Word: skylab
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While coping successfully with one crisis after another during their 28-day stay in space, Skylab 1 Astronauts Pete Conrad, Paul Weitz and Joe Kerwin still had time to act like ordinary tourists. Clicking away with their Nikons, Hasselblads and automatic cameras, they took 50,000 pictures -more than any space travelers before them. Last week, as they returned to Houston for continued postflight medical examinations and debriefings, NASA began releasing their splendid shots, some of the best ever taken in space...
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...
Though the final answers to such questions might require weeks of careful study, NASA officials were already convinced that Skylab had gone a long way toward proving that man could live and work successfully in space. During their 395 trips around the earth, the astronauts slept better, ate more, and seemed more comfortable than any space voyagers before them. Equally impressive, the astronauts-despite the power shortage during the early part of their mission-completed at least 80% of most of their scheduled experiments. They also took some 16,000 photographs of the earth...
...three Skylab astronauts have been so busy coping with one crisis after another aboard America's 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...
Noisy Toilet. Personal hygiene has been no less of a nuisance. Besides ruining food, the 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...