ropes were all these different umbrellas and parasols and sails and
also the equipment that we had selected to try and free up the solar
panel, which was a pretty eclectic
collection of aluminium poles that
could be connected together,
and a Southwestern Bell Telephone
Company tree-lopper with brown
ropes to open and close the jaws.
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!”
The astronauts were unperturbed. Indeed, as their Saturn IB
rocket cleared the Pad 39B tower
and roared into the clear morning
sky, Conrad declared that his crew
could fix anything.
Launch was on time and kicked
off an eight-hour orbital ballet to
rendezvous with the crippled station.
Conrad’s call of “Tally-ho the Skylab!” as a steadily brightening star
on the horizon drew closer masked,
at first, the seriousness of what the
astronauts were about to face.
The micrometeoroid shield was
www.RocketSTEM.org
indeed gone, as was one of the
two solar arrays, whilst the second
was j