Today In History 

On this date 31 years ago, the second crew of Skylab launched to dock with the station.

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In 1969, the movie “Marooned” told the story of an Apollo crew who were stranded by a thruster malfunction during a long-duration mission, leading to the staging of a rescue mission to save them. The fictional story came close to seeing a real-life retelling four years later. As the second crew of Skylab prepared to rendezvous with the station, Pilot Jack Lousma spotted what looked like a thruster nozzle floating past his window. The object was not a nozzle, but rather a piece of ice which had formed inside a nozzle and thus bore its shape--symptomatic of another problem: a leak in one of the quads of maneuvering thrusters. The crew secured the malfunctioning quad and continued the rendezvous with the crippled command and service module. Commander Alan Bean piloted the craft with only a portion the maneuvering authority the vehicle should have offered, while Science Pilot Owen Garriott sat in the center seat, rapidly performing the calculations that would allow for a safe docking.

With the command module safely docked and the crew aboard Skylab, the situation seemed to be behind them. Until, that is, the sixth day of the mission, when one of the astronauts, observing an aurora from a window noticed snow outside. Snow being a rare occurrence in space, the crew realized that something must be wrong. And indeed it was--a second set of quad thrusters had developed a leak. With no idea what was causing the leaks, ground controllers feared that they might be linked, and that the same problem might affect one of the service module’s other quads during the remaining 50 days the crew was scheduled to remain in orbit. While they were confident the crew could return to Earth with the two maneuvering quads they still had, additional malfunctions would jeopardize their safe reentry. And so, efforts began to plan a rescue mission to bring the astronauts home.

Skylab had been designed to accommodate just such a rescue mission. The multiple docking adapter featured ports for two command modules. If the Apollo spacecraft that had carried the crew to the station could not be used to bring them home, a second vehicle could be launched, and could dock with the adapter’s second port. The crew would return to Earth aboard the second Apollo, and the one they rode into orbit would be deorbited. Engineers had figured out a way to modify the three-person Apollo spacecraft to carry five people. Were a rescue necessary, a two-person crew would pilot the rescue craft to Skylab, and then all five astronauts would ride it back home. For the Skylab II rescue mission, astronauts Vance Brand and Don Lind were selected as the rescue crew, and even had an official crew portrait made. While they were awaiting the order to launch, Brand and Lind began looking into whether the crew would be able to return safely. The two rookie astronauts joked that they were working their way out of their chance for a spaceflight. (Both would later get their chance to make flights).

Ultimately, it was decided that since the rescue mission could not be flown until day 43 of the Skylab II mission, there was no reason to order an early termination; a decision which suited the second crew just fine. There were no further malfunctions, and on the 60th day of their mission, the crew returned to Earth safely in the command module aboard which they launched.

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:: :: 08:56 :: David :: [permalink] ::