Success for Skylab

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 6 1/2 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.

Just 38 1/2 minutes later, the capsule, with the astronauts still inside, was hoisted aboard the big carrier. The unusual procedure was ordered by NASA doctors. They had feared that the astronauts--like Russia's Soyuz 9 cosmonauts, who had to be carried from their ship after an 18-day mission--might be too wobbly from long exposure to weightlessness to make it on their own. Beyond that, the doctors wanted to examine the men as quickly as possible to study their initial reaction to gravity.

Effects of Zero-G. The medical concern was not unwarranted. All three astronauts were unsteady as they emerged from the spacecraft, and Astronaut-Physician Kerwin needed a slight assist as the three Navymen walked to a waiting mobile medical lab. Then, as the carrier steamed to San Diego, doctors began an intense, six-hour examination aimed at answering many questions relating to the prolonged flight. For example, had there been irreversible damage to the astronauts' cardiovascular systems or excessive loss of calcium from their bones?

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 and 30,000 of the sun.

The versatility of the astronauts was again evident during their last week in space. To retrieve the 230 lbs. of film exposed by the solar telescopes, they took a final space walk, a 1-hr. 36-min. sortie during which Conrad again lived up to his reputation as Mr. Fixit. To revive one of the telescope mount's dead batteries, he whacked its regulator with a 16-oz. hammer, sending chips of paint flying. The simple strategy worked, apparently freeing a stuck relay switch, and the battery came back to life. Moving to the telescope mount's coronograph--which blocks out the light from the sun's disk, thereby creating an artificial eclipse that allows scientists to study the solar corona, or outer halo of gases--Conrad showed a more delicate touch: he wiped away a piece of thread that had mysteriously settled on the instrument's lens. His most difficult chore came when he tried to tie a swatch of material similar to that on the aluminized nylon-and-Mylar parasol to a strut on the telescope mount (the next team of astronauts will examine it to get some idea of how long the plastic can survive in the sun's searing ultraviolet rays). "Goshdarn stuff is hard to handle out here," groused Conrad, avoiding some of the more earthy language he used earlier in the flight. Finally, as his pulse climbed to 150 beats a minute, he exclaimed: "I got it! I got it!"

Before leaving their home in the sky, the astronauts did some space age housework. They sprayed disinfectant around Skylab's living quarters, turned off unnecessary lights and fans, halted the flow of fresh air into the orbital workshop, depressurized the airlock, closed off the hatch behind them, and then boarded their Apollo command ship for the trip home. That left Skylab shipshape for the next crew of astronauts, who are scheduled to enter it late July to begin a 56-day stay in space.

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