the sources of water that are present.

Meteorology. The reason...at the moment, we just don't have the capability on earth
to predict the weather accurately for long periods. The reason we don't is that
we don't fully understand what makes the weather, and the reason we don't is
because we can't measure the weather all over the earth at the same time at
all altitudes. There's a feeling by some meteorologists that if they could
once accomplish this on a systematic basis, they could create equations and
models that would allow them to forecast the weather. You can imagine that
if we had the ability to forecast the weather, literally millions and millions
of dollars in crop savings alone would result. We'd know when to plant, we'd
know when to harvest, we'd know when and when not to irrigate, and it's just
the first step, of course, to weather control. Before you can control anything,
you need to understand and be able to predict what's going to happen, so the
earth resources experiments are going to add greatly to that science.
 BEAN
Page II

We observed a lot of storms. These are generally anomalous conditions in

the total scheme of the weather, but we're able to track the hurricanes very
accurately on a day to day basis, were able to give an indication of the size,
and we did so. Unfortunately, as yet, we're not able to tell from orbital
altitude just how severe the storm is_jand w_'r_ mn_tly__.,

The earth resources has a great future as far as meteorology is concerned.

From the point of view of trying to understandthe earth's weather. The weather
is concerned on a global basis, and right now, one of the short comings we
have as far as trying to predict the weather is the fact that we only see it
as a small part of the total picture. The use of satellites,both as unmanned
and spaceshipsmanned - over the next years are going to allow us to get a
better feeling for what causes the weather and to start predictingit. As
you can imagine, once we start predictingthe weather, we're gonna' be able"
to make some tremendous savings in many areas, one of which for example is
ships of sea following the right winds and the right, smooth seas. Another
F is the same thing with aircraft. Mcre obvious one perhaps is when to plant,
when to water and irrigate, and when to harvest, so our only hope, as far as
learning a particular weather actively is from space and we think that some
of the work that we did from Skylab is going to further that goal..

The materials processing we did on our flight was one of the things that we
think will be the most beneficialin years to come. There's two major advantages
of space flight as far as manufacturing is concerned. One is the zero gravity
condition, which does not cause separation of materials of different densities
or of different weights, like it occurs on earth. With this phenomena available
to someone, it's conceivable that materials that weren't able to be manufactured
on earth with this gravity field will be manufactured. Serums, for example,
that now are now separable on earth, it's conceivable that up in zero-gravity
condition, forces that aren't useful here, say like electrophoresis or light
magnetic fields or electric fields will allow us to separate...

For example, serums that we are not able to separate here on earth, or medicines
that we are not able to make here on earth because wecan't separate the
components of the...from the fluid that are not desirable, perhaps in zero
BEAN
Page 12

gravity, using some other forces such as light electrical fields or magnetic
fields, we would be able to separate these serums and come back with medicines
that we just can't make here on earth..The same thing with metals. There's
perhaps a possibility of making some sort of foam steel, since the bubbles
won't come to the top since there isn't any top. These techniques were looked
at primarily as just a pilot program on Skylab - that is, we just looked at
the principle to see if it would work. When we build space stations of the
future that are up there for many, many years, with the work of a shuttle or
space ship between earth and the space station or back, it is probable that
these manufacturing techniques are going to be commercially profitable. The
other asset that space has is an unlimited vacuum, and as you know, many different
metallurgical and manufacturing techniques depend on a vacuum in order for them
to operate, and with this more perfect vacuum than is obtainable on earth,
we'll be able to manfacture materials let's say of even increased purity and-
strength than we are presently able to do so here on earth.

Metals melting experiment was a good one in that it allowed us to take...not

us, but the scientists back on earth, the metallurgists back here on earth,
to take a look at different kinds of metals that were heated to the molten
state, and then allowed to cool at different rates. By allowing them to cool
at these different rates and raising them to very specialized temperature,
we could observe just what sort of separation or differentiation would take
place among the metals. You...using this technique, it's conceivable that
we will be able to invent some foam seals or we will be able to create some
high-purity products or specially separated products. It would be exceptionally
good for you to ...for use in electronic solid-state devices, such as TV sets,
radios and the like.

We were the first to take a look at the maneuvering units in space. We had
realized that some sort of device that could be put on an individual man
so that he could go outside and maybe inspect the space station or maybe
repair it, or assemble a large telescope in the future, or go over to a satellite
and work on it, was going to be desirable, just as it is desirable for man here
on earth to walk over as an individual to a car, or to a truck or to a house,
or anything else and work with it. These maneuvering units, although we just
looked at them inside the space station - it had the attendent advantage of
 BEAN
Page 13

being safe to do. We were able to do some very good evaluations of, for
example, the AMU, which is the astronaut maneuvering unit, back pack unit,
which fit on a man's back. He would do some of the chores that I mentioned
about. When you're using a hand-controlled device, much like the space ship,
just fly it around as a single space ship. We found that large space inside
the workshop, in Skylab, was a very definite advantage as far as evaluating
this sort of equipment. We also flew a foot control maneuvering unit. It
utilized a foot as a guiding technique. This turned out to be not as desirable
a method of control as we had hoped, however, it did allow us to take a look
at what man could do with his feet in the event that a future maneuvering ...
that in future maneuvering systems we wanted a combination hand and foot control
unit such as we have in an airplane now, or just a car, where you steer with
your hands and go fast or slow With your feet.

We found living aboard Skylab to be rather present. Sleeping - we slept on

the walls in sleeping bags that either allowed you to float inside them or
through the use of some sort of elastic over the front of you to kinda' squash
p _ you doom against the bed. Now it turned out in Apollo we discovered that
floating free to some crewmembers just wasn't a satisfactory way to sleep.
They liked the feel of the bed, such as enjoy here on earth. The covers
on us and our weight pushing down in bed, so for Skylab, we created these
elastic straps that we could pull tight, and we found by using them and some
days we'd like to pull them tight and be pushed against the bed, and some
days not so tight, and float rather free - we were able to get a good night
sleep consistently. Food aboard Skylab was a very good treat when compared
to earlier space missions. Probably the best feature was the fact that we
had the ability through a warming tray to put all of our food out and heat it
so that when you sat down to eat, you could eat a variety of foods all at
once. Back in Apollo, we had to hold potatoes in one hand in a little bag
and eat them with a spoon in the other. Here you could eat your potatoes
with one bite and the next bite you could have your steak and then maybe you
could have fruit or fruit juice, so it became more earth-like the fact that
we could eat them allowed us to have a variety of foods. Probably the favorite
of everybody's up there was ice cream and strawberries, and we'd have those
every second or third day and it made it real nice. We intended to save those

for after the evening meal and look out the Window while we ate them.
BEAN
Page 14

Personal hygiene was a very convenient sort of thing. We had a shower on

board for...to be used once a week. However, we found that althoughkthe
shower got us clean, it took quite a while to erect it and get it ready to
shower. First of all we found that you just didn't get very dirty up there.
The atmosphere was extremely clean, the temperature was a very nice 70, mid-70's
most of the time, and when you did get dirty, you were able to take a bath with
your washrag, using soap, washing your soap out and then using another rag with
just clear water and just rinsing yourself. Although it was a little more
trouble than stepping Sn the shower here on earth, it was...got you clean,
you didn't feel dirty, and we felt that we kept our hygiene under control.
We used a normal toothbrush and toothpaste and spit the toothpaste into a
rag or a towel at the end, and then...l'll back up a little. We used just
an earth toothpaste, a regular earth-like toothbrush, and some toothpaste
that would allow us to swallow the toothpaste, if need be, however, we found"
it was more convenient just to brush your teeth and spit the toothpaste in
a tissue and throw it away. We were able to keep our teeth just as clean
as we were here on earth. So as far as personal cleanliness and ability to
feel good, it was at least as good as what you enjoy at home, although it was
just a little bit more trouble to do it in confined quarters.

We found housekeeping to be not as difficult as here on earth. One reason was

that we had a planned place for every item, and we usually used it and returned
it to that spot. Another one was that I think most of the ladies would get a
kick out of was whatever dirt we made from food or other activities didn't
just fall on the floor Where it had to be swept up, it usually floated around
in the air and the air current would take it up to a screen intake to the fans,
so any time we wanted to clean up dust and dirt, we merely had to go to one
spot, and that was the area that sucked the air around the spacecraft, and using
a small vacuum cleaner, cleaned it up, so we could get our spacecraft very
shipshape, very clean in just a matter of 5 to lO minutes, which you certainly
can't do in an earth-based house. My guess is that in the future when women
go along on space missions, they're going to find that's one of the finest
parts of the whole mission. Our off-duty activities were...let me start again.

We had some excellent off-duty equipment and...we never were at a loss of

what to do with our off-duty activity time.

 Page 15

Probably the most enjoyable thing was to float over near the window and look
down at the earth going by. I don't think anyone throughout the Skylab program
ever tired of looking down and seeing what the earth looked like at 270 miles,
no matter how long the mission was. It was quite beautiful. One minute you'd
be looking down at New York City, and a bare 12 minutes later, you're looking
down at Paris, France, so there's always something to see. If you were over
the ocean, it was obvious that the clouds and waves and...were interesting
also. We had some tape recorders with some taped music that we played allmost
all the time - each person had his own tape recorder and music. We'd swap
around frequently, but we played that throughout the day when we were working
and when we were exercising. We had some games such as darts and cards, and
the like that we carried aboard, but we found that man just wasn't interested
in that sort of competitivesport. Looking out the window, we all had some
books, some reading and listening to music that took up most of our offduty
time.

We found that we could have quite a little bit of fun doing tricks and stunts
and flips and rolls that weren't possible here on earth. For example, you
k could do a simulated dive that you could do maybe one and a half flips here
on earth. In space, you could do a beautiful lO and a half or 15 and a half,
or whatever you wanted to do, so you could do circus tricks and you could
stand on hands, and you could...uh, you could do circus tricks, such as
swinging by your hands and flying across the workshop to gatch by your hands
on another part of the workshop. You could push off with your feet from the
floor area and land on top of the workshop with your feet and you came...you
became quite agile and that used to occupy our time, not so much as an individual
fun thing to do, but mostly when we were travelingaround the workshop to do
other things. From one end to the other, we might do two or three flips on the
way just for fun.

I think perhaps the most important improvement in long-duration spaceflight

would be the ability to have television and radio come up from the earth at
the same time it's happening on earth . By that, I mean it would be nice
to tune in a Houston TV station and have it presented to a TV set in the
space station. I don't think this is far from reality with the global
communications satellites that we have now. It's just a matter of hooking
 BEAN
Page 16

an antenna on the back of the space station and having it pointed at the
right satellite at the right time, so I Would expect in years to come, that
will be solved. One of the things that'we enjoyed very much on our mission
was talking with our wives via radio down to the ground. This is also important
in long-term space stations, and once again with the satellite tracking and
the ability to track satellites longer during the orbit, we were looking at
ground stations, it should be no trouble to call anybody on earth that you
want to from the space station at any time you want. I think those two
capabilities - television and ability to phone people and hear what they're
saying in real time instead of having it relayed would make living in space,
although pleasant in Skylab, even more pleasant in the future.

We were concerned when we found that we had a leak in the second set of
thrusters of our command module, our service module. However, we knew that "
the people down on the ground hadmore information aboutwhat probably caused
it and had more goodthinking going on down there as to what we were going to
have to do as a result of these leaks. They were much better able to predict
whether this was a problem that would spread to the other thrusters or was
isolated to these two. Because of this, we spent very little time trying to
solve the problem ourselves, but rather devoted our full time to doing
experiments and t_ying to do the daily activities on Skylab. We were worried
that maybe the decision on earth would be that we had to come home early, of
course, we didn't want that because we were only starting to operate as we had
been training for several years. When Dr. Kraft called up and indicated that
these problems were not expected to go to the other quads or occur in the other
quads and that it was elected to leave us up there, we were elated - that was
probably one of the high points of the mission, and of course, we felt very
good about his decision and we just pressed on and continued with the mission.
As it turned out, his prediction was exactly right.

The question "Why manned spaceflight is important" is a frequent one. I think

the key to it is the fact that there's no such thing as unmanned spaceflight.
It's where to you put the man. Do you put him up there where the action is
f_ or do you leave him down here on the ground and give him some road mode
instruments. Now we do know that there are some things that are done better
that way.
 Bean
Page 17

For example, the observation of weather on a long term. That's performed by

some automatic system that takes a picture of the weather and sends it back
down to earth where meteorologists can look at it on a minute-by-minute
basis. There are other things that it seems that the man's best utilized for.
For example, repairing equipment, mixing up materials that might be useful in
a manufacturing process, taking a look at the ground and trying to observe what...
let's say fault lines or geographic phenomena that don't show up so well to a
TV camera or to film. We know that man's eye has the ability to see things that
the camera does not see, and vice-versa. And if you just use that one sense
along, namely the sense of sight, you realize very rapidly that there are some
things that an unmanned satellite can do better than a man, and there's some
things that the man can do better than the satellite, so my guess is that we're
gonna' have a mix of these two forever after.

Skylab missions provided an imPortant link between Mercury, Gemini and Apollo
and let's say Shuttle or missions to Mars predominantly because they showed
that man could live and work in space for long periods and do as good a job
as he could do down here on earth. Now this was a big question because beyond
14 days we had no experience, and there was a school of thought that after so
many days, man would become sort of incapable of operations through some
physical changes and he just wouldn't be able to do the sorts of work that
he could _own here on earth. Now this didn't turn out to be true. In fact, it
turned out just to be the opposite, that as the missions went on, individuals
became more proficient in working than they did the first 14 days, and even at
the end of 84 days, we found that we could do any job in space that we could
do on earth provided that we had the right tools and equipment and training.

Space exploration is important to man for two big reasons, I think.

.........
One is
a spiritual one._Man, asweknow him, needs _ goal and a-_irection to be
fo_g_-_a_omething new in the future -S t,something different in the future,

'and of course, space explorationprovides this spiritual quality. It allows 'i

you to go to the unknown and find what's there, and hopefully by doing so, you're
_ing to jmRrgve your Io t/ ;n ......
the case of man since he crawled o[t
_- from the cave, and I guess that's why he crawled out of the cave. The second
one is - we know that we're using up many of the resources here on earth. We
BEAN
Page 18

know that population - population explosion is a problem. It's not inconceivable

that in years to come, centuries to come, man will fully populate places like
the moon and all the other planets of the solar system and go out among the
stars. I don't think anybody reallyi_knows what man's future is at the moment
but however we do know that what man's been capable of doing, he's always done,
and not only has he always done, he's always done it to his advantage, so I
think I see maybe space exploration as just the beginning of man being able
to go out to other areas of the universe, and once he's able to go out there,
be_s going to f_nd uses for it, he's going to go out there and live, he's going
topopulate, he's going to make a better life for himself and for the rest of
the people of the earth in doing so.

I think the main difference between Apollo and Skylab, is Apollo was a visit
somewhere - a trip somewhere. For two weeks, you got in the Co,and Module "
and the Lunar Module, and you went somewhere and you did something, and then
you returned to earth. So it took a little bit of the aura of a vacation or
a visft. Now Skylab was different, in that it actually went somewhere and
lined there. In our case, we stayed 59 days, and in the casedrof the last
mission, they stayed 84 days, and in that period of time, you shifted over
from just a visitor and a tourist to sort of a person that lives there. This
makes a lot of different in the way you live, the way you act, the things that
are acceptable to you, acceptable to you in terms of food, entertainment, and
so _ think these two types of explorations are the two that we're going to
see in the future, too. Actual living in space, in some cases, and actual
going somewhere and doing a job and returning in some cases.
DR. JOSEPH KERWIN
 Dr. Joseph Kerwin

"SKYLAB- THE VITAL.LINK

AV 519 -

Right. Well, we were down at the Cape on the 14th of May, counting down our
last day of normal living. In fact, NASA would have been pretty upset with
us if we hadn't shown up, but we were there and watched the launch. I was in
the top of the training building, as a matter of fact, and it was a beautiful
launch. Went back downstairs to get to a radio you know, so we could hear
the conversations of the flight controllers as they inserted the thing into
orbit because we all knew before that the first 40 minutes or so of Skylab's
lifetime was going to be critical. There were a lot of sequences that had to
happen in rapid-fire,one-two-threeorder, the attitude had to be controlled
right, the nose cone had to be jettisoned,the ATM had to deploy - that was
when we thought we might have trouble. We were all ready to go up there and
complete the deploymentof an ATM, if the motor failed or the wire broke, and
the solar panels had to come out and each shield had to come out and all those
good things had to happen, and uh, funny thing, it never occurred to us that
that sequence would get mickeyed up before we ever reached orbit on the doggone
-_ thing, and another funny thing, to me, rememberingit, was the - it wasn't
at all clear from the conversation on the flight control loop that we had a
really significant problem. There were temperatures not doing quite the things
temperatureswere supposed to do, and there had been a spike during the launch
and this and that, but it took them and certainly us a fewhours to even begin
to put the thing together, and so it was really mid-afternoonbefore we knew
we had a problem in that our own launch was in jeopardy. I remember at that
time saying "It's in trouble - let's go on up there as quick as we can and
nurse it...it probably needs some immediate attention. Let's not cancel the
launch." And the hours went by and evening came, and my wife was having a
party somewhere down the street with all of our launch guests and we were tossing
do_ a few, and I knew that they were wondering the same thing we were wondering -
are we going to go or are we not. And I called her along about 7:00 o'clock and
had to tell her we didn't know yet - we didn't - we hadn't gotten the word -
but in retrospect, the interestingthing is that Managementmade the decision
not to launch the crew. I'm not sure I would have made the same decision, but
it certainly was the correct one. In fact, they made the decision not to launch
_-_. us for five days and very shortly within the next dayor two, it was obvious
that five days wasn't enough to do this job-we were trying to do a year's work
 DR. KERWIN
Pa e 2

and as it turned out, about nine days and 23 hours to do it.

Well, okay. That was on Day 2, and I didn't have much to do with the
preparation for parasol deployment. I was working restowing the c_mand... \

I remember Pete and Paul being down in the workshop and coming back up for
air every 15 or 20 minutes, because it was pretty hot down there, and proceeding
With the placement of the box into the airlock and the rigging of the rods
and all that, and thenpretty soon they came up and said, "Have you got the
TV ready? We think we're ready to go." So I went up in the c_,_aandmodule
and shopped around for a good window, wound up using the pilot's rendezvous
w_ndow on the righthand side, which gave me a pretty good shot in between the
ATM structure and worksho_ structure,down to where the parasol was to be ,__

deployed. I couldn't see the airlock itself, but I coul_ee_t_is funny looking_1

_range thing all rolled up and skinny come pooching out v_

----of
{heVr_,and then uh /
Pete said okay, we're gonna' let her go and it just started to unfold and did //
a lot of this stuff - a lot of flopping and kind of settled halfway folded .J"
..a__and_a-_aygnfo]__ndi_rel_y_nfo----_ati--on toPete, and according
to what he said, he then commenced a series of maneuvers of pushing the thing
out and pulling it back, and kind of giving it a snap motion to try and flatten
i.tout, and everytime he did it, it would flatten out a little better and finally
it looked to us from that vantage point as though it was as good as it was gonna'
get, and there was nothing else to do from that point on except to wait for
some temperaturesto start falling, and from that, see howeffective this action
was going to be. We were still ready to go out EVA the following day and put
out the sail if we had to,.and we went to bed that night, not really knowing
what the plan was.

Fun thing about the so]ar wing deployment was really getting ready for it...
father than the operation itself...because we had a wonderful time with brown
rope and gray tape, really hand-making some of our own equipment to carry out
and trying to figure out how to restring 25-feet of aluminum pole and cable
cutters and all kinds of equipment in the airlock module, and get it outside
and.get it deployed in an orderly fashion, and Pete let me help a lot on that
but he insisted he tie all the knots himself, having had some sailor-type
 KERWIN
Page3

training, he didn't trust my surgical knots, so the actual deployment itself

kind of falls into three parts. The preparation therefor, getting outside the
hatch the first time, everything very familiar,no problem at all, deploying the
aluminum pole, getting the ropes all squared away and the thing out to its full
length, getting the cable cutters on the end and verifying their operation and
getting all that equipment up to the spot where it had to be used halfway around
the vehicle on the sunny side was pleasant and routine and no problem, but we
knew we really hadn't faced our big problem yet, and from my point of view, the
big problem was hooking the jaws of the cable cutter onto the aluminum strap that
was holding the wing down. Basically, a very simple operation - just maneuvering
the jaws, which had a spread of about an inch and a half or two inches at the
end of the 25-foot pole, hooking them over the scrap and pulling the rope to
tighten it, but the problem was that that long cable had quite a bit of mass
and quite a bit of inertia, and everytime I moved it, my feet would slide out
from under me and I'd start going in the opposite direction and there was just
no way. And Pete was down there trying to hold my feet, but he didntt have anything
. proper to stabilize himself and that didn't work. He tried to help me by holding
the pole and that didn't work, and we were getting hot and sweaty, and anxious
and Paul inside was saying, "Okay now, why don't you just take a rest and think
about this for a few minutes", and suddenly it dawned on me that I had a 6-foot
tether hooked to my chest and that there was a little eye down on the workshop
dome through which that tether would pass, and maybe if I hooked it from my
chest down through the eye and back to my chest, it would serve as kind of a
third leg. And so with Pete's help, I accomplished that, and then all of a
sudden it went from a very difficulttask to a complete piece of cake standing
and pushing both feet cn the rim of the workshop with the tether between _LY
legs acting as a stabilizingforce. As long as I kept some tension on it and
I was fixed in position beautifully - just as if I'd had a pair of dutch shoes
out there, so from that point, I could move that thing around anywhere I wanted
with great precisiow_, and using the help of Pete's 20-15 vision, it only took
us about three minutes to get it hooked on, and that wasPhase II and from that
point on, it was all routine, too. We had the avenue out to the panel now
because we had the 25-foot pole secured at that end with the jaws bitten part
way in. We had me hanging onto it at the near end and Pete used it as a handrail
or super highway to go down there, verify that the jaws were in place correctly
 KERWIN
Pa_e 4,

and hook one end of his brown rope on the panel itself that was to be used
in pulling it up once we cut the strap and all that took place very, very
quickly, and with a great deal of ease, and in fact, we got that all done by
the first sunset, and we spent the night out there under the ATM support trusses
_ust enjoying the view, and cooling Off, and when the following "morning" came
on, it was a simple matter. Pete went down and verified some connections, he
tried to hook a redundant or second hook into the panel, couldn't quite reach
the eye, but we didn't need it. We cut the jaws, several tugs but no real
problem, and then we verified that Pete's umbilical was out of the way and
be went ahead and got underneaththe rope and heaved on it, and I got underneath .
the rope and helped, and pretty soon there was a big crack and we went flying off
_.ndifferent directions, and by the time we had gotten ourselves stabilized
again and grabbed ahold of something to where we could look at the panel, why
i_twas fully, 100% deployed.

e_'_-ic re,asonf(}-r-a_
_61__kage of onboard medical experiments"i.,\
/$kylabwas that we were planning to quadruple the amount of time in-"space
by a human being, and we'd seen changes on some of the shorter missions in \

Apollo and in Gemini which were not dangereus in themselves, but which, if \
they continued to change, and I'm talking about things like a decrease in number )
/
Qf red cells in a guy's body, and a decrease in calcium in his bones, anda _
loss of weight. __ _-_

The reason for having a complete package of medical experiments - onboard on

Skylab, as opposed to the case in the earlier missions where we did our medical
stuff primarily before flight and then after flight, was that we were going to
fly much longer than we ever had before, We were going to quadruple the amount
of t_e of a human being in space - from 14 days to 56 d_ys, and as it turned
out, we did better than that - 84 days on the third flight, but there were
changes that we'd seen on the earlier flights, which were not dangerous in
themselves, but which if permitted to continue, and if they did continue, might
be dangerous and might compromise the individual'sability to survive or to

! , perform during re-entry or on the water or on the carrier afterwards. Things

J _ l_ke a.decrease in the number of red cells in your blood, decrease in amount
!
I of calcium in your bones, basically,weight - a loss in weight. We'd seen
 KERWIN
Page 5

weight losses of over I0 Ibs, if you multiplyt_b_fn,r- vn,,'voSn*

age Or experiments that we hoped would give us warnings at the time w, ile
!theguys were still in orbit and before'they'dcompleted the mission that maybe 1

things
and on weren't going
the other well
hand, if and
the we might consider
experiments an early
went well, mission
it would termination,
give us confidence #I
that we could press on to the full mission duration and that we weren't building /
!

ourselves a bridge to trouble, so this worked out very well. The actual changes/
that we saw inflight and the symptoms we felt and the whole ball of wa_'were /
Very much milder, much less dramatic,much less harmful than we had expected //
J

might be the case....... ---

We had about four major medical experiments that were performed inflight,
with many little side issues and add ons. The system we ex,
pected,t_ change _.\
thebodywasthecardiovasc.lar
syst . The elbloodve sel ,
the amount of blood in them and the way they operated, and so our number one
i

experiment to stress that system and see how it reacted to stress was called "
lower body negative pressuree.,_The'theoryhere is that ifan_individual sticks
_imself into a garbage can from feet up to the waist, seals his waist with
an i_pervious cloth seal and then sucks some of the air out of the garbage
can, the lower pressure in his legs causes the blood vessels to expand, leaves
more room in the blood vessels down there and actually results in the pulling
or stasis of a considerable amount of blood down in the legs...this is the
same thing that happens to a man when he stands upright in gravity for a
long period of time without moving his muscles. You get more and more blood -
tb_s Zs why people's ankles swell when they've been shopping for a day - and
this is why soldiers in a parade occasionally tend to become faint and pass out.
They pool so much blood down in their legs that there isn't enough left for
the heart to work withLand you see the pulse rate go up.an& the blood pressure
drop and the,. we didn t have gravity up their
tsO w_cg.uldn't stand-
&
a_nd the LBNP or lower body negative pressure, was a surrog_t_ a substitute
for gravity - a way to fake the body out, and we ran that at four-day intervals
throughout the mission, and from the very first time we ran it it was obvious
that there were indeed changes, and that there was ...this was a much tougher/
_-_ _ test inflight than it was on the ground, and we felt the change in pressure
_Luch more readily -_y6uY__o_nf_ort at a s--ooner
timethan...at a Sooner
 KERWIN
Page 6

time in the experiment and at a lower negative pressure. You felt the mailaise
andmaybe a little cold sweat on your palms and maybe a little dizziness and
once or twice during the mission there was a time when we felt that we might
faint - like the soldier in the parade ground - if we didn't stop the test,
and we did stop it early. Now looking back on that, what was going on was that
indeed the body had dumped a lot of fluid, fluid which it turns out is unnecessary
in zero-G, which on the ground is packed into your thighs and the calves of your
legs to counterbalancegravity pressures in the vessels. When you get up there
that fluid soaks back into the blood system and is eventuallyexcreted in the
urine, then when you suck blood down into the legs, there's room for a lot
_ore of it, and you pool maybe twice the amount of blood. I'm talking about
three or four pints of blood, sucked down and held in the leg by the negative

pressure where the heart can!t_et at it, so the symptoms are very much greater, ,_
/___b.@ encouraglng thlng was that these symp't_I_ _erepresent the very firs_ *_
_t:_e_e did the te_hey didn t get worse as time went _That was th

thing we were really interested in Z were we backing into trouble - were we -\

losing more blood or pooling more or in some way, was the system not respo_di_n_
t - the way_ould, and although LBNP was a tough test,It_wasn't an_tougher o__
_ay25 than it
was_on _--_h_ S the-data we really needed. _leE_re
were
other m a4_ordynamic tests or stress tests that we used todete__oL_jZ.conditio_
_j_flight_and tha__w_bi_T_rgOm_er_ .Th_srw_-a_dif_erent_--_-_.__.V_kind
of \
,_ress , this was an exercise stress - you didn t ta_e bJoo_-out of the systeI_,

__ u simply worked your heart and your muscles and your lungs to the maximum i
!#apacitythat you were able to work them on the ground to see whether they /
_ll played together in the absence of gravity the same way, and our experience
In that was completelydifferent from our lower body negative pressure, because /
there was simply no change at all and we found that our ability to exercise,
)ur_eart_s ability to move blood around the body, the cells and muscles abilit_
I
_o extract oxygen from it and all the processes that go into maximum exercise

_6_e_._fected_byzero-gravity._es, we had a little less blood

to work with, but it was enough to do the job and all of that went normally.
We used the bicycle not only of course for this experiment,which again we
did every four days, but we used it for exercise every day and we found that

we were able to exercise very well, and themere we exercised the better we
t.
KERWIN
P ;.

The third major experiment that we did was an experiment designed to test the
reactions of the vestibular system, which is your body's gyroscope system, in
weightlessness,and that was interesting. We didn't consider it quite as
critical in terms of go-no-go for mission duration as we did the other experiments.
It was the hardware involved - the hardware involved was a rotating cha_, like
a rotating barber chair only more sophisticated,and the things we did on the
chair were designed to test whether it was easier or harder for us to detect
rotation, and easier or harder for us to get motion sick as a result of rotation,
_P there, as _t is down on the ground. We were all very carefully calibrated
and tfienwe wear up, strapped ourselves into the chair, spun the thing like a
long-playing record and made head movements, which on the ground are guaranteed
to make you notion sick, and much to everyone'samazement,and this is true
across all three mission_, across all nine crewmen, once we had adapted to the
enyironment, five or six days into the mission, it's impossible to get motion
silckup there in that chair. Our threshold just went clear out of sight, and
_ couldn't even f_nd it, and that's very interesting because you know a number
oF the guys have gotten motion sick to one degree or another ib_ediately on
getting up _nto zero-G, and certainlyi_wewere all very much surprised to find
t_at once that little square wave to the system has been adapted to it, once
you're used to zero-G and your appetite returns and you're feeling pretty good,
you can forget motion sickness, because there's no way to make it happen.

Okay, the other medical experiments were also very important, but they were
more important from a standpoint of postflight analysis than they were of
infligfitgo - no-go - o_ of inflight (laughter). These other experiments were
_erymajor - one of them was the calcium balance experiment, and that was a
very major time consumer in flight because what it meant to us was that every-
thing we ate and everythingwe excreted had to be very carefully measured and
accounted for because what they were doing was measuring the total net intake
or output of calciu= and phosphorus and potassium and sodium and every other
darn thing so as to tell with great accuracy over a long period of time whether
our bones were getting thin or not - sometimes that's hard to tell on an x-ray
when _tts in the early stages, so it meant adhering to a vry strict diet,
_easuring any food that was uneaten, it meant measuring urine and feces on a
regular daily basis and making sure you did a good accurate job of it - also
 KERWIN
Page 8

everything you drank. We didn't get any data return from that during the
flight - the one thing we did get data return from during the flight was our
zero-gravity mass measurement device, our equivalent of the bathroom scales.
Everything ...every morning when we got up the first thing we had to do was
hop into the body mass measurement device, measure our weight and report that
to the ground, and it was also of a great deal of interest to us, and it was
delightful to see that after an initial period of rapid weight loss in the
first week of the mission, we lost very little weight from there on out as
long as we flew, and that was again true of all missions.

Okay, so we returned all these samples in the area of food and waste and
another set of samples that we returned for the first time from a flight
was blood. We had discoveredalong the way that it wasn't really that hard
to draw each other's blood -

Okay, in addition to the other samples that I've mentioned, we brought back
samples of blood from every crewman, we discoveredin preparation for Skylab
_ " that _t wasn't that difficult to draw each other's blood, giving the cre_n
a good deal of paramedical training anyway so that they could handle illness
or injury on the part of their crewmates,and we had for the first time a
_pability to centrifugethe blood or to freeze the blood so that it wouldn't
deteriorate so that it would make sense to bring blood samples home as a
- an inflight check on the blood levels of the hormones and minerals that we :
were interested in and were collecting in the urine and feces. It was a good
thing to do - it proved to be very easy to do.

Now let me talk for a minute about medical experimentsaside, what the symptoms
and feelings are that a crewman has when he_s weightlessand what affect, if
any, it has on his performance. I'll leave motion sickness go for now because
I think we've talked about it enough - it's a transient thing - if a guy is
going to get motion sick up there, he's over it in a few days now anyway -
so what...so once you've adapted to the environment,you know darn well you're
not in one-G - it's different. You have a constant feeling of fullness in the
head which you notice about one minute after you arrived in orbit, and it never
really goes away completely,you just get used to it. And when you look at
 KERIN
Page 9

your fellow crewman, you notice that he doesn't look the same as he looked on
the ground. His cheeks look fuller and thicker, fatter, and his eyes look a
little slantier, because the tissues around them are kind of pooched up -
you notice that the veins in his neck stand out - they're full of blood all
the time. He talks with a little bit of a nasal twang, if you really know his
voice. It's a little different from on the ground- probably since all these
_)_usclesand tissues are not being pulled down by gravity any more, they take
a little different shape and it changes his voice a little bit. Your posture
is different. If you relax up there, your arms _ind of float up and your
shoulders go up in the general direction of your ears and your legs kind of
bend halfway and sit out there in front of you. Your neck moves back a little
b_t and your back flattens up and you have to get used to that because it doesn't
feel right and I would continually findmyself trying to pull my arms down and
_tra_ghten out my back and read a book in my lap, but you just don't read -
donLt want to read a book in your lap down there - pretty soon your head stamts
to come up and your shoulders come up and you say to heck with it, and you read
the book out in front of you where it belongs. Minor annoyance. Something you
notice and then you get used to it, and then pretty soon you forget. Your
_ appetite is remarkablygood and that was one of the rather major surprises
of the mission. We had a mistaken impression that a guy didn't eat nearly
as _uch food _n weCghtlessnessas he does on the ground. Turns out this is
not true. Turns out that again once you're over that four or five day period
at the beginning, your appetite returns to normal and you eat everything they
giveyou, so you eat well, you sleep well, it's a little harder going to sleep,
probably because of this posture thing. Everybody is used to sleeping with his
body arranged in a certain way - on your back, on your side, with your hands
here or there, and you can't sleep that way up there because you compose yourself
for sleepand then you relax and assume that same old posture that I just talked
about. Once you get used to that and get used to how you want to snug yourself
_nto your sleeping bag, sleep is quite easy. The duration of it may be a
little short, but the quality of it is goodand you wake up pretty refreshed
in the morning. You can exercise well, no problem doing activity, no problem
thinking or planning or any of that stuff, and having talked about some of
tb_ th_ngs that feel different - the important thing to emphasize is that most
_-_ of the time you feel the same. Now that...nowthere's one other area that
I'd like to touch on - that really feels different than it does on the ground -
 KERWIN
Page lO

and that is your sense of up and down. Your sense of where things are with
respect to you. This does take a little time to get used to because with no
gravity, first of all, if your eyes are closed or if it's dark up there, you
have no idea where anything else is except your own body, and sometimes you're
not so sure about your hands and feet, which is a peculiar sensation. I
remember _aking up one night in the sleeping compartment and Houston was
calling on the radio and it was pitch black in there, and I knew that the
_ntercom box was two feet from the end of my nose, right straight in front of
me, and it took me a minuteto find it because I didn't know where I was in
relation to the bed or the ceiling or the floor or anything,and I had to
feel my way around this tiny little compartment until my finger hit the
transmit button and I said, "Oh, yeah - there it is", and once I had the
light on, it all goes away - once your eyes see something, then you relate
to it and you say whatever is above my head is up and whatever is below my
feet is down, doesn't matter whether it's the floor or the ceiling - and
in fact, if you stand there and have this nice sense of rightness that everything
_s in its place, and you turn 180 degrees and stand on your head, the whole world
I turns with you, and what was the ceiling now feels like the floor and you know
now that the chairs and tables are growing out of the ceiling. You wonder why
the designers built them this way, and all the lights are on the floor, and so
on. Your sense of relation to the outside world is completely different. It's
completely centered in your own body, and once you get used to this, it's kind
of pleasant to just play with it to look down the long axis of the workshop
headfirst,and it feels like you're looking up, then you rotate around and you
look at it between your feet and it looks like you're standing on the top of
a deep well and could jump down into it. That's the way it feels - moving
around in it is very easy, very delightful. I think it's like learning how
to ride a bike - it takes you a few days to get the reflexes down right and
then you can push off and do some somersaultsor twists or land with your feet
with the...in the right place everytime, not even worrying about it. Okay?

I_t_s(nterest_ng to speculate on what the outlook would be for the nation's

space program now...if we hadn't had a Skylab at all...or if we had attempted
to do the same kinds of experiments on a number of unmanned missions, or if
we hadn't been able to repair the Skylabwhen it had its little accident on
 KERWIN
Page II

• the first day, and to me, the differencebetween the thinking around the
office and around the agency between say January 1973,_hen we were in final
training, and April of 1974 when the whole thing was over and put to bed
is just enormous, and that that change in attitude and the facts that go to
make it up have almost paid for the program, never mind the tremendousdata
that we got from the solar physics experiments and the tremendous data that
gQt from the earth resources_experiments,and
the medical experimentsand
the surprising finds in the areas of materials processing. Just the fact that
now we know that we can fly a complex laboratoryand that we can utilize man
as a link in that laboratory,notjust because he's a scientificgenius and
can invent things on the spot and think beautiful thoughts, that, too, maybe.
But als_ because as a practical matter, it's very much simpler to take an
experiment that you nomnally do in a laboratory down on the ground with
tecBn!cians and scientists andpeople to run it, and take that thing and put
_t into a spacecraftand not have to redesign it, automate it, computerize "
it and program it to run through its thing over a period of days or weeks or

monthspbmut_a h,,m_nhaqd be.inglaid on it. That'_ensive _ it can be

) the thing, to fix it when it breaks,-_6ta_ it out and put a new one in, is )
(n many cases, not only the rewardingthing to do, but the cheap thin.gto d__o.J
Now we_ve got a very successful unmanned program going and I'm talking as an
advocate of man,,in flight, but it seems to me that the unmanned program is
clearly the way to go in at least two areas that I can think of off the top
of my head. One is exploring far out - other planets, down close to the sun,
clear out of the solar system hopefully where we can't send man because we
just haven't solved the problem yet. The other is in the area of gathering
_er_ _aluable repetitive data and doing things in orbit of a repetitive and
routine nature, where its cost effective to use a small spacecraft, a small,
specialized spacecraft - I'm talking about weather satellites, communication
satellites, navigation satellites, relaysatellites, all that sort of thing,
and a lot of the things we did on Skylab in an experimental way I think
will be done in a routine operationalway, surveying the earth and the oceans
and so on unmanned. But I think that when you get into things like manufac:
tur_ng, when you get into astronomy and solar physics, I don't think you're
_-_ going to find a cheaper way than to carry up the food, carry up the atmos-
phere, carry up the tape recorded music and whatever you need to make the guy
KERWIN
Page 12

happy and let him do the job because he's going to do it better than the
computers can, and the reason is that the human race does it that way on
the ground. AnythCng wedo manned on the ground, we probably ought to do
manned in orbit,
ASTRONAUT ED GIBSON
 Ed Gibson

s'SKYLAB- THE VITAL LINK" p.

AV 519
"l !
We had two additional types of exercise on our mission. The first was that
we exercised for a longer period of time.

On the third mission, we had two additional types of exercise. Different

than the previous flights. First, we went for about an hour an a half as
opposed to an hour for the second mission, and a half an hour for the first
mission, so in terms of cardiovascular conditioning, I thi_k we were in better
condition because of that additional length of time. Secondly, we took along a
device which Dr. Bill Thornton came up with which was the way to keep our legs
in better shape for walking and running. It was a device which we could essen-
tially duplicate walking and running the same way we do down here, and that I
think contributed substantially to us being in I think excellent shape when we
got back.

The two types of missions that we plan to fly in the future - both will depend
upon knowledge that we've gained in the medical areas in Skylab. First the
Shuttle flights, which are relatively short, will need to understand what
happened to man in the first week of flight. We had exceptionally good instru-
mentation on board to measure all the changes which do occur to the human when
he_s first up there. We know what to expect in the way of cardiovascular changes,
fluid shifts, and muscular deconditioning. Secondly, we hope in the future that
we'll have another long-range, long-duration space statioo_certainlyon our_

_A_ig_h-tg-ot
up to 84
days--_a_a-_)__hinkwe c_ng_'-quitea bit longer than that._
We understandwhat problems may crop up, but we're also greatly relieved thatI
that there were no significantproblems, and certainly we got a green light for )
going much further than 84 days. JC-I /_ . _ _, -_.,,__- -"

I think just to put an order of magnitude on the limit that we see now, it
would be on the order of a year. The only thing that would hold us back is
long-duration changes in the skeletal structure. That is, a small amount of
calcium loss multiplied over a long period of time - it may become significant
in some individuals.

._ Well, on our flight, we were fortunate enough to be able to first of all record
a solar flare from the very beginning all the way through the rise through the
 GIBSO_
Page 2

end. That's exceptionally important, because as an explosion takes place, you

have to observe the explosion itself and not the aftermath. So far, on all of
the flights, we've only been able to watch what happens after the energy is
released in the solar atmosphere. On ours, based upon the previous experience
oI the other crews, we were able to f_gure out what happens before a flare,
then be on target and gettTng data as the flare came up. For us, that was
most exciting, and most useful for understanding these fairly unknown things
Whilch do occur in the solar atmosphere. The other which was very interesting
to us was the observation of a coronal transient which is an exceptionally
large amount of material thrown out of the solar atmosphere and eventually got
into the solar wind and came back, some of it reaching the ionosphere of the
earth. We were able to make this observation because of the close coordination
betweem the ground and the people on board. One of the observatories out in
Hawaii noticed a prominence lifting off the solar wind, and within a matter
of minutes, that information was up to us and we were able to observe it.

One of the advantages we had being on the last mission is that we were able
to use the experience of the p_evious crews in order to gather the solar data
J iN a l_ttle bit better way. Espec_ally _n the area of flare observation.
Ow_n Garriott, on the previous flight, had come up with a number of items which
were precursors to flares, or those things which he thought occurred before a
flare actually began. Weuse that information in order to observe a flare from
the very beginning all the way through the rise into the tail-off or death of
the flare.

Well, for us, the Comet observationswere in a sense a disappointment,but in

another sense, quite beautiful. Disappointmentprimarily because the intensity
was quite a bit lower than we had anticipated, but other than that, the comet
was quite beautiful when we saw it close to the sun. Our first sighting of
it was when we were out EVA. I had just finished up one task, and we were
very close to sunset. I Still had my dark visor down, and I looked up and
there was the comet. I saw it through the visor, even with my eyes not dark-
adapted, (It was very bright, and most notable was the sunward spike. The
spike w_ich_as in the opposite direction of the tail - very sharp and pointed
towards the sun The color was yellow. In subsequent days, this spike became
smaller, the color went finally to a yellow-orange, eventually the tail became
 GIBSON
Page 3

very long, and it changed to a violet tail, a very mottled appearance. Now
we were able to observe it visually, as l've described, and put these observa-
tions on to drawings, sent them down on television and secondly, we made lots
of observations with the ATM equipment. 'We used the coronagraph especially,
and I think they came back with some pretty good observations of how the tail
changed, how the whole configuration of the comet changed as it swept around
the sun. We did take observations with some of the other equipment onboard
to understand the spectra of the comet, try to understand the composition. LAs
far as I know, we did not get the intensity we anticipated, but I think the
ways in which their observations were carried out werequite successful.

Well, the observation of Kohoutek offered an unprecedented opportunity. First

comets are important to science because we are able to obs_rvewha--h_ think is
priordal matter, that is, matter which has been around since the birth of the
solar sys£em, if the comet came from the solar system, or if it came from
outside the solar system, then it's an opportunity to observe something which
was not created with our solar system, but in the regular stellar scheme of
things. One opportunity we had with Kohoutek was that we found out about it
very far in advance - almost a year in advance - so that we could martial a
lot of forces in the observation. We were able to get ground observatories
and the Skylab, with all the full capabilities from both, observing the comet
at the same time. One of the opportunities we had in the observation of
comet Khoutek came because Dr. Kohoutek was able to observe the comet and
identify it at...very early. This allowed us to martial a lot of forces on
the ground and in Skylab to make the observation. As a matter of fact, when
we were making the observations, we were able to talk to Dr. Kohoutek on the
time at which he was at Johnson Spacecraft Center and tell him what we had seen
visually and how the observations were progressing.

The Skylab solar observations have been important and will continue to be
important to science, primarily in two areas. First, the sun is our nearest
star, and in terms of understanding all of the stars and our primary energy
source, the sun - this is an unparalleled opportunity to do thEngs on Skylab
because of the combination of being above the earth's atmosphere, having
_" instruments with unique capabilities, as well as having trained observers
operating those instruments, we were able to accomplish things that have not
GIBSON
Page 4

been able to have been done up to this time. I think we made a fairly large
step forward in understanding the sun - not just to understanding the stars
or the sun has proven to be important, but also the sun turns out to be a giant
astrophysical laboratory. It is made up of plasma - that's high-temperature gases
which we plan to use down here for many schemes in energy production, and we
can use the sun as a laboratory to better understand how plasmas are affected
by electromagnetic fields, how they're moved, what their properties are.

Now the advantage of being up above the earth's atmosphere is that it's two-fold.
First, and maybe one which is most obvious to people, is that we're able to
obserye the atmosphereof the sun without any hindrancebecause of a scattering
of atmosphere around the spacecraft. Down here, we can only see the atmosphere
of the sun called the corona, during times of an eclipse - that's time at which
the moon covers up the sun. Now up there, we're able to cover the sun with an
occulting disk and observe that atmosphere of the corona any time that we like.
As a matter of fact, we observed it for almost nine months straight during
Skylab and learned a lot about how it changes with time. Something it is just
not possible to do down here. Secndly...we'llcut.

Secondly, most of the very interesting effects on the sun occur in high energy
ranges. The signature of these ranges occur in the ultraviolet and x-ray ranges
of spectrum rather than visible. By that, I mean light which we see down here
is the same frequency light which our eyes are able to sense. On the other hand,
the ultraviolet and x-rays are stopped by our atmosphere and the only way to
observe them is to get above our atmosphere and get an undistorted look.

Sleeping turned out not to be a problem in Skylab. As a matter of fact, it

was quite enjoyable. I found that the restraint devices that we had made it
fairly easy to sleep, i_yfirst night up there, I was so darn tired that I
dropped off right away and had no problem. One experiment which I did do however,
was to try to sleep floating completely free. I'd go out at night and float
around in the orbital workshop, which is quite a large volume, and find that I
womld slowly mash into one wall, and maybe five minutes later, slowly mash into
another wall, and I was never able to completelyget a sound sleep. I'd go for
maybe a half an hour at a time, but never a complete night's sleep, but it was
a real experience.
 GIBSON
Page 5

I tried at some times to remain completely stationary to get a little bit away
from a wall and to remain fixed, but it turned out that we had an airflow in
there where every object which was out in the air finally got sucked up into
one of the screens in the top of the workshop, and sure enough, every morning
I'd go to sleep, I'd find myself the next morning up there against the screen,
just like everything else that was loose in the workshop.

Well, on our flight, we didn't really have time for...much time for off-duty
activity until the second half of the mission. But what I did enjoy most was
looking out the window. For us, that was both useful and enjoyable. We found
that we got much more proficient as time went on in the area of visual observa-
tion, and when we weren't doing that, I enjoyed body acrobatics in zero gravity.
I think I finally got up to a 10½ gainer in the workshop. It was quite enjoy-
able.

We were up there for a number of holidays - as a matter of fact, on both

Thanksgiving and Christmas, we were working, were outside EVA on both of those
t days. After our last EVA on Christmas, we come back inside and had a little bit
of time to celebrate around our homemade Christmas tree. We had a star on the
top which resembed a comet; we made the Christmas tree out of some food cans
which...food can retainers which we had enough of while we were up there, and
in general, it wasn't quite what we had at home, but it was still Christ_s.
We had some gifts on board which we did not know about until they finally called
us up on Christmas day and told us they were all in the command module, and all
three of us just about got wedged in the hatch at the same time trying to get
to them. Each one of the wives had packed away a small gift. Matter of fact,
I have mine here - a small Japanese emblem, a tie clip, it says "Love" from
my wife.

In general, I think the EVA's went along quite smoothly, primarily because
we bad some excellent training in that area. We worked down at the Marshall
Spaceflight Center neutral buoyance tank, I think we all learned to become
very familiar with the EVA surroundings, so that when finally we did get out
there, and not only the film retrieval became almost mundane, but the additional
_, tasks which all came up on each one of the flights became of a secondary nature
in terms of working them out. On our flight, we had to fix an antenna for the
 GIBSON
Page 6
>

earth resources experiment package. It took us a long time. Bill and I were
out there for about 6½ hours. One of the primary difficulties in that EVA was
that we had to undo some screws and we could only turn them around a quarter
of a turn each time we attacked, and it took a long time. We got some pretty
sore fingers out of it, but we got the job done. I think the familiarity with
the EVA goes back to the neutral buoyancy, and there was only one area in which
_was surprised. That was while we were out on the sun end of the space station,
part away from the major bulk of the space station. Now I go out and lean beck
so that I was almost completely free - I'd find that then I had the feeling that
it was just me and the ground, 270 miles down. I never had a sensation of falling .
in a spacecraft or in an airplane except for that one moment and for me that was
rather exhilarating.

Of course, the view when you're out there is spectacular. When you're inside,
you've just got a little window to look through. When you're out there, you've
got a 360 degrees worth of good view. It's a great outdoors, and you really
appreciate it.

Well, the advantageswhich manned spaceflightoffers are In the area of repair

iand maintenance, which we've demonstrated time and time again on Skylab.
z As
a matter of fact, the whole Skylab series of flights would have been a failure
had it not been for the ability of the first crew to repair the space station./
Now over and above repair maintenance comes a primary thing in my mind to use
man for and that's judgment. In many cases, in a solar observation,in the
observationsof the earth, you don't know beforehandexactly what you're looking
for, when you're going to see a given phenomena,and what you...and exactly
what youtr_ going to see. You use man up there to best utilize the instruments
to get tbe best data hck. I think this will in the future will be the major
selling point of a man onboard also. In the shuttle, we'll be taking up
people who are scientists,the-best in their given field, and they're gonna'
be there because they can exert judgment.

Skylab turns out to be a very important link in all of the programs which we've
- had in manned spaceflight,- in the Apollo program, we had what I consider very
_mportant aspect - it was a focal point for building a manned spaceflight
capability. Certainly, we got the international prestige and we got some very
GIBSON
Page 7

good science out of exploring the moon, but it was a focal point. We got the
hardware, we got the capability to get up there. In Skylab, we asked how can
you best utilize man and what are his limitations. Certainly,long-duration,
84 days, is in no way a limitation on man, and we discovered the best way to
utilize him is to let him exercise his judgment in taking data, repair mainten-
ance also turned out to be a very important thing. I think in the future, we'll
see both of those areas emphasized. We'll find man up there repairing, maintain-
ing existing spacecraft in orbit. We'll also find a specialist being up there,
exerting judgment in taking data in his own particular area, whether it be earth
Observations,stellar observations,solar observations,or medical observations.

One realization we had while we were up there was that we were able to look down
at all the homelands of the people and almost the whole inhabited planet, and we
looked back at our own United States, and we realized that there's something -
rather unique and very special right down here. We couldn't see it in the land,
but we could tell that we had the first real good space station in earth orbit.
_e _ere the f_rst people to go to the moon, and it gave us the realizationthat
there was a certain spirit and capabilitiesright down there within the American
people which made it all possible. Something we have not seen elsewhere in the
world. That gave us an appreciation for our own country, the people in it, and
made us very proud to be apart of it. Now manned spaceflight is to me just an
extension of man's desire to explore, as well as man's desire to utilize what

he's obtained as ability. _First, we have explored the moon, and we've n_
gone to explore near space, and finally we're going to explore the solar system.
All of this
- man plays an integral part._ Over and above just the desire to use
space and explore it, I think the country needs somethingwhich is outside of its
own internal needs and comforts. Mankind and man are really one and the same,
the same way a man is not too comfortable, uh too useful, if he spends his full
time worrying about his own internal needs and comforts. Mankin_ in the same
way _s not productilve_
Cs not useful, is not going forward if he expends his
full energies concerning himself with internal needs and comforts. We need things
which broaden our scope, our external to ourselves, in order to really fulfill
our own destiny and the way in which we're just made and put together. You
may want to cut...