a concept that came to be known
as ‘the parasol’. Tests showed that
a combination of coiled springs
and telescoping rods could fit inside a standard airlock experiment
canister and could be deployed
smoothly. Jack Kinzler, chief of the
Johnson Space Center’s technical
services division, a close friend and
neighbour of Conrad, developed
the system by jury-rigging it from a
parachute canopy and telescoping glass-fibre fishing rods in hubmounted springs.
During a final review at the Kennedy Space Center on 19 May, Kinzler’s parasol was accepted as the
primary method and on the 24th the
flight readiness review endorsed it.
Having an astronaut standing in the
hatch on an EVA was undesirable,
since it would come at the end of a
long, 22-hour day for the crew.
Equally, the twin-pole concept
did not meet with the approval
of the flight surgeons, who were
aghast at the prospect of such a
complex task so early in the mission, before the crew had properly
acclimatised to weightlessness.
However, Conrad felt that Kinzler’s
design was the simplest, safest and
quickest method…and most likely
to succeed.
Years later, Schweickart glowingly praised the efforts of the industrial and NASA workforces to save
Skylab during those frantic days of
May 1973. “I probably got a little bit
of sleep,” he recalled, “but most of
the team who worked with me at
Huntsville never slept for four days!
It was totally round-the-clock and
it was not just the resources of the
centre; it was all of the resources of
the whole aerospace industry.”
Kerwin felt the same. “It was a
great team,” he reflected. “I look
on Apollo 13 as the supreme test…
for the Mission Control team. The
Skylab problem was the supreme
test for the engineering team. Both
the contractors and the civil servants joined together, as one, and
they figured out what the problem
was.”
Of course, the state of the arrays and the reason for the No. 2
array being unable to properly un-
36
36
Close up view of Skylab 2 Crewmember Joseph P. Kerwin performing an extravehicular
Photo: NASA via Retro Space Images
activity (EVA), probably to repair the covering.
furl, could only be speculated until
the arrival of Conrad’s crew and
the presence of three sets of eyes
to physically see what was amiss.
If debris was the problem, a repair
method was acutely needed and
engineers from the Marshall Space
Flight Center set to work to adapt
a cable cutter (not dissimilar to a
heavy-duty tree lopper) and a universal tool with prongs for prying
and pulling to open the jammed
array.
On 19 May, the tools were successfully tested in Marshall’s neutral buoyancy tank, with the Skylab
mockup specially ‘modified’ with
fragments of metal wire bundles,
shards of bolts and other objects
representative of a failed micrometeoroid shield. Conrad, Kerwin and
Weitz took their turns underwater,
evaluating the tools, practicing prying the debris away from the array
and completing the whole procedure safely.
The tools had already left for the
Kennedy Space Center when a
certification review ruled that the
pointed tips of the cutter were hazardous. New heads with blunt tips
were quickly prepared and the
change was made at the launch
site. Now, however, the time for
talking was over. Years later, in her
book Rocketman, Nancy Conrad
related that Pete’s response to the
seemingly endless testing was typically to the point: “Just get me up
there!”
With their launch scheduled for
the stroke of 9:00 a.m. EST, the morning of 25 May 1973 was particularly
peaceful for the three astronauts.
“This was the least well-attended
Apollo launch in history,” Kerwin recalled, “because everybody had
to go home and put the kids back
in school. We arrived at the command module and looked inside
and it was a sea of brown rope under the seats and under the brown
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