An overhead view of the Skylab Orbital Workshop in Earth orbit, as photographed from the Skylab 4 Command and Services Modules (CSM).
THE FIRST AMERICAN SPACE STATION
The Americans’ initial plans for an orbiting space station, conceived back in the 1950s, had been superseded by the rush to get to the Moon. But with lunar ambitions achieved for the time being, thoughts again turned to a US space station, and Skylab was launched in 1973.
The Salyut 3 space station was sent into space on June 25, 1974—another Almaz-type military station but one that was a considerable improvement on its predecessors, having superior living and working quarters. It had a floor and a ceiling painted different colors to provide the crew with some degree of orientation. Shortly afterward, the crew of Soyuz 14 arrived at Salyut 3, their 15-day mission going relatively smoothly. Soyuz 15 was also intended to visit Salyut 3 (carrying Colonel Lev Demin, at 48 the world’s first space grandfather), but it had to return after two days due to docking problems. Despite this, Soviet planners were encouraged by their latest space station. Nevertheless, it was not visited again and reentered the Earth’s atmosphere in January 1975.
The first space station launched by the United States was Skylab, which was visited by three crews between 1973 and 1979. Although Wernher von Braun had dreams of a space station in the 1950s, they did not get far before the race to the Moon took precedence. In 1963 the US air force started development of its Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL), which was basically a small, two-man space station equipped with a large telescope for spying on the Earth’s surface. Initially the MOL was to be launched as part of a Titan II rocket with a modified Gemini capsule on top. It was soon realized, however, that for reconnaissance work there was no need to have the space station manned, since automated systems would work just as well. It was in response to this US initiative that the USSR started its Almaz military space stations, some of which flew in space in the 1970s.
An overhead view of the Skylab Orbital Workshop in Earth orbit, as photographed from the Skylab 4 Command and Services Modules (CSM).
At the time, NASA was worried about the possibility of a military space station and started looking at ideas of its own. It seemed logical to use the powerful Saturn booster being developed for moonflights and adapt Apollo hardware. Eventually it was decided to use an unfuelled third stage of a Saturn V rocket, which was fitted out with living quarters and a docking port. It was to be placed into orbit using a two-stage version of the Saturn V, left over from the canceled Apollo missions.
It was launched on May 14, 1973, and immediately ran into severe problems. Among those watching its liftoff was Owen Garriott, who was to later live onboard it for 59 days.
Garriott: The Saturn V launch, the big earth-shaker, went extremely well. We saw the take-off, saw it disappear, we were very pleased from the VIP stands. So we all came back to the motel, and I remember we changed our clothes into flight suits, because we were going to go out to Patrick Air Force Base to fly back to Houston in our T-38s. As we were coming by, walking out to get into our car, I noticed a gentleman on the second story up there, whose name was Rocco Petrone. Rocco had just been recently appointed the Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center and so we went up and said: “Hey, that’s great Rocco. Sure looks good.” “Owen, don’t get too excited. There’s something on the telemetry that doesn’t look quite right. It looks as if they’re not getting the electrical power and the attitude is wrong, so we don’t know just what’s happening yet, but we have a problem.” So that’s how I found out about the difficulty when the launch occurred and that Skylab’s micrometeoroid shield had been torn away from the third stage of the Saturn V.
Owen Garriott, Skylab 3’s science pilot, performing an EVA on the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM) of the Skylab Space Station.
Joe Kerwin had planned to liftoff in a Saturn 1B the following day with fellow astronauts Pete Conrad and Paul Weitz, to become the first crew to inhabit Skylab. Until, that is, he heard about the problems.
Kerwin: Something went awry during launch with the heat shield. It seems the designers of the heat shield didn’t talk to the aerodynamicists and they didn’t properly protect the heat shield from the supersonic windstream. When the vehicle went supersonic, we got some windstream under the leading edge of the heat shield, and it just ripped right off the spacecraft. When it ripped around to one of the solar panels, it carried it off with it at the shoulder, so we lost one panel. When it got to the other panel, thank the Lord, it ripped around it instead and preserved that panel, but riveted it almost completely shut. A piece of aluminum with a rivet at one end literally wrapped it to this solar panel cover and held it down. So they got into orbit, commanded the solar panel covers to open. They got no response from one and they got a little trickle of power from the solar panel on the other side. The thing had opened, as it turned on, about a foot and then jammed. Then the temperatures inside began to climb.
Meanwhile, it became apparent that afternoon that we weren’t going anywhere the next day. This was not ready for a crew and might never be. So our first duty was to our families, who were having the preflight cocktail party at Patrick Air Force Base. We called them up and said: “You can keep having your party, but we’re not launching tomorrow. You can go on home.” In fact, the next morning, we got in our T-38s and flew back to Houston and joined the team that was going to try and figure out this problem and what to do about it.
On launch day, now May 25th, we showed up at the launch pad and there was practically nobody there. This was the least well-attended Apollo launch in history, because everybody had to go home and put the kids back in school, you know. So it was a very peaceful morning. We arrived at the Command Module and looked inside, and it was a sea of brown rope under the seats, and under the brown ropes were all these different umbrellas and parasols and sails and rope, and also the equipment that we had selected to try and free up the solar panel, which was a pretty eclectic collection of aluminum poles that could be connected together, and a Southwestern Bell Telephone Company tree-lopper, with brown ropes to open and close the jaws, and all that stuff. They handed us the checklist and said: “This is how to operate that stuff.” Some of it we’d seen, some of it we hadn’t.
We then soft-docked with Skylab. I won’t describe that in detail, but it’s a partial docking. Sat there for an hour or so discussing with the ground—we had lunch at that point—what we were going to do. We decided that it was worth trying an EVA to open the side hatch of the Command Module and use one of the tools we had, which was sort of a shepherd’s crook on a five-foot pole, to try and pry that solar panel up. We didn’t know how much force it was stuck down with. So we tried it. We got our helmets and gloves back on, checked the suits out, and opened the side hatch. Paul Weitz had the shepherd’s crook, I had Paul by the legs, and Pete, of course, was flying the spacecraft.
He’d fly it up within a couple of feet of the solar panel, and Paul would put his shepherd’s crook out there and get it hooked under the free edge. He’d pull back, and the two spacecraft would come together, and there would be jet firings everywhere. Conrad would say: “Oh my God.” We never collided or anything, but it was fairly sporting. Tried that two or three times, and it was obvious that it was stuck too hard and this was not going to work, unfortunately. So we closed the hatch, repressurized. Pete got himself a little ear block, I think, on that occasion, but he didn’t say anything about it until the next day.
We said: “Okay, that’s not going to work. Let’s go back and dock and just proceed with activation, and we’ll go to Plan B.” That’s where we went back to dock and the docking wenches didn’t work. Oh my God. They had worked the first time, for the soft docking. This time they didn’t work. So here we are up there, now we’d been up for, I don’t know, 18 hours or something already, and it’s getting late. He tries it soft and he tries it hard. We tried all the backup means in the book. We finally got to the last backup, which required another EVA. It required that we de-pressurize the spacecraft again, because we now have to go up into the tunnel hatch, remove that hatch, get up into the docking probe itself, and cut a couple of wires and put the hatch back on. What it does is, this bypasses a relay that requires the capture latches to be mated before the main latches can activate. So we’ve solved that, and now he has to dock once more and keep, with the hand controller, keep the RCS [reaction control system] jets forcing the probe to collapse against the docking ring, and hopefully, when it collapses fully, the main latches will now latch on their own. So we go in, he’s got it knocked, he’s right in the middle. He’s one, two, three, four—they said to give it ten seconds—five, six, seven, rat-rat-rat-rat-rat. There’s machine gun noise, which is all 12 of those docking latches. We said: “Thank God. We don’t have to go home tomorrow.”
So the first two weeks, we were still in the dark. We still hadn’t solved all the problems, so there was still tension. We were doing the exercise thing. We had a half-day off around day eight or nine, and we gave the ground a little television show. Weitz had a taped copy of “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” It was the theme for 2001, Strauss. We played that real loud, and we set up the camera, and we came down into the workshop for the docking the day after and we did our acrobatics thing. See, we had learned how to do it in the first week, and the ground thought that was neat. So it relaxed everybody.
There were no handholds, no footholds, no visual aids, no lights, because there was never any planned maintenance on Skylab. Too dangerous. There was, fortunately, planned EVA. It was to retrieve film and exchange film in the ATM. So we had the suits, we had the umbilicals, and we brought up some tools that we thought we’d need. They planned an EVA that had us erect a twenty-five-foot pole, put the cable cutter on the end of it, and the jaws, which are about three inches long, had to close around that aluminum scrap that we’d seen, and bite halfway into it but not all the way. That was step one. Now we had a handrail. Pete could go along the handrail while I stabilized the near end of it, with another rope attached to his sleeve. When he got as far out as he could, taking care to avoid sharp edges, please, he would hook that rope into the solar panel cover as far down as possible, so as to give it some leverage from the hinge. Because what we had to do was not only cut the scrap, but then break up that hinge which had frozen, and start the thing up. He was to go down, put the rope on, then I would tie the other end of the rope up to a stanchion, as close to the surface as possible, and then the two of us would get under the rope and stand up and hope for the best. That was the Rusty Schweickart solution. We said: “Well, okay, Rusty, we’ll give it a go.” And out we went with all the equipment. I even had a dental saw from the medical kit taped to the chest of my suit, just in case, if all else failed, we thought maybe we could go down there with the dental saw and try to get that thing off. Didn’t have to use it.
Gerry Carr visited Skylab for 84 days between Nov 16, 1973, and Feb 8, 1974:
The three main tasks, of course, of Skylab, were to study the human body, to study the Sun, and study the Earth. So we spent a lot of time on those experiments. The solar physics work was extremely difficult, because the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM) control panel controlled a great number of different experiments. The Apollo Telescope Mount itself, the telescope, there were five or seven experiments in that big mount, and I always thought of it being like a big Gatling gun or a gun turret, because it turned. What you did is you would turn the drum inside there and you’d position one of the experiments to take solar data, and then when you finished with that, you would position another one and take data.
It had been more than two years since a single Soviet cosmonaut had been in space following Soyuz 11. The newly designed Soyuz 12, launched in September 1973, was flown by two rookie cosmonauts, Commander Lieutenant Colonel Vasili Lazarev, 45, and Engineer Oleg Makarov, 40. Things were evidently normal during the first day of flight. Few scientific experiments were included in the program. On the second day, however, serious defects developed in the life-support system, followed by a failure in the ship’s attitude control system. The flight lasted barely two days.
Soyuz 13 was launched on December 18, 1973, and was the second test flight of the new Soyuz design. Both cosmonauts, Pyotr Klimuk and Valentin Lebedev, were rookies. Klimuk had trained for many years in the L1 and L3 lunar programs before his assignment to the current mission. As the two cosmonauts entered orbit, it marked not only the 50th manned spaceflight but also the first time in the history of spaceflight that men from both the United States and the Soviet Union were in space at the same time. (NASA astronauts were in the middle of their marathon Skylab 4 mission.)
Salyut 4, launched in December 1974, was a complete success, being visited by three Soyuz crews, including one that stayed for 63 days. Unmanned Soyuz capsules remained docked with it for prolonged periods, proving the Soyuz system’s versatility and durability. The age of the Soviet space station had truly begun.
TIMELINE
| 1973 | 14 May US launches 85-ton Skylab, its first manned space station, with first crew Kerwin, Conrad and Weitz |
| September Russians restart their Soyuz program, with the launch of Soyuz 12 | |
| 18 December Russians launch Soyuz 13 | |
| 1974 | 29 March US space probe Mariner 10 completes a flyby of planet Mercury |
| 26 December Russians launch their space station Salyut 4 |
