Skylab 1973: Repairing the Workshop and Living in Weightlessness

Skylab, a working laboratory and man's first home in space, lifted off on May 14, 1973, to be occupied by three teams of astronauts in three record-breaking missions. About 60 seconds into the flight, the meteorite shield ripped off, creating an overheating problem in the workshop.

A damaged workshop

Over the following ten days, NASA centers and contractors worked on ways to rig a temporary or permanent heat shield. Crews tested the proposed fixes in a water tank at Marshall. The first crew launched on May 25 with three potential ways of covering the workshop, two of them shaded from the Sun.

About seven and a half hours after liftoff, as they rendezvoused with the workshop, the crew saw the extent of the damage. One solar wing had completely left the vehicle, and the gold foil normally beneath the heat shield and meteorite shield was exposed to sunlight and had darkened considerably. On the other side, a small metal strap that had torn off the shield had jammed the remaining solar wing.

Repair by the crew

Two astronauts went into the workshop and installed a canister containing a parasol in a scientific airlock. The parasol unfolded partly, flapping, and was deployed as best the crew could. It worked well for the rest of the mission, and by about day four or five the environment was no longer uncomfortable. With the solar wing still jammed, the station had about half its intended electrical capability. When one astronaut pulled on the jammed panel, it let go suddenly and he was thrown into space on the end of a tether; when he straightened out, the wing was deployed. A crewman said the whole series of flights would have been a failure without the first crew's repair.

Living in weightlessness

Skylab was planned to quadruple human time in space from 14 days to 56 days, and the third flight reached 184 days. Lower body negative pressure, a substitute for gravity, was used at four-day intervals to stress the cardiovascular system. Its symptoms appeared the first time and did not worsen. A bicycle ergometer showed that exercise capacity was unaffected by zero gravity, and a rotating chair showed that after a few days the crew could rotate almost all day without motion sickness. The third crew extended daily exercise from one hour to an hour and a half and, one crewman believed, came back in better condition than any other crew.

The Sun, a comet and the Earth

Skylab crews recorded a solar flare from its beginning to its end and saw an eruptive prominence casting an expanding gas bubble through the corona at about 300 miles per second. They observed Comet Kohoutek, noting a sunward spike opposite the tail. The Earth Resources Experiments Package, with a battery of six cameras aimed at the same spot, photographed fault structures in Southern California, Baja California and New Zealand, the Falkland current's plankton bloom, drought in Central Africa and pollution in the Great Lakes.

Daily life and the end of operations

Crews described moving in the "Peter Pan mode", eating heated meals from a warming tray, with ice cream and strawberries as favorites, and sleeping in sleeping-bag-like devices with straps. In early February 1974 the third crew retrieved film, tapes and samples for the last time. Solar physicists faced about a hundred thousand photographs of the Sun to analyze.