Word: conrad
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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...
...earth and sun, performed biomedical tests on themselves, and even feasted on some of the foods that NASA had feared would spoil in Skylab's scorching temperatures. The outlook seemed bright. Asked whether they expected to remain aloft for a full 28-day mission, Commander Charles ("Pete") Conrad Jr. replied unhesitatingly: "You betcha...
...Conrad's optimism was short-lived. Before the week ended, a second critical storage battery had failed, further depleting Skylab's already reduced power supply. After an emergency meeting in Houston, top NASA officials concluded that there was only one hope. To provide more electrical power, the astronauts would have to take a space walk outside the ship this week and attempt to free the inoperative solar panel that remains jammed in the side of the orbital workshop (the other workshop panel was ripped off completely during Skylab's launch...
...worst was still to come. When the disappointed astronauts moved Apollo back to the nose of Skylab to dock for a rest period, another glitch developed: Apollo's docking mechanism, which had worked the first time, suddenly balked. Several times Conrad bumped Apollo's nose into Skylab's docking adapter; each time, Apollo's docking mechanism failed to engage...
...soared to more than 125° (after hovering around 105°). That created fears of additional food spoilage, and the astronauts were warned to be on the lookout for bad odors when they began sampling Skylab's delicacies, which include such items as roast beef, lobster Newburg and Conrad's favorite butterscotch pudding. The space agency was also worried about the buildup of potentially lethal fumes from the decomposition of the heat-sensitive polyurethane foam used to insulate the interior walls of the ship. As an added precaution, the astronauts planned to don gas masks before entering...