Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
Four more batteries were performing far below normal, apparently because of excessive heat and overuse. When another battery faltered in midweek (only to revive mysteriously the next day), NASA officials feared that the mission might have to be drastically curtailed...
...NASA's engineers and technicians, who had already displayed extraordinary Yankee ingenuity in fashioning Skylab's makeshift sunshade, refused to give up. Experimenting with duplicates of tools aboard Skylab, they devised techniques for cutting, sawing and even prying off the metal. Practicing with these tools in simulated conditions of weightlessness in NASA'S big water test tank at Huntsville, Ala., Backup Astronauts Rusty Schweickart and Ed Gibson demonstrated that the implements might well work in space...
...then Skylab had passed out of range of ground listening posts, and the astronauts toiled for more than an hour in radio silence. It was only when Skylab moved back within range of NASA'S big dish antenna in California's Mojave Desert that Mission Control learned the results. "We got the wing out and locked," reported Conrad. With a tug from the astronauts, the solar wing had swung out perpendicular to the ship and its accordion-like silicon panels were unfolding. However, hydraulic fluid in the panels' spring mechanism had stiffened in the extreme cold...
...With NASA's abrupt withdrawal, development of the Triangle was also sidetracked. Thompson says that the Authority's initial reaction to the NASA departure was to pursue job-intensive development for the remainder of the Quadrangle, but that consultants advised the CRA to seek middle and upper income housing for the site...