Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After spending a record 28 days 50 minutes in space, Skylab Astronauts Pete Conrad, Joe Kerwin and Paul Weitz came home last week. They made a perfect splashdown in the Pacific some 830 miles southwest of San Diego. As the Apollo command ship bobbed gently in the rolling seas 6½ miles off the bow of the recovery ship Ticonderoga, Conrad radioed a message: "Everybody here is in super shape." Indeed, it was a flawless finish to a successful mission that only four weeks earlier had seemed doomed to failure...
...friends, Astronaut Charles ("Pete") Conrad Jr. is known as "Mr. Fixit." During his youth, his mother recalls, he spent hours with Erector sets, model planes and finally cars and motorcycles. While in quarantine after his Apollo 12 moon-landing, he assembled a complex stereo system. Last week the 43-year-old Navy captain continued to live up to his reputation as Houston's No. 1 amateur mechanic. During a daring and dangerous four-hour walk in space-the longest ever attempted-he and Fellow Astronaut Joseph Kerwin freed Skylab's jammed solar wing, thus probably saving the mission...
They pointed out that the loss of only one more battery might 1) force the shutdown of the orbital workshop, 2) require the halt of all major experiments -including important biomedical tests -and 3) compel the astronauts to retreat to the cramped quarters of the Apollo command ship...
Soon after the astronauts had rendezvoused with Skylab last month, Astronaut Paul Weitz-leaning out of the Apollo command module-had attempted to pull the jammed wing out with a long-handled tool that resembled a boat hook. But a 2-ft.-long scrap of aluminum from the ripped shield was so tightly wrapped around the bottom of the wing that it would not extend...
...heard criticism of the plan concerns the de-emphasis of basic research. "It's ridiculous to compare the conquest of cancer with putting a man on the moon,"* says Dr. Robert Good, director of Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York City. "At the time the Apollo project was initiated, we knew all the basic information we had to know in order to go to the moon. We simply do not have that information about cancer...