Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program (43 page)

Final View of Skylab

The crew took off from Complex 39, Pad B, on November 16, 1973. The launch went well and in less than eight hours, the CSM was in position for docking. Again, the probe did not achieve capture. After two attempts, the crew initiated the hard docking technique and that was successful.

The crew took their prescribed anti-nausea medication, but it did not help Bill Pogue, he became nauseated and vomited a small amount. The crew requested a delay twice from the planned end of day status report and unfortunately decided to minimize Pogue’s condition as nausea only when they finally made their status report.

The spacecraft had the onboard voice recorder with the channel B. This channel recorded all the astronaut communications and dumped the contents to the ground. The internal crew discussion then resulted in a transcript in MCC within less than twenty-four hours. Their downplaying of Pogue’s problem became known and resulted in an admonition delivered by Al Shepard to “tell it straight.” And they did many times during the flight by using Channel B, the voice-dump with a built-in twenty-four-hour delay. This situation had to have been a downer for the crew and it probably inhibited their comments on the normal air to ground circuit, even in the case of the overload of work they were asked to do. They slept in the CSM the first night, as a precaution against moving around in the larger volume workshop, which was believed contributed to the likelihood of nausea.

Once they moved into the Workshop, activation began, and was immediately disrupted when iodine mix was dumped into the waste tank instead of the water tank. They did have an expected repair of the water coolant supply from the EVA suit. There were also some added girth measurements that also took a lot of time, as there was no preflight training for it. There was next a repair of a failed antenna that was on the earth’s side of the ATM. The repair resulted in half of the motion control capability restored, to the delight of the experimenters on the ground. A week into the flight, in a look back session over the first week, Carr explained that things were frantic and they were very frustrated that they were unable to keep up with the flight plan.

Once back at it, one of the control moment gyros (CMG) seized up. The gyros were the muscle of the attitude control system of the Workshop and they were backed up by a nitrogen gas and thruster system that had been used significantly during the early stabilization efforts. The flight controllers were working on procedures to operate in the degraded mode with one of the CMG’s inoperative. The crew continued to complain to MCC on Channel B, but that mode of communication had a limited audience and was delayed. It was certainly not as widespread as a primary air to ground communication loop. As an example of the crew difficulties, the teleprinter was an efficient way to send up changes to the checklist but a message that was three or four inches long on the teleprinter took thirty minutes to transcribe into the checklists. The program scientist, Bob Parker, estimated that the time spent on experiments was about twenty-five man hours per day, down ten percent from the planned rate.

The parahelion (the point of closest approach to the sun) was to occur on the twenty-eighth of December. In the Christmas day EVA, Carr and Pogue reloaded the ATM film, pinned the now functioning door open, then repaired a filter wheel and bent the shutter blade out of the way. Carr and Gibson performed another EVA on December twenty-ninth, specifically for comet observation and recording with hand held instruments. It should be noted that in the second half of December the crew kept up with timeline.However, the continuing sense of an overloaded timeline caused Carr to communicate his questions to the ground via the Channel B communication link. He wanted to know how they were doing. Did the single exercise take too much time? If the experiment program was behind, what can be done to close the gap? The ground also was inhibited by the open air to ground loop and they did not want to press the issue. In response they sent up a long teleprinter message trying to give an overall summary of where they were on the timeline. And they scheduled a debrief for December thirtieth on the open loop. The plan compared the experiment hours for Skylab 4 for just the second half of the first month and they were very close. This exchange made the parties wish they had done that earlier.

The flight controllers tried using heaters to warm the lubricating oil for the CMG. There was also a conference between all the crewmembers and all the experimenters. This was very good and helped to give both camps a better understanding of what had gone on and was coming in the future. Gibson spent a lot of time and even stretched his time trying to catch solar flares with the instruments and he finally did catch one in the last days of the mission and described it to the ground.

It was now time to deactivate Skylab and prepare for separation and entry. The CSM thrusters were used to increase the orbit altitude and added approximately five to eight years of on orbit time for the workshop. No one had any particular plan to use that time but it gave the maximum time possible. As they left, the vehicle was unpowered and left in a configuration with the docking port up, pointing away from Earth. During the period after deorbit and before entry, Carr was surprised because of the loss of attitude control of the CSM. He quickly switched over to the backup system. The crew landed safely after a record eighty-four days on orbit. No Skylab debriefings for me. It is time to recycle the clock to several months earlier in ASTP time and pick up the rest of the busy 1973 year.

I cannot exactly place when Alex Tatischeff showed up to help us with interpreter duties, but it was most likely during 1972. He was in his seventies and as soon as he showed up, I claimed him as my interpreter. He seemed happy with that. He had a courtly, gentlemanly manner about him and made a positive impression on all who met him. This was first impression, soon to be confirmed by various acts of kindness, thoughtfulness, caring and insights. They spread outward from Alex like rays from a light.

Alex was raised in an aristocratic family in the Czar’s court. His father was the Czar’s ambassador to Germany. He was especially well versed in Russian history. He always differentiated between his country, Mother Russia, and the present “regime,” as he called it, as if it were a temporary condition. At the time of the revolution, Alex was about sixteen. He fled the country and escaped through the Caucusus. I only know a few facts about the next times of his life. He got to Paris somewhere in the ‘20s and lived by singing in cabarets. His thirties and forties are unrecorded by us. He arrived in America by the ‘50s and worked in the Agricultural Department until a Senator named Joe McCarthy came on the scene. His purge of Communists caught this Russian émigré’ in its sweep and he was extradited to somewhere. He showed up in the ‘70s as an interpreter, maybe via the State Department or the interpreter community. He said he was drawn to the ASTP venture to help his new country, America, do something out of this world with his birth country, Russia. A patriot, twice over.

Sometimes, I forgot Russia was his home, now long removed. We were walking through a palace in St. Petersburg that was designated as an “Institute of Friendship and Peace” by our hosts. This was a typical over-done title, much like the Communist slogans on the buildings. As we walked listening to the guide’s description, Alex leaned over towards me and whispered that his sister had once owned this place. He was connected, even if by the past. Whenever we walked through Moscow, he would likely be wearing his three-piece-suit and overcoat, tall and distinguished. Almost all of the “babushka ladies” who passed us would give this nod of respect to Alex. It was definitely not directed at me. It was as if they saw something in him, maybe something they had lost and still missed. Or maybe it was just my imagination. But it happened all the time.

Alex Tatischeff and Professor Bushuyev

But, it was not my imagination to know how much Alex helped me in understanding our counterparts. He knew when I was pressing too hard and managed to get a time-out. Or he just let something cook a little and become ready in its own time. For good reasons, and some not to be discussed, he was also trusted by the Soviets in both little and big things. They respected him and sometimes used him as a conduit to us. It was heart-warming to see this honorable man, in his twilight years, finding ways to help both of us in this venture to make space travel safer for the humans who traveled there.

Dave Scott was head of the NASA delegation for the June 18, 1973, meeting in Moscow. I had decided to stay through the Skylab crew visit and return. Dave went through all the preps for the meeting and it was good to get another experienced hand testing the ASTP process. It was also an opportunity for Dave to live and breathe what our WG chairmen were dealing with.

WG1 introduced the experiments subgroup. They identified all the experiments and the schedule for them. Paul Jashke and Yuri Denisov were the co-chairmen of this group. This was our first opportunity to brief the Soviet team on what the experiments were and how they would interact with the crew and flight plan.

WG2 had a design acceptance review of the docking target. The docking target review was completed and the U.S. fixture for alignment of the docking system target on Soyuz was finalized. Soyuz control requirements for the docked phase were up for discussion. Earlier discussion outlined the problem and requirements for the Soyuz to perform, and the Soviets backed off their documentation obligation. They were not ready to provide the info at an appropriate level of detail to satisfy the terms of the problem. Legostayev decided to delay the discussion until a splinter meeting in Houston during July.

WG4 was reported as unsatisfactory. Dave Scott reported that they did not bring the agreed documentation, some was late and there were unexplained absences on the part of their key players. What they brought was poor and their chairman and people were sometimes missing. Dave had reported these failures to Professor Bushuyev, who again responded that he would take care of it.

In WG5, the U.S. side discussed the results of our thermal analysis on materials in the docking system, life support systems and comm gear. We agreed to provide analysis of the Apollo RCS impingement on the docking system seals.

The results in WG2 were disappointing. This group has spent much time discussing these issues without a lot of schedule pressure and there should be little room to not know what is expected. As to WG4, soon after I thought they were finally on track and had told Professor Bushuyev that they had improved, WG4 failed again. They did not bring the goods and were occasionally AWOL.

The continuing deficiency of the Soviet side in WG4 lead me to document specific failures over an extended period of non-performance and incorporate it in a private letter to my counterpart. (There may be some internal reason why this continues. If I had all these complaints over such a long time, the person would have long since been replaced. Why is Nikitin still here?) The letter was several pages, some of it very blunt and requested his firm action. These brief excerpts capture the tone:

“Despite these very significant accomplishments, I am still concerned about the delay we are experiencing in obtaining pertinent technical and program related data from your side. As I discussed earlier, we have experienced a delay in exchange of material of up to nine months. This has occurred even though we have signed minutes committing ourselves to specific dates for these exchanges. Our experience indicates that the need for rapid exchange of information reports greatly increases as the time for flight approaches.”

Referring to WG4, “I think we both agree that the work of this group has not been satisfactory, and this has been due to a lack of timely preparation, primarily, on the USSR side.”

In a splinter meeting on June twenty-seventh to July eleventh, 1973, WG3 signed off on the safety assessment report for the inadvertent opening of the structural latches. They defined the test procedures for the next docking systems tests and the Soviet docking system seals were provided for Rockwell to test the seals of both sides.

As I relate these various activities, I acknowledge that most of them are accounts of the WG process and surrounding events by which we negotiated all the necessary agreements and actions to implement the project on the level where it met the other side. While we construct and operate this new arrangement, there is a considerable amount of attention that must continually be paid to the daily flow of issues internal to our side – technical, budget, interactions, relationships, requests, et cetera.

As a way of trying to convey something of the rhythm that is Program Management at JSC, my office and others like it at JSC have a regular communication with the Center Director, Chris Kraft. My deputy and I would have a regular status meeting with Kraft once a week and more often as need arose. The purpose of the meeting is to report all of the major influences and issues relative to the project, the status of our progress, actions we are taking, items that Kraft might need to address. We include the regular flow of technical spacecraft problems and resolutions, budget matters, contracts and upcoming issues requiring interactions with other organizations, including HQ. The measure of success was whether we leave the boss informed, not surprised by developments and synchronized with our mutual priorities. For reference, the Skylab spacecraft were CSM 116,117 and 118 for the planned flights with 119 as the rescue ship. Plus, the presently excess CSM 115 and 115A were awaiting assignment or disposition. CSM 111 was the primary ship for ASTP and when 119 was released from Skylab support, it would serve as a backup to 111. There are also the docking module, docking system, other flight hardware and software, and other supporting facilities. Then there was the daily traffic and problem solving for all the CSMs.