Word: skylab
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 and brightening chances for the completion of the $2.6 billion Skylab program...
Power Shortage. As Conrad and his crew ended their second week in space, those chances seemed dim indeed. Skylab's power shortage-which resulted from the jamming of one solar panel and the loss of another during launch, when the orbital workshop's meteoroid and thermal shielding ripped off-had suddenly been compounded by a severe new problem. Two of Skylab's 18 storage batteries had failed...
Having sufficient battery power was vital to the mission. Every time Skylab was in the earth's shadow-for some 30 minutes during each 90-minute orbit -the production of electricity by the four working windmill-shaped solar panels atop the telescope mount ceased, leaving the lab completely reliant on its batteries. Freeing the jammed solar wing thus assumed even greater importance: it could provide Skylab with another 3,000 watts of electricity while it was in sunlight and charge up eight idle batteries connected to the wing...
...crew conducted a host of biomedical tests-swirling about in a rotating chair to study disorientation in zero-G, climbing into a pressure chamber that measures the accumulation of blood in the lower body, contributing daily samples of blood (and freezing them) for laboratory analysis back on earth. Only Skylab's bicycle exerciser, designed to measure the astronauts' stamina, gave the crew any trouble. Confronted by the heat and some badly adjusted straps on the machine, Astronaut Paul Weitz found that pedaling was too exhausting and cut the experiment short. The astronauts also beamed a lively TV show...
Despite all the activity, prospects for completing the entire mission were still uncertain at week's end. Said Flight Controller M.P. Frank: "This may well be the last manned mission to Skylab. If we can't fix the solar panel, we might not be able to keep the lab alive long enough to get another crew up there." Indeed, as concern grew about possible further deterioration of the batteries, NASA advanced the launch date of the second Skylab crew from the originally scheduled Aug. 8 to July...