RocketSTEM Issue #2 - April 2013 | Page 39

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