29. Was it hard work?
Some work tasks were very difficult, but most were routine and merely took adequate time. The hardest jobs were repair and maintenance tasks that involved a lot of physical force, such as pushing, pulling, or twisting.
Sometimes there was no convenient surface or handgrip to hold on to with the free hand, so as to balance the force applied with the working hand. A typical problem we faced was in trying to loosen or tighten screws on a large flat surface. To apply a strong twist force, you normally have to push on the screwdriver while twisting it. In doing one repair job, I found it necessary to rig pull straps for my left hand so I could pull to balance the push force of my right hand. If you’re patient and aren’t pressed for time, these problems become an interesting challenge. If you’re trying to meet a critical time schedule, it can be very irritating and frustrating.
On the average, we figured it took about twice the time to do a job in weightlessness than it took on Earth. One particular servicing task I did was extremely hard to do even on the ground. It involved reaching into an enclosed area to disconnect and reconnect two plumbing lines by sliding metal sleeves on pipes that ran sideways to my arm direction. I only had to do it once in space, but that was enough. My legs were thrashing around as I tried to get my arms in the best position, and, when I finally finished, my wrists were scratched and cut from banging into the sheet-metal edges around the access opening. I really felt “pooped” by the end of the day. You can’t “stretch yourself” like you can on Earth when you keep going to finish a long job.
30. What did you do on space walks?
On space walks, we repaired a radar antenna used for Earth studies and a telescope used to look at the sun. On the inside of Skylab, we repaired cooling systems, tape recorders, and many of the scientific instruments.
Some of the repair jobs were really crude because we didn’t have the right tools or materials. Ed Gibson operated one instrument that used batteries to power a light inside to create a sighting reference on a mirror surface. The batteries kept running down and Ed had to keep installing fresh batteries. Finally, he ran out of spare batteries, so he had to dig out some other batteries, which were intended for our tape recorders, and try to make them work. They didn’t fit in the instrument, so he had to run wires from the inside of the instrument and tape them on the battery terminals. It worked, but it really looked weird. The clump of batteries sort of floated on the end of the wires, and Ed finally had to tape the whole glob on the side of the instrument. Ed said we were bumping into the batteries and loosening the wires. I was surprised that the tape held the wires snuggly enough against the battery terminals to make a good electrical connection. Early in Skylab training we had asked for a soldering iron as a part of our tool kit, but the mission planners said there was no need for one and disapproved the request. As it turned out, a soldering iron would have been very useful when Ed rigged his battery assembly.
31. Was it hard to work while in a space suit?
Yes. The suit is bulky and stiff, which makes it difficult to bend or turn your body. The gloves are very thick, so you don’t have much feel. Because air pressure in the gloves tends to hold the fingers out straight, it is very tiring to maintain a grip on anything. I always felt like a “bull in a china closet” when working in a space suit. After doing a lot of work in a suit, my fingertips became very sore and tender and I had cuts and burns on my shoulders from the braided metal arm support cables inside the suit. Even so, we enjoyed the space walks and looked forward to the chance to get outside. I was out on a space walk once for six and a half hours and once for seven hours.
The suits used by Space Shuttle astronauts provide better torso mobility (twisting at the waist), the arms and legs are a bit easier to move and the suit is easier to put on. However, hand and finger movements still require a lot of effort and hand fatigue and finger irritation are still experienced.
32. When you were on a space walk, did you work during darkness? (The periods of light and dark are about fifty minutes and forty minutes respectively.)
Yes, if we had lights in the area where we were working. For some of the repair work there was no lighting provided, so we had to stop work while we were on the night side of the Earth. It can often cause difficulties when darkness comes right in the middle of a task.
33. What did you do if your nose itched when you were in your space suit?
Not only did my nose itch occasionally, but also my ears. Because a scratch is almost an involuntary reaction, I frequently reached up to scratch my nose and hit my helmet—which can make you feel really dumb. I scratched my nose by rubbing it on a little nose pincher device we used to clear our ears. If our ears stopped up or became uncomfortable due to pressure changes in the suit, the procedure was to press the nose against this open “V” device in order to hold our nostrils closed while we exerted a slight blowing pressure. This is a common technique used by fliers to clear their ears. This little nose pincher also made a nice nose scratcher. If our ears itched, we just had to tolerate it. I usually tried rubbing the side of my head against the inside of the helmet, but it didn’t help much. The best thing to do was to think of something else.
34. Was it quiet or noisy in space?
Sound can’t travel through space because there is no air to carry the sound waves. However, there was a moderate noise level inside Skylab, most of which was caused by pumps, fans, and voice chatter on the radio. We had a teleprinter which made a pecking sound similar to a typewriter—this made it difficult to sleep at times. Occasionally, small thrusters on the outside of Skylab would fire, which sounded like someone hammering on a large piece of metal. The most peculiar sound we noticed was a deep rumble which occurred about every forty-five minutes. It sounded like the roll of distant thunder. We finally decided it was due to alternate heating and cooling of the side of Skylab that faced the sun. This surface expanded as it heated up and shrank (contracted) as it cooled. The noise created was similar to the crackling sound made by a furnace or wood stove as it heats up or cools down. The total structure of Skylab was so large that it produced a low-pitched rumble instead of a crackling noise.
35. What kind of tools did you have?
Because of the long missions scheduled on Skylab, it was thought that we would need an assortment of tools to repair breakdowns in equipment. We had a rather complete set of light tools, and we used most of them at one time or the other. Most of the tools were bought at hardware stores, but some were specially made for anticipated repair work. The tools included various types of screwdrivers and pliers, socket wrenches, and torque wrenches. Special tool kits were also provided for repair jobs on space walks. Each astronaut had pockets in his trousers to carry a Swiss army knife and a pair of surgical scissors, which were used frequently for minor repair work.
When using tools requiring a lot of force like screwdrivers or socket wrenches, it was necessary to have your body firmly restrained or tied down before applying force; otherwise, when you applied force, your body would move instead of the wrench. For example, if you floated over to a panel, inserted a screwdriver into the slot of a screw, and twisted your wrist, the screw wouldn’t turn—you would!
36. Did you ever lose anything?
Yes. Several items were lost and never found. Frequently, our tableware, usually a knife, would get knocked off the magnetized surface on our food trays. The air flow in Skylab would usually carry the items to a filter screen in the air duct system, where they would stick due to the slight vacuum. This was the first place we looked when something was missing.
One day, when I whirled around to get a camera to take a picture of Hawaii, my eyeglasses flew off. I heard them bouncing around through the experiment compartment as I was taking the picture, but when I went to get them, I couldn’t find them. Three days later, Dr. Gibson found them floating near the ceiling in his sleep compartment.
I had a spare set of half-specs, granny glasses, which I used until Ed found my bifocals. I did
n’t like the half-specs because the straight ear pieces allowed the lenses to float up off my nose and bob up and down in front of my eyes. It was very distracting when I was using both hands to do a job.
37. How did you clean the spacecraft, or did you have to clean the spacecraft?
As on Earth, a lot of trash accumulated during the day, but most of it was immediately placed in a waste container. However, bits of skin, fingernails, hair, food crumbs, odd pieces of paper, and the like tended to drift around and eventually were sucked up against air filters. We used vacuum cleaners to clean off the filters, and that took care of most of the problem. The worst mess was in the area where we ate. Small drops of liquid from our drinks and crumbs from our food would float around until they stuck on the wall or in an open grid ceiling above our food table, and it became quite dirty. Although we could see into this ceiling area, we couldn’t get our hands in to wipe it clean, so it became progressively worse throughout the mission. Near the end of the flight, it began to look like the bottom of a bird cage. I just stopped looking at the ceiling after a while because it was such a mess.
38. How did you write?
I found that a lot of writing became an irritating task in weightlessness, particularly when it had to be done on narrow strips of paper that came out of our teleprinter. This paper was just a bit wider than the paper used in cash registers. It tended to curl up and was hard to hold steady on a flat surface. We often used the food tray tops, our dinner table, as a desk, and we had to exert effort to bend forward to get into a good position to write. Also, we had to hold downward force to keep our hand and arms down on the table while writing. Other astronauts didn’t seem to mind this as much as I did.
39. Did you use pen or pencil?
We used mechanical pencils, pressurized ball-point pens that assured ink flow in weightlessness, and felt-tip pens. The ball-points and mechanical pencils worked well, but felt-tips dried out very quickly in the low humidity of Skylab, so they weren’t of much use.
Pencil leads did break off, but they didn’t cause any problems, even though it would have been possible to get a piece in the eye—or inhale it.
40. How did you keep a book open to the right page?
This occasionally became a real problem. Most of our flight documents were printed on stiff paper and held together by metal rings which could be opened to insert or remove pages. We had clips to hold the books open to the right page, but they didn’t attach very tightly and occasionally they would pop off and the whole book would fan open—costing us considerable time in relocating the right page. The covers were made of extra heavy paper to make it easy to find the front of the book and the index.
When reading a book from our personal library, which was mostly paperbacks, we held the book with one hand, with our thumb in the open crease, and dog-eared the pages to mark our place.
41. What would happen to water on Skylab? How did free water behave in weightlessness?
In weightlessness, water and other thin liquids must be fully enclosed in a container to prevent them from spilling and floating around. Water in a drinking glass would tend to crawl up the inside surface, over the edge, and down the outside of the glass. Free water droplets become spherical or ball-shaped. Large drops or balls of water quiver and jiggle like gelatin as they float about. On Skylab, we performed many science demonstrations with water drops.
42. Did you bring food, clothes, etc. with you when you went to visit Skylab?
We brought a twenty-eight day supply of food (food bars, some freeze-dried foods—and drinks) to supplement the fifty-six day supply already on board Skylab, and we brought enough underwear and socks for the extra month.
Each astronaut selected his menu items from a shopping list prepared by NASA dieticians. We had dehydrated scrambled eggs. After adding water and heating them, they were quite good. We had canned fruit (peaches, pears) and dried fruit (apricots). For the first time in space, we had frozen food, which included steak, prime rib, pork, and ice cream. We had no bread or milk. We also had a wide variety of drinks, which included orange, grapefruit, strawberry, cherry, grape, and coffee and tea.
The only food that was a disappointment was the chili. I was really looking forward to having it, but the oil separated from the meat and sauce and it looked very unappetizing when we opened the can. I stirred it up as much as I could and jammed my crackers into the can before eating it.
43. How did you keep frozen food frozen?
There was a food freezer on Skylab, which was kept below freezing by coolant chilled in a radiator on the outside at the rear of the space station. We had the same problem with frost inside the freezer as you have here on Earth, and we had to remove the frost frequently. We used wet cloths to melt the ice around the door and on the inside. It was a slow, unpleasant job, and we usually took turns during the process because our hands got so cold.
44. How did you cook your food?
We didn’t cook our food, but we did warm solid foods like precooked meats and vegetables in their metal containers by placing them in food tray cavities that were warmed by electrical heating elements.
Skylab had a hot water system, and coffee or tea could be prepared easily and quickly.
45. How do you keep the food on your plate?
We didn’t have plates. Our food came in cans and plastic bags that fitted into cavities in our food trays. We used a fork and spoon to get the food from the containers and a knife and fork to cut the solid meats.
There was a thin plastic cover over most of the canned food. We cut a crisscross slit in the plastic and fished the food out with a spoon or fork. The natural “stickiness” (surface tension) of the food and the plastic cover held it in quite well. Occasionally, little bits of food or meat juice would float out as we took a bite. We would dab at it with a tissue as it floated above the table, and we got most of it. Unfortunately, we didn’t get it all, and the droplets would usually float up, due to airflow, and stick to the ceiling. Thick soups and ice cream tended to stick to the spoon, so you could eat them normally, as long as you didn’t make any abrupt movements.
46. Did you have catsup and mustard?
Yes. It was in little plastic sacks similar to the kind you use at a fast-food restaurant. We also had hot sauce, liquid pepper in restaurant-type squeeze bottles, and horseradish, which we mixed into a paste and spread on our meat. The liquid pepper was especially good and had a full, fresh flavor.
We had salt water in a dispenser that looked like a hypodermic syringe with a plastic nozzle. We squirted the salt solution directly on our food.
NOTE: The first Skylab crew had no condiments at all. The Commander, Pete Conrad, really blasted the planners when he got back and raised such a fuss about the bland, yucky-tasting food that condiments were finally added. The second crew tried regular ground pepper and salt, but they didn’t work too well. By the time we launched, the dietician had worked out a good scheme for dispensing a wide selection of condiments. Pete Conrad really did us a great service by insisting on the addition of condiments.
47. Did you have recycled water?
No. Skylab carried about one-thousand gallons of water for drinking and also for bathing. If Skylab had been designed for repeated visits over several years, then recycling of water would have been practical. The simplest recycling system is to remove water from the spacecraft atmosphere. This water would come from exhaled air and moisture evaporated from the skin, i.e. sweat. We actually removed this water, but we didn’t use it for anything. It was collected in a waste water tank. (The Russian cosmonauts reuse this water in their Salyut space station.) A more complete water recycling scheme would also include reprocessing of liquid body waste, urine.
If this sounds offensive, just remember that the Earth is a closed life (ecological) system. Something has to happen to all the liquid waste of animal life. It is recycled in our natural system through evaporation and subsequent rainfall, if you’re lucky. Some of it isn’t even recycled if your city water su
pply comes from a river downstream of another city using the river as a sewage dump.
48. How did you drink?
A water dispenser similar to a water gun was used to take a drink of water by holding the nozzle, or point of the dispenser, in the mouth and squirting the water directly in. Flavored drinks like coffee, tea, or orange were prepared by forcing water from hot or cold water dispensers into the plastic container. It held a flavored mixture which was dissolved by the water—we usually shook it to mix it. The plastic container squeezed up like an accordion and had a valve on the nozzle to keep the liquid from leaking out. To drink, we put the nozzle in our mouths, opened the valve with our teeth, and squeezed the bag to squirt the drink into our mouths.
49. Did you have trouble swallowing?
No. We had no trouble swallowing, but there was one bad aspect of swallowing drinks from the plastic drink containers. I think it bothered me more than the others. When I drank from the plastic squeeze-drink bags, I tended to swallow a lot of air with the liquid. This caused an uncomfortable pressure in my stomach which normally would be relieved by burping or belching. But—in weightlessness—the contents of the stomach don’t settle; they coat the stomach more or less uniformly. So, if you burp, you stand a very good chance of regurgitating. The gas pressure in the stomach is unpleasant, but the consequences of burping are even worse. I think I only burped twice in eighty-four days. Once my exercise period had been scheduled right after breakfast and I had only been pedaling the bicycle a short time when I got this strong desire to burp. I fought it, but it happened anyway. I gritted my teeth, swallowed it, and kept right on pedaling.
How Do You Go to the Bathroom In Space? Page 2