Living and Working in Space

The NASA History of Skylab

William David Compton, Charles D. Benson, Paul Dickson

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486264349
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Astronomy & Astrophysics

The official record of America's first space station, this thorough and highly readable book from the NASA History Series chronicles the Skylab program from its planning during the 1960s through its 1973 launch and its conclusion in 1979. Its definitive accounts examine the project's goals and achievements as well as the use of discoveries and technology developed during the Apollo program.
This three-part survey begins with the background against which post-Apollo planning unfolded, amid congressional doubt, public opposition, and internal uncertainty at NASA. The second part recounts the modification of existing spacecraft, the manufacture and testing of new modules, changes in astronaut training, and other alterations — all requiring a high degree of coordination between NASA headquarters, field centers, experimenters, and contractors. The final part reviews the three missions and assesses their results. Extensive appendixes provide convenient summaries of the missions and experiments in addition to profiles of the participants.

Part I

From Concept through Decision,
1962–1969

An earth-orbiting station, equipped to study the sun, the stars, and the earth, is a concept found in the earliest speculation about space travel. During the formative years of the United States space program, space stations were among many projects considered. But after the national decision in 1961 to send men to the moon, space stations were relegated to the background.

Project Apollo was a firm commitment for the 1960s, but beyond that the prospects for space exploration were not clear. As the first half of the decade ended, new social and political forces raised serious questions about the nation’s priorities and brought the space program under pressure. At the same time, those responsible for America’s space capability saw the need to look beyond Apollo for projects that would preserve the country’s leadership in space. The time was not propitious for such a search, for the national mood that had sustained the space program was changing.

In the summer of 1965, the office that became the Skylab program office was established in NASA Headquarters, and the project that evolved into Skylab was formally chartered as a conceptual design study. During the years 1965–1969 the form of the spacecraft and the content of the program were worked out. As long as the Apollo goal remained to be achieved, Skylab was a stepchild of manned spaceflight, achieving status only with the first lunar landing. When it became clear that America’s space program could not continue at the level of urgency and priority that Apollo had enjoyed, Skylab became the means of sustaining manned spaceflight while the next generation of hardware and missions developed.

The first five chapters of this book trace the origins of the Skylab concept from its emergence in the period 1962–1965 through its evolution into final form in 1969.

1

What to Do for an Encore: Post-Apollo Plans

The summer of 1965 was an eventful one for the thousands of people involved in the American space program. In its seventh year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was hard at work on the Gemini program, its second series of earth-orbiting manned missions. Mercury had concluded on 16 May 1963. For 22 months after that, while the two-man Gemini spacecraft was brought to flight readiness, no American went into space. Two unmanned test flights preceded the first manned Gemini mission, launched on 23 March 1965.¹

Mercury had been used to learn the fundamentals of manned spaceflight. Even before the first Mercury astronaut orbited the earth, President John F. Kennedy had set NASA its major task: to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely by 1970. Much had to be learned before that could be done—not to mention the rockets, ground support facilities, and launch complexes that had to be built and tested—and Gemini was part of the training program. Rendezvous—bringing two spacecraft together in orbit—was a part of that program; another was a determination of man’s ability to survive and function in the weightlessness of spaceflight.

That summer the American public was getting acquainted, by way of network television, with the site where most of the Gemini action was taking place—the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC). Located on the flat Texas coastal plain 30 kilometers southeast of downtown Houston—close enough to be claimed by that city and given to it by the media—MSC was NASA’s newest field center, and Gemini was the first program managed there. Mercury had been planned and conducted by the Space Task Group, located at Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia. Creation of the new Manned Spacecraft Center, to be staffed initially by members of the Space Task Group, was announced in 1961; by the middle of 1962 its personnel had been moved to temporary quarters in Houston; and in 1964 it occupied its new home. The 4.1-square-kilometer center provided facilities for spacecraft design and testing, crew training, and flight operations or mission control. By 1965 nearly 5000 civil servants and about twice that many aerospace-contractor employees were working at the Texas site.²

Heading this second largest of NASA’s manned spaceflight centers was the man who had formed its predecessor group in 1958, Robert R. Gilruth. Gilruth had joined the staff at Langley in 1937 when it was a center for aeronautics research of NASA’s precursor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). He soon demonstrated his ability in Langley’s Flight Research Division, working with test pilots in quantifying the characteristics that make a satisfactory airplane. Progressing to transonic and supersonic flight research, Gilruth came naturally to the problems of guided missiles. In 1945 he was put in charge of the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division at Wallops Island, Virginia, where one problem to be solved was that of bringing a missile back through the atmosphere intact. When the decision was made in 1958 to give the new national space agency the job of putting a man into earth orbit, Gilruth and several of his Wallops Island colleagues moved to the Space Task Group, a new organization charged with designing the spacecraft to do that job.³

The Space Task Group had, in fact, already claimed that task for itself, and it went at the problem in typical NACA fashion. NACA had been a design, research, and testing organization, accustomed to working with aircraft builders but doing no fabrication work itself. The same mode characterized MSC. The Mercury and Gemini spacecraft owed their basic design to Gilruth’s engineers, who supervised construction by the McDonnell Aircraft Company of St. Louis and helped test the finished hardware.⁴

In the summer of 1965 the Manned Spacecraft Center was up to its ears in work. By the middle of June two manned Gemini missions had been flown and a third was in preparation. Thirty-three astronauts, including the first six selected as scientist-astronauts,* were in various stages of training and preparation for flight. Reflecting the general bullishness of the manned space program, NASA announced plans in September to recruit still more flight crews.⁵

Houston’s design engineers, meanwhile, were hard at work on the spacecraft for the Apollo program. The important choice of mission mode—rendezvous in lunar orbit—had been made in 1962; it dictated two vehicles, whose construction MSC was supervising. North American Aviation, Inc., of Downey, California, was building the command ship, consisting of a command module and a supporting service module—collectively called the command and service module—which carried the crew to lunar orbit and back to earth. A continent away in Bethpage, Long Island, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation was working on the lunar module, a spidery-looking spacecraft that would set two men down on the moon’s surface and return them to the command module, waiting in lunar orbit, for the trip home to earth. Houston engineers had established the basic design of both spacecraft and were working closely with the contractors in building and testing them. All of the important subsystems—guidance and navigation, propulsion and attitude control, life-support and environmental control—were MSC responsibilities; and beginning with Gemini 4, control of all missions passed to Houston once the booster had cleared the launch pad.⁶

Since the drama of spaceflight was inherent in the risks taken by the men in the spacecraft, public attention was most often directed at the Houston operation. This superficial and news-conscious view, though true enough during flight and recovery, paid scant attention to the launch vehicles and to the complex operations at the launch site, without which the comparatively small spacecraft could never have gone anywhere, let alone to the moon.

The Saturn launch vehicles were the responsibility of NASA’s largest field center, the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, 10 kilometers southwest of Huntsville in northern Alabama. Marshall had been built around the most famous cadre in rocketry—Wernher von Braun and his associates from Peenemünde, Germany’s center for rocket research during World War II. Driven since his schoolboy days by the dream of spaceflight, von Braun in 1965 was well on the way to seeing that dream realized, for the NASA center of which he was director was supervising the development of the Saturn V, the monster three-stage rocket that would power the moon mission.⁷

Marshall Space Flight Center was shaped by experiences quite unlike those that molded the Manned Spacecraft Center. The rocket research and development that von Braun and his colleagues began in Germany in the 1930s had been supported by the German army, and their postwar work continued under the supervision of the U.S. army. In 1950 the group moved to Redstone Arsenal outside Huntsville, where it functioned much as an army arsenal does, not only designing launch vehicles but building them as well. From von Braun all the way down, Huntsville’s rocket builders were dirty-hands engineers, and they had produced many Redstone and Jupiter missiles. In 1962 von Braun remarked in an article written for a management magazine, “we can still carry an idea for a space vehicle … from the concept through the entire development cycle of design, development, fabrication, and testing.” That was the way he felt his organization should operate, and so it did; of 10 first stages built for the Saturn I, 8 were turned out at Marshall.⁸

The sheer size of the Apollo task required a division of responsibility, and the MSC and Marshall shares were sometimes characterized as “above and below the instrument unit.”* To be sure, the booster and its payload were not completely independent, and the two centers cooperated whenever necessary. But on the whole, as Robert Gilruth said of their roles, “They built a damned good rocket and we built a damned good spacecraft.” Von Braun, however, whose thinking had never been restricted to launch vehicles alone, aspired to a larger role for Marshall: manned operations, construction of stations in earth orbit, and all phases of a complete space program—which would eventually encroach on Houston’s responsibilities.⁹

But as long as Marshall was occupied with Saturn, that aspiration was far from realization. Saturn development was proceeding well in 1965. The last test flights of the Saturn I were run off that year and preparations were under way for a series of Saturn IB shots.^† In August each of the three stages of the Saturn V was successfully static-fired at full thrust and duration. Not only that, but the third stage was fired, shut down, and restarted, successfully simulating its role of injecting the Apollo spacecraft into its lunar trajectory. Flight testing remained to be done, but Saturn V had taken a long stride.¹⁰

Confident though they were of ultimate success, Marshall’s 7300 employees could have felt apprehensive about their future that summer. After Saturn V there was nothing on the drawing boards. Apollo still had a long way to go, but most of the remaining work would take place in Houston. Von Braun could hardly be optimistic when he summarized Marshall’s prospects in a mid-August memo. Noting the trend of spaceflight programs, especially booster development, and reminding his coworkers that 200 positions were to be transferred from Huntsville to Houston, von Braun remarked that it was time “to turn our attention to the future role of Marshall in the nation’s space program.” As a headquarters official would later characterize it, Marshall in 1965 was “a tremendous solution looking for a problem.” Sooner than the other centers, Marshall was seriously wondering, “What do we do after Apollo?”¹¹

Some 960 kilometers southeast of Huntsville, halfway down the Atlantic coast of Florida, the third of the manned spaceflight centers had no time for worry about the future. The John F. Kennedy Space Center, usually referred to as “the Cape” from its location adjacent to Cape Canaveral, was in rapid expansion. What had started as the Launch Operations Directorate of Marshall Space Flight Center was, by 1965, a busy center with a total work force (including contractor employees) of 20 000 people. In April construction teams topped off the huge Vehicle Assembly Building, where the 110-meter Saturn V could be assembled indoors. Two months later road tests began for the mammoth crawler-transporter that would move the rocket, complete and upright, to one of two launch pads. Twelve kilometers eastward on the Cape, NASA launch teams were winding up Saturn I flights and working Gemini missions with the Air Force.¹²

Under the directorship of Kurt Debus, who had come from Germany with von Braun in 1945, KSC’s responsibilities included much more than launching rockets. At KSC all of the booster stages and spacecraft first came together, and though they were thoroughly checked and tested by their manufacturers, engineers at the Cape had to make sure they worked when put together. One of KSC’s largest tasks was the complete checkout of every system in the completed vehicle, verifying that NASA’s elaborate system of “interface control” actually worked. If two vehicle components, manufactured by different contractors in different states, did not function together as intended, it was KSC’s job to find out why and see that they were fixed. Checkout responsibility brought KSC into close contact not only with the two other NASA centers but with all of the major contractors.¹³

Responsibility for orchestrating the operations of the field centers and their contractors lay with the Office of Manned Space Flight (OMSF) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. One of three program offices, OMSF reported to NASA’s third-ranking official, Associate Administrator Robert C. Seamans, Jr. Ever since the Apollo commitment in 1961, OMSF had overshadowed the other program offices (the Office of Space Science and Applications and the Office of Advanced Research and Technology) not only in its share of public attention but in its share of the agency’s budget.

Directing OMSF in 1965 was George E. Mueller (pronounced “Miller”), an electrical engineer with a doctorate in physics and 23 years’ experience in academic and industrial research. Before taking the reins as associate administrator for manned spaceflight in 1963, Mueller had been vice president of Space Technology Laboratories, Inc., in Los Angeles, where he was deeply involved in the Air Force’s Minuteman missile program. He had spent his first year in Washington reorganizing OMSF and gradually acclimatizing the field centers to his way of doing business. Considering centralized control t...