The Longest Journey

There were no speeches, no red carpets, and the Navy band played for only about a minute. After their splashdown on target in the Pacific 225 miles southwest of San Diego last week, the three astronauts were whisked to the deck of the recovery carrier New Orleans. Then, wobbly but smiling, they were guided by NASA doctors a few steps to waiting chairs and quickly carted off atop a moving platform for medical examinations. The return of Skylab 2 Astronauts Alan Bean, Jack Lousma and Owen Garriott was in fact so subdued compared with past homecomings that it did not begin to do justice to their remarkable accomplishment: they had just completed man's longest voyage in space.

For 59 days and 11 hrs. the astronauts had spun around the earth, logging more than 24 million miles. (That record-breaking performance contrasted sharply with the current manned space efforts of the Soviets, who last week launched two cosmonauts, Vasily Lazarev, 45, and Oleg Makarov, 40, on a two-day orbital mission.) Regularly putting in 12-to 16-hour days despite their initial nausea, the Skylab 2 astronauts accomplished nearly twice as much scientific work as planned. They took over 100,000 pictures of the sun, earth and stars, collected enough data on the earth to cover 18 miles of magnetic tape, and performed so many other technical and biomedical experiments that scientists will be kept busy for years interpreting the data.

If the astronauts were not given much chance to talk, their doctors had no hesitation about speaking out. After completing preliminary shipboard medical examinations, they declared that the trio appeared to be extremely fit--in better shape, in fact, than the returning Skylab 1 astronauts, who were in space only about half as long. The prolonged exposure to zero gravity did take its toll.

Despite healthy appetites, the astronauts lost weight, Alan Bean dropping the most: 8 1/2 lbs. There was also a deterioration of muscle tone, marked by loss of more than an inch in the circumference of the crew's calves. Yet most of these changes took place during the first half of the flight. By the 40th day, the weights of the astronauts had stabilized.

In addition, their heart rates, which had at first shown a tendency to climb dramatically at the slightest exertion, became more steady. The improvement was at least partly attributable to a stepped-up program of exercises, but NASA doctors also suspect that the body may gradually adjust to weightlessness by itself.

Solar Cycle. Other earthlings aboard Skylab did not fare as well. The spider Arabella, which became famous by demonstrating that it could spin a web in zero G, survived the return to earth. But its arachnid companion Anita died before the end of the mission, apparently of starvation; Anita stubbornly refused to eat the morsels of filet mignon that were offered. Other casualties were the two minnows that had been carried aboard Skylab. However, their offspring -- the first earth creatures to be born in space (except, perhaps, for some offspring of stowaway bacteria on earlier nights) -- made it safely to earth, only to die a day later.

Skylab 2's most important scientific contribution may well be the mass of solar pictures and data gathered with a $121 million array of solar telescopes.

It may be months or even years before the 200 solar scientists working on the Skylab program can digest the information. But some important discoveries have already been made, particularly about the sun's corona, or outer atmosphere. During the mission, at a time in the eleven-year solar cycle when the sun should be relatively quiet, two exceptionally large flares suddenly appeared; one of them expanded over an area 17 times the diameter of the earth. Under the direction of Garriott, a solar scientist by profession, the awesome event was photographed and measured from the first minutes of the eruption. Their pictures may well help to explain the exact cause of these fiery outbursts, so powerful that only one of them generates as much energy as the earth is likely to need for the next 500 years.

The Skylab astronauts also obtained closeup views of erupting prominences, which consist of relatively cool clouds of ionized (or charged) gases that have temperatures of only about 6,000DEG F., compared with typical temperatures of 2,000,000DEG elsewhere in the corona. Before Skylab 2, solar physicists thought the phenomenon was relatively rare. Now it has been observed about once every two weeks, followed by periods of radio interference on earth. The astronauts also made observations of so-called solar bright points; although the points were previously thought to be concentrated in the sun's active equatorial belts, they are apparently spread measles-like over the entire solar surface.

Even more data about the sun will be gathered by the Skylab 3 astronauts, who will also study Comet Kohoutek as it becomes prominent in the sky during daylight hours in December. But that will be the last manned scientific space mission planned by the U.S. Says Robert Noyes of the Harvard College Observatory: "We'll probably never again have such an opportunity in the foreseeable future."

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