Skylab–PART 1
Announced at a press conference by George Mueller, NASA’s Associate Administrator of Manned Spaceflight, that AAP missions would start in 1968, the plan was that several visits to the workshop by different three-man crews with flight durations up to 56 days. Other modules would also be launched, including a solar observatory called the Apollo Telescope Mount. It would be attached to the workshop in orbit with additional workshops and missions that would follow within the year.
First of all, a Saturn 1B would be launched into Earth orbit with its S-1VB upper stage. The crew of three astronauts would be launched in a modified Apollo CSM and a Multiple Doc King Adapter (MDA). In orbit, the S-1VB would be dried out of fuel, and then linked up with the MDA and Apollo CSM. It would become a habitable workshop with equipment carried up in other units–known as the “wet” workshop, it is a spent-stage concept. However, all plans came to a halt when Grissom, White and Chaffee burned to death on the launch pad of Complex 34 at Cape Canaveral. Resources allocated to the Apollo Applications Program were given to redesigning the Apollo command module and catching with moon-landing schedules.
A modified S-1VB rocket stage of a Saturn 1B was the main part of Skylab. It was called the orbital workshop (OWS) and included space for crew quarters, experiment compartment, and storage for most of the expendables such as food and water. A meteoroid shield provided thermal protection as well as protecting the outside from impact by space particles. The workshop was supplied with some 10 kilowatts of power by a pair of solar cell arrays as big as barn doors attached to the sides of the OWS. A two-story structure, the OWS’s lower level was the crew quarters, the living room was the wardroom, containing a galley and a table .
The waste management compartment, or the toilet facilities, sleeping area and an experiment with apparatus, including a rotating chair and a bicycle ergometer. The forward compartment or upper level is a major storage area for clothing, food and experimental equipment and the spacesuits. An airlock module (AM) was attached to the forward dome of the OWS. When astronauts needed to perform EVA’s, they could isolate the module from the rest of the craft and depressurized it. It also doubled as a control center for Skylab, particularly for life support and communications systems. It held nitrogen and oxygen tanks which supplied the atmosphere in Skylab.
May 14, 1973 was launch day for the unmanned Skylab. The United States would soon have its space station as the Saturn V thundered into the sky smoothly precisely on time. However, it wasn’t the first space station. Two years earlier, Russians launched their first space station, Salyut 1, however it was much smaller than Skylab. Cosmonauts, Georgi Dobrovolsky, Viktor Patseyev and Vladislav Volkov spent a record 24 days in space on their second visit to Salyut. Returning to Earth, in a spherical re-entry capsule, the cosmonauts were dead. They were killed by spacecraft depressurization after an equipment malfunction.
This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Mission History, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
