Word: apollos
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...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...
...renewed crisis occurred after the astronauts thought they had their electrical problems well in hand. Power available from the four working windmill-shaped solar wings atop Skylab's telescope mount, and from fuel cells in the adjoining Apollo command module, was only about half what scientists had considered necessary for the mission. But by prudent rationing (turning off unnecessary lights, curtailing some experiments), the astronauts were able to perform most of their scheduled tasks. When they flipped Skylab over to begin earth-surveying photography with six high-resolution cameras, the functioning solar panels were turned away from...
...temperatures to erect an umbrella-like sunshade over the area where Skylab had lost its micrometeoroid and thermal shielding. The makeshift solution worked. Within a few days, temperatures in the workshop dropped to the low 80s and the astronauts, who had been spending most of their time aboard the Apollo command module, could take up residence in Skylab...
...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...