The Good Life in Space

It is the largest, most complex spacecraft ever built. Stretching 118 ft. from end to end, it weighs 100 tons, and has the interior space and most of the comforts of a three-bedroom house: private sleeping compartments for its three passengers, a dining table, a shower, a lavatory larger than any commercial airliner's and an 18-in. porthole to provide a view of the earth. To sustain its crews, it carries 720 gal. of drinking water, more than 2,000 Ibs. of food and enough scientific and medical gear for months of experimentation. Both inside and out, it would make a splendid set for a movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey or the TV series Star Trek. But it is a real spacecraft called Skylab, which will soon become the U.S.'s first manned orbital space station.

Skylab is scheduled to be launched from Cape Kennedy on May 14 atop a giant Saturn 5 booster and sent into a 269-mile-high orbit of the earth. Next day, a smaller Saturn 1-B rocket will loft an Apollo command ship with three astronauts on board into a similar orbital path around the earth. Seven hours later, the astronauts will rendezvous and dock with Skylab. The men will then move into their posh quarters and prepare to remain there for the next 28 days -four days longer than the previous record set in 1971 by the Russians in their more primitive Salyut I space station.* Later in the year, two more three-man crews will board the orbiting ship, each group remaining in space for 56 days. Total cost of the three missions: $2.5 billion.

To astronauts and public alike, these prolonged earth-orbiting flights may seem less exciting than the Apollo lunar expeditions. But Skylab's mission will have far-reaching consequences. It will help determine if man can live and work in space for the extended periods of time necessary to make round trips to the other planets or moons. "On Apollo we were like Christopher Columbus going into the unknown," says former Apollo Director Rocco Petrone. "With Skylab, we are more like the Pilgrims trying to settle the New World."

During their pioneering mission, Astronauts Charles ("Pete") Conrad Jr., Paul J. Weitz and Joseph P. Kerwin will not lack for elbow room or equipment. In addition to their Apollo command ship, which will remain docked with Skylab, there are four major sections of the cluster: 1) the 22-ft.-wide Orbital Workshop, which contains the astronauts' main living and working quarters; 2) the smaller Multiple Docking Adaptor, which serves as part of the passageway between the Orbital Workshop and the Apollo command ship and contains the complex control panel for Skylab's telescope; 3) the Apollo Telescope Mount, which is the world's first manned solar observatory in earth orbit and contains eight separate telescopes for different types of astronomical observations; and 4) the Airlock Module, which serves as a pressurization chamber for sorties out into space and is the nerve center for the entire station; it is equipped with thermal and electrical controls and extensive communications gear, including a teleprinter to receive updated flight plans from Mission Control in Houston.

Luxury. In their weightless environment, the astronauts will be able to drift readily from one section to another; as an experiment, they may wear new Buck Rogers-like strap-on jet backpacks that should propel them at a speedy two knots. For easy communication between Skylab and Mission Control, the astronauts can use any of the squawk boxes scattered throughout the ship. To power up a portable scientific instrument, a heater or ventilating fan or even their vacuum cleaner -to snare drifting debris -they can plug into any of the ship's many electrical outlets. There should be energy to spare. Skylab's huge solar wings, converting the sun's radiation directly into electricity, should be able to deliver up to 12,000 watts of power, enough to service five to ten average households on earth.

Unlike the astronauts who squeezed into cramped Apollo command ships and lunar modules, the Skylab crew will live in relative luxury. In the wardroom section of the Orbital Workship, each man will have his own food preparation tray, including individual heaters to warm up the frozen foods (sample entrees: roast beef, filet mignon, lobster Newburg) and a squirt-type water bottle from which he can sip half an ounce at a time. NASA originally considered another amenity -wine -but abandoned the idea for fear of provoking protests from teetotalers.

For the first time, astronauts will be able to perch on a real toilet, an ingenious waterless facility that uses a suction system to collect the wastes in the weightless environment (solids will be dried and urine frozen for biomedical examination back on earth). In previous missions, they had only cumbersome bags and collection tubes. Sanitary conditions will be improved in another way: Skylab includes a hand washer and an enclosed shower where the astronauts can douse themselves once a week.

Night Cap. During most of their stay in space, the astronauts will wear informal gold shirts and slacks made of noncombustible fibers. Going to bed will involve strapping themselves into sleeping bags attached, batlike, to the ceiling and floor of their individual compartments; one of them will wear a unique night cap containing sensors that will enable ground controllers to monitor his brain waves. Alongside their sleeping bags, the astronauts will have reading lights and squawk boxes. To while away the off hours, astronauts will be able to read, throw Velcro-tipped darts and play cards, or listen to their favorite music on a stereo tape player. For Conrad, Skylab's commander, that will mean Country Musicians Charley Pride and Faron Young.

In addition to making astronomical sightings from their unique platform above the earth's obscuring atmosphere, the astronauts will perform a host of scientific tasks, ranging from observation of the earth to tests of the effects of weightlessness on molten metals. They will also conduct 19 experiments picked from suggestions submitted by 3,400 high school students (sample experiment: observing the development of colonies of bacteria in zero-G).

But the most important scientific observations and experiments will be those that determine how the astronauts react physically to living in space. Under the direction of Kerwin, who will be the first U.S. medical doctor in space, the astronauts will use a bicycle exerciser (to check for changes in their metabolism), place themselves in a rotating chair (motion sickness and general disorientation) and crawl into a cylindrical chamber that looks like an iron lung (cardiovascular system). They will weigh themselves daily on a vibrating "weightless" scale that can calculate an astronaut's mass by measuring how much a known force accelerates him.*

On their 28th day aboard Skylab, the astronauts will again don their space suits, crawl back into the Apollo command ship, undock and head for the traditional splashdown in the Pacific. Behind them they will leave the giant laboratory, which will remain uninhabited in orbit until it is boarded by the next team of astronauts.

* At week's end cosmonauts still had not boarded Salyut II, which was put into orbit two weeks ago.

* A technique based on Newton's well-known formula: force equals mass times acceleration.

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