I am one of hundreds that was privileged and proud to fly in the American space program. I was the Science Pilot on the last Skylab space station mission, the 84 day flight of Skylab III.

LIFTOFF

Liftoff is an exciting time, and any crewperson who is not excited, doesn’t really understand what’s about to happen.

One crisp cool morning, you take a ride in a van with some of your friends out to a 37-story building, just as you’ve done many times before. It’s all so familiar. You take an elevator to the top floor of the building, walk to the end a long hallway, and wait to enter a small room.

As you lean against the structure, you feel it popping and creaking and groaning under the weight and frigid temperatures of a million pounds of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen poised in the belly of the booster. You see lights blinking, computers flashing, and gases venting and you realize that today, finally, this building’s come alive!

You try to erase the smile from your face as you slip into that small room, lie in a couch, and stare at a very familiar scene. After a few hours, one of your friends outside starts counting backwards from ten, you hear a tremendous sucking sound as propellants are ripped into combustion chambers. Then, far below and lasting less than a second, you feel eight engines ignite in a ripple fire, and you creep off the pad. The front of your mind is intently focused on gauges and potential abort procedures even as a whisper seeps up from the back of your mind, “Your basement just exploded.”

The first stage is noisy and rough, like a high-speed train with square wheels. At about one minute into the flight, you go through the speed of sound and also reach the maximum of the aerodynamic forces and turbulence. The vibration becomes severe; you feel like a fly glued to a paint shaker. Then it smoothes out a little until staging at two minutes, which jolts you like a head-on crash quickly followed by a sharp impact from the rear.

In contrast, the second stage resembles a long, smooth elevator ride that accelerates ever faster as the mass of the propellants burn away. Eventually, you weigh five times your normal weight, which is not bad because your heart is at the same elevation as your head. But it’s hard to lift a hand, and you notice your cheeks and ears sliding towards the back of your head.

Then, at a little over eight minutes, the engines cut off— sharply! Immediately, everything floats. Your spacecraft, which they worked hard to keep clean at the Cape, fills up with dirt and debris that floats up from hiding places on the floor. In short order, the air conditioning cleans it all up.

Outside you see the curved horizon and the coast of Florida receding. “Hey, this is the best simulation yet!” You look back in at the gages and throw a few switches to get ready for the rendezvous with the Space Station. In just a few minutes, when you glance out again you see Italy going by and understand what it’s like to travel at five miles a second.

Soon... the window will be filled with Skylab.

LIVING IN SPACE

Skylab was damaged goods before anyone ever reached it. One solar panel was ripped off during launch and now lies at the bottom of the Atlantic leaving Skylab looking like a one-winged bird. The micro-meteoroid shield, which also provided thermal protection, was also ripped off. Thus, when the first crew arrived, they were greeted with an inside temperature of about 140^oF. With a chuckle we told them not to worry because it was a dry heat. Nonetheless, they erected an awning that brought the temperature down to an acceptable level. They also fixed the one remaining solar panel that brought the power up to an acceptable level. Alongside the HST, I believe that it was the best repair work ever performed in orbit.

Skylab was large, about the size of a three-bedroom home (14,000 cubic feet). The diameter of one module was 22 feet and one straight line unobstructed path was over 60 feet in length. It was so large, in fact, that my two crewmates actually lost me one morning. I was down in one compartment behind a large freezer trying to locate some old procedures where the previous crew had stowed them. They checked that the Command Module, our ride home, was still docked to the station. No, I hadn’t left by myself. Eventually, I drifted back into view.

The Earth scenes that continuously came over the horizon proved to be addictive. After a few weeks, we each could tell what part of the Earth we were over not by time, map or land mass outline but rather by the colors, patterns and textures of land, sea and clouds. Earth became known like the back of our hands.

Living and working in zero gravity also became addictive. Once we accepted that everything had to be restrained, and it became a habit, the 3-D freedom became enjoyable and useful. One night while looking out a window, I felt the sensation that the space station had a heart. That is, the structure that I was lightly holding onto with my fingertips pulsed at a rate of about 50 beats a minute. When I gripped harder, the sensation ceased. I smiled as I realized that it was the blood pulsing in my arm and fingertips that gave me this sensation. I learned later that it is called the ballistocardiographic effect.

Meals were handled a bit differently in zero gravity than on Earth. All drinking fluids had to be in closed containers and extracted through spigots. Meats had to be cut with planning and care to ensure they did not meander away. And soups came out of a container as jiggling spheres on the end of a spoon (not the time to sneeze).

The shower worked as well as we could have expected. It took place in a three-foot diameter, six-foot high enclosure. The water heater was limited in volume so that it was somewhat like taking a shower a Windex bottle. What water there was did not run off but pooled on our skin. Thus, a few strong shakes like a dog were used to shed most of the water before reaching out for a towel.

In the lavatory, air flow replaced gravity, which worked well. However, there was a mistake that any crewman would make only once: forgetting to turn on the flow.

In addition to the scientific and technical that data was returned, we learned a great deal about the long-duration reliability of space station systems and how to best utilize and support humans in long-term work environments, which are actually more like those on Earth than the highly planned and structured operations in critical flight regimes such as liftoff and re-entry. Although sometimes painful, the crew and the ground control team learned that longer missions should not be run like time-critical operations; i.e., a continuous flow of detailed instructions on what, when and how to perform every minute of the mission proved not only to be psychology unacceptable but also counterproductive. People down here do not work that way for very long; neither should people in space. Specification of what should be done at a particular time or orbital ephemeris and a prioritized shopping list of other required tasks provided for a more productive work environment. We all learned these hard lessons together.

In the late seventies there was an effort to use the Shuttle to save Skylab and perhaps put it back into limited use. However, the Shuttle was late in its development and Skylab re-entered earlier than expected. The abnormally high solar activity heated and expanded our atmosphere slightly, which increased the drag on the station and brought it down before a Shuttle could launch, rendezvous with it, and boost it to a higher orbit.

Although it might not appear so based on its all metal surfaces, Skylab was a comfortable home for sure. I would've been content to live there for many years, if I had friends and family along and maybe... a good pizza delivery.

SPACEWALKS   

The discussion above left us working inside the Skylab space station. The real challenge and enjoyment, however, comes when we go outside.

Learning to Walk

Just like a baby taking its first steps, we astronauts had to learn to walk in space. It was frustrating. We would float away from our work on or our work would float away from us. How would we ever tie everything down and get the job done in this foreign environment?

After a few frustrating spacewalks in the Gemini Program, the answer was developed. It was discovered that if we went underwater in our pressure suits and had weights put on us so that we would not float up or down or rotate, it was almost like floating in space. In this state of neutral buoyancy, the restraints and procedures could be developed that would be effective on spacewalks. After a few flights where neutral buoyancy training was used, we concluded that if we could do it in a water tank, we could do it in space.

Skylab had many planned and unplanned tasks that had to be performed on spacewalks. In fact, the spacewalks performed on the first manned mission did, in fact, save our Skylab space station and made it useable after it was crippled by major failures during launch.

On the last mission, my mission, we performed four space walks with a few lasting 6 1/2 hours. Dr. Wernher von Braun, the Director of Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, understood the lessons of Gemini and had a training facility ready for us as we started developing the spacewalks required by Skylab. It worked!

Walking

Three times I had the opportunity to go into the “great outdoors". When you’re out there, it’s a silent world, except for the whispers of your own breath. You feel totally alone, like the world below doesn’t even know you’re there. But then, you think of the many people down in mission control that monitor everything on the station, including your every breath, word, and heartbeat, and you realize that, even way up there, you’re being supported in the most extensive way possible.

But what IS it like? Let’s go up to the top of a tall building and look out. It’s pleasant and relaxing. But now, let's open the window and take you out to the end of a long spring board, where Hulk Hogan grabs you by your ankles and holds you head down. Now, "intellectually," you know you'll never fall. And, even though you're at the same height as you were inside, you have to admit . . . it feels a bit different.

On a space walk, you'll have that same feeling, just more of it. Head down, your glide over Earth at a very serene five miles a second. And the laws of Sir Isaac Newton give you full "intellectual confidence" that you're up there to stay! But when you move away from the station, look straight down at Earth 300 miles below, and feel or see nothing else around you ¾ a whisper seeps up from the back of your mind, "Suppose that Newton guy . . . was just a little bit wrong?"

You wipe the smile off your face and get back to work.

RE-ENTRY AND LANDING

We returned home from Skylab in our Command and Service, which is like the one you might have seen in the Apollo 13 movie, although the side of ours was not blown out by an exploding oxygen tank.

What would you experience if you went along for the ride?

First, you undock from the Space Station, fire the big engine on the back of the Service Module to slow up just slightly, separate the command module, and glide down towards re-entry. At first, re-entry is like being inside a soft-violet neon tube whose brightness gradually increases. Eventually the glow progresses to a white hot flame, the G’s and turbulence build, and it’s more like being inside a vibrating blast furnace on a centrifuge.

Eventually you find yourself hanging on 3 good chutes, and you know you are almost back home. You also know you are back to your normal weight, even though you feel 3 times heavier.

You splash down right on target two miles from the carrier. The sea is clam with no wind; however, you still end up in what NASA calls, Stable Two. That means you’re hanging upside-down in the straps bobbing up and down on the ocean in a closed damp cabin with the heat of re-entry soaking back in — the most uncomfortable part of the whole flight. In a few minutes, you inflate three air bags and pop upright.

Once back on the carrier deck, part of you feels a little depressed. No matter how hard you push off, you can no longer float. And no matter where you go, you’re painfully aware that once again you have to haul along massive amounts of meat and bone. Rolling over at night becomes a real engineering challenge.

And there’s another disappointment to deal with. Without gravity in space, each of your vertebrae expands a bit and you become about two inches taller. Hey, this is great. Send me up again, and let me grow another two inches! But your new height is short-lived as soon as gravity gets you back into its clutches again.

We were proud of what the Skylab III team had accomplished. Besides all of the scientific and technical data returned, we had set a world record of 84 days in space. As an American record, it lasted for 21 years, which greatly disappointed us because it should have been broken much sooner.

Whether we look at the challenges and accomplishments of the initial crew’s repair work or the results from the onboard solar physics observatory, earth observations platform, medical experiments and most corollary experiments, Skylab was an unqualified success.