Word: skylab
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Until the failure, it had seemed that the astronauts had triumphed over almost insurmountable difficulties. Finally docking with Skylab after five attempts, they had struggled for three hours in 125° temperatures to erect an umbrella-like sunshade over the area where Skylab had lost its micrometeoroid and thermal shielding. The makeshift solution worked. Within a few days, temperatures in the workshop dropped to the low 80s and the astronauts, who had been spending most of their time aboard the Apollo command module, could take up residence in Skylab...
...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...