Word: astronautical
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...experiments on the Air Force nurses shed no new light on a major medical mystery of the space age, which was described last week by Physician-Astronaut Joseph Kerwin: loss of 6% to 20% of the body's red blood cells in space and a delay in replacing them after returning to earth. "The plasma starts going immediately,"e; Kerwin told the American Academy of Pediatrics in Chicago, "and the red blood cells follow." Kerwin, who was responsible for medically monitoring his mates on Skylab 1, also found that loss of blood fluid-and muscle tissue-was so great...
...welcome was so warm that about the only thing missing was balalaika music. Astronaut Tom Stafford greeted the Soviet visitors to the Johnson Space Center in his newly acquired (albeit broken) Russian. Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov-who in 1965 became the first man to walk in space-promptly returned the linguistic compliment. Asked whether he anticipated any language difficulties when Stafford's Apollo spacecraft and his Soyuz rendezvous and dock in earth orbit in 1975, Leonov broke into a broad grin and said: "No problem English...
Like their predecessors in space, the Skylab astronauts did experience some weakening of their heart and other muscles, caused by 28 days of weightlessness. While most of the Apollo astronauts recovered their strength about 48 hours after their trips to the moon (which averaged about eleven days), the Skylab crew-notably Physician-Astronaut Kerwin -took a few days longer. But doctors said that the delay was expectable. "They are in better condition than we had hoped for," reported Cardiologist Robert L. Johnson...
Effects of Zero-G. The medical concern was not unwarranted. All three astronauts were unsteady as they emerged from the spacecraft, and Astronaut-Physician Kerwin needed a slight assist as the three Navymen walked to a waiting mobile medical lab. Then, as the carrier steamed to San Diego, doctors began an intense, six-hour examination aimed at answering many questions relating to the prolonged flight. For example, had there been irreversible damage to the astronauts' cardiovascular systems or excessive loss of calcium from their bones...
...high temperatures in the orbital workshop section (caused by the loss of its outer shielding) also ruptured two-thirds of Skylab's toothpaste tubes, as well as all of the containers of hand cream, stocked to lubricate the skin in the spacecraft's dry atmosphere. The astronauts could console themselves with once-a-week showers, but pleasant as the bathing was, it was also very taxing. Water tended to cling firmly to the body and to the shower compartment's walls. As a result, Kerwin said, "it takes forever to dry both one's self...