Skylab's "Mr. Fixit"

To his friends, Astronaut Charles ("Pete") Conrad Jr. is known as "Mr. Fixit." During his youth, his mother recalls, he spent hours with Erector sets, model planes and finally cars and motorcycles. While in quarantine after his Apollo 12 moon-landing, he assembled a complex stereo system. Last week the 43-year-old Navy captain continued to live up to his reputation as Houston's No. 1 amateur mechanic. During a daring and dangerous four-hour walk in space--the longest ever attempted--he and Fellow Astronaut Joseph Kerwin freed Skylab's jammed solar wing, thus probably saving the mission and brightening chances for the completion of the $2.6 billion Skylab program.

Power Shortage. As Conrad and his crew ended their second week in space, those chances seemed dim indeed. Skylab's power shortage--which resulted from the jamming of one solar panel and the loss of another during launch, when the orbital workshop's meteoroid and thermal shielding ripped off--had suddenly been compounded by a severe new problem. Two of Skylab's 18 storage batteries had failed.

Four more batteries were performing far below normal, apparently because of excessive heat and overuse. When another battery faltered in midweek (only to revive mysteriously the next day), NASA officials feared that the mission might have to be drastically curtailed.

They pointed out that the loss of only one more battery might 1) force the shutdown of the orbital workshop, 2) require the halt of all major experiments --including important biomedical tests --and 3) compel the astronauts to retreat to the cramped quarters of the Apollo command ship.

Having sufficient battery power was vital to the mission. Every time Skylab was in the earth's shadow--for some 30 minutes during each 90-minute orbit --the production of electricity by the four working windmill-shaped solar panels atop the telescope mount ceased, leaving the lab completely reliant on its batteries. Freeing the jammed solar wing thus assumed even greater importance: it could provide Skylab with another 3,000 watts of electricity while it was in sunlight and charge up eight idle batteries connected to the wing.

Soon after the astronauts had rendezvoused with Skylab last month, Astronaut Paul Weitz--leaning out of the Apollo command module--had attempted to pull the jammed wing out with a long-handled tool that resembled a boat hook. But a 2-ft.-long scrap of aluminum from the ripped shield was so tightly wrapped around the bottom of the wing that it would not extend.

NASA's engineers and technicians, who had already displayed extraordinary Yankee ingenuity in fashioning Skylab's makeshift sunshade, refused to give up. Experimenting with duplicates of tools aboard Skylab, they devised techniques for cutting, sawing and even prying off the metal. Practicing with these tools in simulated conditions of weightlessness in NASA'S big water test tank at Huntsville, Ala., Backup Astronauts Rusty Schweickart and Ed Gibson demonstrated that the implements might well work in space.

Thus Mission Control gave the astronauts permission for the space walk. After donning their pressure suits, all three astronauts moved from the orbital-workshop area of Skylab into the multiple docking adapter. Then, while Weitz remained behind, Conrad and

Kerwin went outside through a small side hatch in the airlock module.

Skylab was just about to enter the earth's shadow, and the astronauts had to begin their work illuminated only by lights in the hatch area. After they assembled five sections of tubing into a 25-ft.-long extension pole and attached it to a 2-ft.-long cutting tool similar to pruning shears, they untangled the long, snaking umbilical cords that provided them with oxygen and a communications link to Skylab and Mission Control. Then, as the sun reappeared, they began to make their way through the maze of trusses on Skylab's telescope mount, circled part way around the outside of the cylindrical airlock module and finally arrived within pole's reach of the jammed solar wing.

Working in the weightless environment proved difficult and strenuous; Kerwin's pulse went up as high as 150 beats a minute. "Take it easy," advised Space Veteran Conrad,* whose own heartbeat rose only to 110. While Conrad held the rope to the cutters, Kerwin tried to direct the pole so that the blades hooked around the aluminum strip. "I can't stabilize myself," he complained as he failed again and again. "I just can't do it." Finally, just as the spacecraft was about to make another pass into darkness--which would have forced the astronauts to halt their work because the illumination from the hatch area did not reach the solar wing--the cutter moved into place.

By then Skylab had passed out of range of ground listening posts, and the astronauts toiled for more than an hour in radio silence. It was only when Skylab moved back within range of NASA'S big dish antenna in California's Mojave Desert that Mission Control learned the results. "We got the wing out and locked," reported Conrad. With a tug from the astronauts, the solar wing had swung out perpendicular to the ship and its accordion-like silicon panels were unfolding. However, hydraulic fluid in the panels' spring mechanism had stiffened in the extreme cold, and the panels only partially came out. Yet by week's end the warming rays had thawed the fluid. The panels extended fully, and the eight previously idle batteries began charging up.

Meanwhile, Conrad described to Mission Control exactly why the crucial solar wing had been jammed. The strip of aluminum that obstructed it had been held in place by a single 3/16-in. bolt that had penetrated the solar wing when the shield was ripped off. "One lousy, single bolt," said Conrad incredulously. "Everything else was free."

*Who last week broke the record for total time in space, exceeding Jim Lovell's 715 hr. 5 min.

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