Word: conrad
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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...
...first space station that they have had little time to consider one of the most important questions of their 28-day mission: What are the everyday problems of living and working in space over prolonged periods of time? Last week, as Skylab's troubles finally subsided, Astronauts Pete Conrad, Joe Kerwin and Paul Weitz began to verify some old answers and provide some new ones...
...tried to eat, for instance, they found that spoons fly off at the slightest touch and salt grains ricochet everywhere; food bags break, scattering their contents, and slices of bread float frustratingly out of reach. Even when they dug into some soft canned tomatoes, the astronauts created a mess; Conrad noted that he was "flinging tomatoes all over the place." Indeed, they had to spend up to 90 minutes each day on simple housekeeping chores...
Otherwise, the astronauts had no trouble dozing. "You can sleep on your back, on your side, on your stomach," explained Conrad. Moving about was effortless in zero-G. "All you have to do is to aim and take off," said Conrad...
While pedaling the bicycle exercising machine in the hot (88° F.) orbital workshop, Conrad worked so hard that his heart skipped some beats. NASA doctors were not worried by the palpitations, which they said could have also occurred on the ground. But they did express concern about another physical effect. In zero-G the heart tends to work less and does not pump blood as efficiently to the body's lower extremities...