TechStuff Visits Space Stations

We've talked about space suits. Now it's time to talk about space stations! From the first Salyut space station to the incredible story of Skylab, we look at early space stations in this episode.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and a love of all things tech. And just in
case this sounds different, it's because I'm once again recording

(00:24):
on my own equipment, but in the office studio. So
just in case you think it sounds weird, and it's
not just me, that's why. But we recently did a
history of the evolution of the space suit and how
countries like Russia and the United States dedicated millions of
dollars in research and development to create suits that would

(00:46):
help astronauts and cosmonauts survive the rigors of traveling to
space and then back to Earth. I mentioned the International
Space Station a couple of times in that series and thought,
you know, I haven't really done any episodes talking about
space stations or how the I s S came to
be and what folks do up there as they whizz
around the Earth at four point seven six miles per

(01:09):
second or seven point six six kilometers per second for
you know, everyone who's not in the US. And I
figured that it was more than past time to cover
these sort of things, because you know, the modules that
make up the I S S were originally rated for
a fifteen year lifespan, but the first modules for the
International Space Station launched in So if you do your math,

(01:33):
that means that puts the fifteen year market two thousand thirteen,
and we are well past that as it stands. There's
hope that we could see the I S S continue
to operate for another few years to hit that thirty
year mark, but recently we've seen some claims that suggest
the end might need to come a little earlier than

(01:54):
that if we want to avert catastrophe, because parts of
the I S S are a little worse for where
But of course this is tech stuff that means we
have to dive into a lot of history before we
get to the I S S. In fact, spoiler alert,
we won't be touching on the International Space Station in
this episode. We'll be getting that in a later one.

(02:15):
So the International Space Station was not the first space
station in orbit. That honor goes to the first Saliot
space Station, and there were multiple of those, and those
came from the then Soviet Union. Now earlier this year
we passed the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Saliot
one that got off the ground literally on April nineteenth,

(02:39):
ninety one. Now, this space station is important for quite
a few reasons. Not only was it the first space station,
but elements in the Saliot would continue down through a
line of different space station and spacecraft designs out of
the U. S. S R, and then later out of
Russia to find their way into components that are now

(03:02):
part of the International Space Station. So it's all going
to tie together in the end. But first, let's talk
about Salute, which means salute. Surprisingly enough, it got its
start in the nineteen sixties with Soviet scientists discussing the
possibility of developing a space station specifically for military purposes.

(03:25):
So this project had the name alamas A l m
ay Z, which means diamond in Russian and I'm sure
I'm mispronouncing it. My apologies to all you Russian speakers
out there. So the real purpose of the Alma's stations
were to serve as reconnaissance operations, so spying. In other words. Now,

(03:47):
generally speaking, it's not incredibly wise to advertise that you're
engaged in spying. It's kind of defeats the purpose. So
the Soviets decided that they would mask that and they
would launch a series of civilian space stations UH specifically
dedicated to scientific research, and then they would just kind

(04:09):
of hide the military ones in the mix. So some
of those stations would genuinely be about scientific exploration and experimentation,
some of them were more about peeping on the neighbors. Also.
The original plan was for the Alma's stations to be
modular in design, but the success of the Apollo eleven

(04:32):
moon landing in nineteen sixty nine spurred the Soviets to
move up their timeline and that necessitated a change in plans.
So instead of going with the modular Alma's space station,
which would mean that you would have to launch components
in separate launches, and then crews would need to go
up into space and assemble those modules together to create

(04:54):
a space station, the Soviets decided to instead rely on
a Salute design and all in one space station that
could be launched fully constructed into space. The first Saliot
was one of the civilian missions, so not one of
the secret military ones. UH. Saliot two, three, and five

(05:14):
were all military projects, so they were really mixed in
there also, Quickside notes Saliot to suffered a catastrophic failure
just two weeks of it being launched into orbit. The
station depressurized after a collision with a part of the
launch vehicle system and ended up moving lower in orbit

(05:37):
until it re entered the our atmosphere and broke apart. Now,
fortunately there were no cosmonauts aboard because no Soviet crew
had yet visited the launched station, which meant that no
lives were lost as a result of this incident. So
to visit a Saliot station, in order to get there,

(06:00):
crew of cosmonauts would launch inside a Soyu's space capsule
talked about those in the space suit episodes, and this
capsule would be you know, attached to a launch vehicle,
a rocket in other words, and the Soyus capsule would
get launched into orbit and that would be on a
trajectory to dock with the Salut station using a new

(06:23):
probe and drogue docking system. So the probe is the
part that you know, docks inside the drogue. And it
was originally going to have the name Zaria, the original
original space station was. In fact, it had that name
so long the engineers actually painted the name on the spacecraft.
It had the name Zaria on it. That means dawn

(06:46):
by the way. However, for several reasons, and they were
all pretty valid ones, the Soviets decided that they needed
to rename the spacecraft, so they renamed Saliot. But there
wasn't enough time to give the space station a new
paint jobs, so while it was named Saliott, it had
the name Zaria painted on it. Also, the development of

(07:07):
the Saliot station had some drama attached to it, and
I'm gonna have to do a full episode about the
Soviet era space program to talk more about not just
the program and the technology used and the goals of
the program, but also the rivalries that existed within the
program itself. So the guy who designed the Soya's spacecraft

(07:30):
was Seragei Korolov, and the guy who came up with
the Alma's Reconnaissance station, which eventually got merged into the
Saliot program was Vladimir Chellamy and Chelloman also designed the
Transport Supply Ship or the t k S that was
designed to resupply the Alma's space station. And these two,

(07:53):
these two Soviets had some pretty intense battles within the
Soviet space program, and each attempted to level ridge various
political favors in order to push their own projects ahead
of the other. So I will have to do a
full episode about that at some point. It's pretty fascinating.
But let's talk about the first Saliot space station briefly.
The main part of the station was cylindrical. It measured

(08:17):
forty eight feet long or about fourteen point six meters,
and it was a stepped cylinder, so in other words,
like it wasn't a smooth cylinder. There were sections of
the cylinder that had uh different diameters, right, so you
might have a few meters of of space that are
one diameter and the next few are different. So at
its widest section, which was the rear of the spacecraft,

(08:38):
it measured thirteen point nine feet or four point to
five meters in diameter, and inside there was around three
thousand five cubic feet of volume for the cosmonauts to
live and work in, and as a NASA page on
the topic puts it, it was about the size of
a large in ground swimming pool. Inside there though not

(08:58):
the shape, but you know, same sort of space. The
station solar arrays that collected energy from the Sun to
power the station were really important, right. They were using
solar power to provide electrical power to the station, and
it also had a lot of scientific equipment aboard, enough
that the equipment weighed two thousand, six hundred pounds here

(09:19):
on Earth or just under one thousand. It had antenna
to allow it to transmit messages back to Earth. Very important,
and the cosmonauts were meant to inhabit the station, conduct
observations and experiments using the various equipment and telescopes aboard
the station, and generally pushed science forward by leagues. Heck,

(09:40):
the cosmonauts themselves were technically experiments because no one was
really sure what the long term effects of a prolonged
mission in space might be on the human body. Uh.
And of course there were the military operations as well,
where cosmonauts would be conducting reconnaissance missions rather than scientific ones. Now,
the station include did a refrigerator and a food warmer.

(10:03):
Cosmonauts wore special suits that provided resistance to major muscle
groups in order to you know, exercise, and the reason
for that was to fight against the tendency for cosmonauts
to lose significant muscle mass while just maneuvering through a
microgravity environment. The resistance meant that just moving around would
require a bit more exertion than normal, and the station

(10:25):
also had a treadmill as well as elastic restraints to
hold you onto the treadmill so that the cosmonauts could
take exercise. For the same reasons, you know, you wanted
to fight against things like muscle loss and bone density
loss as best you could. Unfortunately, when the first Saliot
space station innered orbit in April nineteen seventy one, the

(10:45):
protective cover for the scientific instruments stayed in place rather
than jettisoning off from the station as was planned, and
that meant that a lot of those experiments just couldn't
happen because the instruments were still covered by a casing
you couldn't remove. Still, the station was habitable, and on
April the Saya's ten space capsule launched, carrying three cosmonauts

(11:10):
headed off to move into the station. Only there was
an issue. The probe and drogue apparatus failed to create
a good docking seal, so there was no hard lock
with the space station, so the crew of the capsule
could not make the transfer over into the space station,
so they were forced to ultimately return home without having

(11:31):
gone into the space station. But then a subsequent crew
aboard the next capsule, Soya's eleven, which had a newly
designed probe to interlocked, interlocked with the drogue mechanism on
the space station that launched on June six of that year.
So the first saliot did eventually get a crew, it
just took a couple of tries. That crew stayed aboard

(11:53):
the station for twenty four days. That was a record
for the amount of time spent in space at that point,
and tragically that crew perished on their way back to Earth.
In fact, from what I understand, these are the only people,
at least acknowledged anyway, who have died in space. There's

(12:14):
been a lot of accidents related to space missions, but
most of them have happened within the atmosphere of Earth.
Um this one did not. The Saya's capsule de pressurized
and tragically all three crew member died as a result,
And in fact, this was the tragedy that would change
the way the Soviet Union approached the Sayers capsule and

(12:37):
space suits. If you remember from the space suit episodes,
the Soviets decided for a while that they just would
do away with pressure suits and space suits for any
missions that didn't require extra vehicular activities, that is, spacewalks.
But after the disaster of Saya's eleven, the Soviets then
redesigned the Saya's capsule and it would only carry a

(12:59):
crew of two cosmonauts instead of three, and that would
allow enough space inside the capsule for both of those
cosmonauts to wear pressurized space suits during launch and landing
to protect against the sort of thing and to at
least give them a chance. As for that first space station,
it remained in orbit for one days, and the redesign

(13:21):
of the Sayus capsule meant that no other crew was
going to be able to visit Salut before it was
no longer habitable, and so the Soviets chose to de
orbit the space station so that it would re enter
their atmosphere and break apart over the Pacific Ocean. So
only one crew actually got to the first Saliot space station,
and we already mentioned that the second Saliot space station,

(13:44):
the first of the military ones, experienced catastrophic failure, again
fortunately without anyone inside it, but then the Soviets launched
lots of other ones, and the third space station went
up just a few days before the United States was
to launch its own first space station, and we'll get
to that in a little bit. But anyway, that third

(14:05):
one also failed to achieve orbit and would receive the
name Cosmos five five seven, And information on that is
kind of limited. The Soviets were incredibly secretive with their
space program, and so finding reliable sources that talk about
hard facts is difficult. You get a lot of you

(14:26):
get a lot of speculation, and you get a lot
of reports that may or may not be reliable. In fact,
NASA just described this as quote an unmanned Soya's type
vehicle end quote, and that the funding agency is quote
unknown end quote. But then in parentheses behind that says USSR.
So I guess kind of known. Anyway, The actual Salut

(14:49):
three mission, which was one of the military missions disguised
as a civilian one, reportedly included the testing of a
twenty three millimeter gun attached to the stage sation so
like um like a conventional gun actually as part of
a station weaponry. Now there's very little information on this,

(15:11):
so I hesitate to relay any stories about it. And besides,
a lot of stuff has actually contradictory reports, so it's
hard for me to say what happened because there are
accounts that contradict each other. But yeah, at least according
to some stories, this was the first spacecraft to be weaponized,
and at least some of the stories indicate that the

(15:32):
Soviets did test fire it while the space station was
an orbit, though supposedly not when any crew were actually
aboard the space station, So the command to fire the
gun was given from the ground. The way this gun
was on the station. By the way, you couldn't move
the gun to point at targets. You would actually have
to reorient the entire station to point at whatever it

(15:53):
was you're going to fire at. Uh, don't have much
more information about that. Got a lot of speculation though.
In total, there were seven official Saliot space stations, but
nine attempts. The Cosmos five five seven was one of
the failed attempts, and another one was called the do
OS two space station. Both of those failed to achieve orbits,

(16:15):
so they didn't get the Saliot designation. Then again, as
I mentioned, the Saliot to space station achieved orbit that
had to be de orbited within two weeks due to malfunctions.
Saliot six and seven were of a different design than
their predecessors. The older Saliot stations had a single docking
port at one end of the cylinder, and that's where

(16:37):
the Soya's capsule would connect to the station, But six
and seven had two docking ports, one on either end,
so the Soyas capsule could dock at one side of
the cylinder and the other side could serve as a
docking point for resupply ships. In addition, it made it
possible for a second Soyas capsule to dock with the station,
so you could have two crews aboard the station at

(16:59):
one each with you know, two cosmonauts, and they can
meet at the space station simultaneously. This allowed the Soviets
to have some guest cosmonauts go on trips to the
space stations in orbit. The cargo ships called Progress were
automated and they would dock with new supply so there
was no crew aboard these, it was just you know,
resupply ships. These were all important steps towards creating the

(17:23):
next generation of space stations. Now the first six Saliot
space stations launched in the nineteen seventies. Most of them
re entered the R's atmosphere just a few months after
they had launched, so they didn't stay up there for
very long. Saliot five stuck around a little bit longer.
It launched in June nineteen seventy six and stayed up
until August of nineteen seventy seven, so it was up

(17:45):
for more than a year. Saliot six went up in
September nineteen seventy seven and re entered Earth's atmosphere in
July of nineteen eighty two, so it was up there
for about five years. Then the final mission launched in
April nineteen eighty two and stayed up until February, so
nearly a decade. Pretty impressive for an early space station design.

(18:10):
The civilian stations all had a core module that had
the designation d O S, so that d O S
two was one of those. The military stations had a
core modular designation as h O P S. The d
S design would then extend beyond the saliott era into
the next phase of the Soviet Union's space program, which

(18:30):
would include the Mirror, which spoiler alert, we also won't
get to in this episode. But when we come back,
we'll switch over to talk about sky Lab for a bit,
but first let's take a break. So, the Soviets were
launching space stations in nineteen one, and it would take

(18:53):
a couple of years before the United States was ready
to follow suit. But we've got some overlap that we
need to talk about, because obviously the stuff isn't just happening,
you know, one after the other. There's a lot of
stuff happening at the same time. And actually we need
to backtrack as far as the late nineteen fifties and
the scientist Werner von Braun. His is a complicated history,

(19:15):
which is a pretty nice way of saying he was
once a Nazi, or at least he worked for the
Nazis during World War Two developing long range rocket based weaponry,
and he was one of the engineers responsible for the
infamous V two rocket. Some accounts suggest that he wasn't
particularly sympathetic to the Nazis, but rather worked under them

(19:36):
because he had little choice unless he was to abandon
his life's pursuit of engineering. And so essentially he was saying,
I had to work for them. They were the ones
who were letting me do science. Now I find that
explanation somewhat unconvincing and certainly not satisfying, but at any rate,
Von Brown, along with more than fift hundred other German
engineers and scientists, where they were all secretly away to

(20:00):
America after World War Two as part of Operation paper Clip.
So while the United States and the rest of the
world we're you know, seeking out Nazi officers and trying
to hold them accountable for various war crimes up through
World War two and and after uh, the scientists and
engineers were kind of spared that because they were seen

(20:22):
as being useful assets, so they were relocated to America
to work for us instead. That's also a fascinating story,
that entire story of Operation paper Clip. It's one I
should probably do a full episode on and maybe I'll
get some of the lads from the stuff they don't
want you to know to come and join me for
that one. Anyway, one of von Braun's ideas that you

(20:44):
know once he made the transition over to America was
to use a multi stage rocket in order to travel
to the Moon. But he also had the idea of
using the upper stage of the rocket to convert it
in orbit to serve as a scientific laboratory. The upper
stage would hold propellant during launch, so it would be
part of your launch vehicle. But then a subsequent visiting

(21:06):
crew could go to that, uh, that stage of the
rocket which would be in orbit, and then they could
vent any remaining propellant out of that. And it's an
airtight container, so they could then fill the container with
breathable oxygen and convert it into an orbiting laboratory. He
called this proposal Horizon, and it would turn out that

(21:29):
sky Lab, the United States first space station, would kind
of follow this design. Now largely this was thanks to
Van Brown advocating for this approach, as he anticipated he
and his team wouldn't have a whole lot of work
to do once the Apollo missions completed, and you know,
guy has got to get paid. So in the late

(21:50):
nineteen sixties, NASA began to consider, and not for the
first time, the potential for establishing a space station in
orbit around Earth for a more lasting presence in space.
The Apollo program was proving to be a success after
an initial catastrophe with Apollo one, and you had the
first astronauts landing on the Moon in nineteen sixty nine,

(22:13):
so the agency really began to look ahead while still
pursuing additional lunar missions. The Soviets were planning out how
to combine military operations with a civilian space station program,
but NASA was looking to create a more persistent presence
in orbit, and that became the origin of the sky
Lab project. Now, the plan originally was to launch sky

(22:35):
Lab as a wet works station. That means following the
style of von Brown, having a multi stage rocket in
which all the stages are holding propellant and one of
them you then convert into a workstation. However, that changed
for a couple of different reasons. One is that NASA

(22:57):
originally had plans for additional Apollo missions after Apollo seventeen,
but those got scrapped, and it meant that effectively NASA
had a couple of extra Saturn five rockets, so they
could then launch sky Lab on a Saturn five rocket,
one of the ones that was originally going to be
part of the Apollo program, and thus they could have

(23:18):
a special payload attached to this rocket that would hold
the scientific instruments and a solar observatory, as well as
an orbiting workstation where astronauts would actually live and work,
so the upper stage of this launch vehicle, the S
four B stage, would become the orbital workstation. Again. Originally

(23:40):
the plan was this was gonna be a wet workshop.
They were going to pump out or vent out the propellant,
the extra propellant inside of it and then converted into
a workstation. But as it would turn out, by the
time it came to launch, the plans had changed, so
the S four B stage didn't need to hold any
propel and at all, so it could be just a

(24:01):
dry workshop, which dramatically simplifies things. Uh, there would be
no need to do that conversion stage while in orbit.
You could actually set everything out here on Earth. And
the reason that was possible is that the Saturn five
launch vehicle, which again was not originally intended to be
a sky Lab launch vehicle, is powerful enough with just

(24:22):
the earlier stages to get the payload into orbit without
the need for the Saturn four B stage to also
be part of the launch vehicle. So the station itself
would have lots of different scientific instruments aboard. A large
focus was on the study of the Sun and tightly
wrapped around the S four B stage was this micro

(24:46):
meteoroid shield. Uh. This shield was meant to do two
major things to protect the the space station against micro meteoroids,
so tiny particles traveling at intense speeds that could would
cause massive damage if they were to collide with the
space station. But was also supposed to be a heat
shield because since this laboratory was meant to study the Sun,

(25:09):
it was going to be exposed to solar radiation and
it could get pretty warm out there if you didn't
have a way of you know, throwing some shade, I guess.
And this was all supposed to deploy once the station
achieved orbit. The idea was that the sky Lab would
get into orbit, it would deploy its solar arrays, and
it would deploy its micro meteoroid shield. That did not happen.

(25:34):
See I used words like it was it was to
deploy and it and that the solar panels were to
provide electricity. Because these things did not go smoothly when
it came time for Skylab to actually launch, which was
in May nine, three two years after the first Salut
station went into orbit. So during launch, the micro meteoroid

(25:58):
shield was damaged. It became dislodged and it tore away
from the spacecraft. It also damaged one of the solar panels,
which subsequently also tore away from the spacecraft. So you
only had one main solar panel left behind. I mean
you had one, had some for the solar observatory, which
was part of the scientific instruments, but the main orbiting

(26:21):
workstation only had one solar panel left, and it was
partially jammed, so it was unable to fully extend to
the way it was supposed to be. The shield, like
I said, was meant to provide protection not just against
micro meteoroids but also heat. So without it, the station
started to reach temperatures of fifty two degrees celsius, and

(26:41):
that's about a d degrees fahrenheit. That's way too hot
for astronauts to take up residents for any sort of
extended stay. The first Skylab mission with a crew was
called sky Lab two. This gets a little confusing because,
I mean, if you look at the Soviets and the
Saliot missions, those numbers like salut to sell at three

(27:03):
that refers to separate space stations, right, Each of those
are space stations that either got into orbit or suffered
a failure. But sky Lab, when we talk about Skylab
to Skylab three and sky Lab four, those are just
missions that were going to the one sky Lab station.
There was only ever one sky Lab, so when you're

(27:24):
sky Lab two, that's referring to the mission that went
to the station. It brought the first three astronauts up
to the Skylab station, and obviously one of the top
priorities for that mission was to repair the space station
after it's troublesome launch and try to get it into
working order. Several days had passed since it had launched,

(27:46):
and there were already some big issues that the astronauts
had to address. First of all was that problem with
the heat so they installed an ingenious little thing to
fix it, and um it was good because there was
a real fear that the entire mission was going to
have to get scrapped because of the launch problems that

(28:07):
had happened. But the crew of Skylab two were able
to install a new sun shield of parasol. Essentially, it
was a temporary fix. A later Skylab mission would install
a more permanent heat shield, but this was like a
little parasol, like just like you would hold up you know,
if you were a Victorian and you wanted to take
a stroll in the park, and they installed it into

(28:30):
the station, which kept the station at a more tolerable temperature.
The crew also made repairs to the exterior of the
space station and a couple of e v A s
extra vehicular activities spacewalks. In other words, they unjammed the
remaining main solar panel. And the duration of Skylab two's
mission aboard the space station was twenty eight days, so

(28:54):
they were up there for four weeks. Uh, pretty phenomenal.
Then you had two other Skylab missions, he had Skylab
three and sky Lab four. Those would see crews spend
fifty nine days with Skylab three and eighty four days
for sky Lab four. Pretty phenomenal. And Uh, here's a
cool personal connection that I just thought I would throw

(29:16):
in there. One of the astronauts in the sky Lab
three mission was Owen Garriott, a scientist astronaut. He was
up there for that fifty nine day period. As I said,
he would later go on a second space mission in
nine three he was aboard the space Shuttle Columbia. And
he also was the father of Richard Garriott. Then they

(29:40):
might not mean anything to you unless you're a big
computer game fan like computer role playing game fan. Because
Richard Garriott is also known as Lord British. He is
the guy who created the Ultimate series of computer games.
He's also one of just a few civilians who ever
got to visit the International Space Station. I'll talk about
that in another episode. I used to chat with Richard

(30:03):
Garriott at conventions. I met him and like we knew
each other a little bit and would talk. I wouldn't
say we were friends, because we were never that close,
but we were friendly with one another. Uh. And that
is as far as my personal connection to sky Lab
or the I S S goes, But it's still be
kind of cool, I think anyway. So the first mission
with a crew launched in May seventy three. The final

(30:26):
mission with a crew returned to Earth in February ninety four,
so you're looking at less than a year for all
the Skylab missions. However, Skylab itself stayed up in orbit
for quite some time, longer than that. NASA actually hoped
to be able to boost sky Lab to a higher
orbit and to send Space Shuttle missions there and extend

(30:49):
its mission even longer. However, the spatial program ran behind schedule,
and sky Lab ultimately ran out of time. Increased overer
activity and a deteriorating orbit meant that sky Labs days
were numbered. It was going to re enter Earth's atmosphere.
There was no way to avoid it, because there was
no way to push it further out into orbit. In July,

(31:14):
sky Lab re entered or atmosphere. NASA had previously attempted
to adjust sky Labs orientation. This wasn't an effort to
kind of try to steer it toward like an ocean,
so it wouldn't fall over a populated area. There was
a real concern and in some places, like a media circus,
regarding where this space station might fall, and that it

(31:36):
could potentially you know, kill someone, or cause massive damage
or or collide with, like, you know, a population center.
A NASA study indicated that the agency itself was concerned
about such an outcome. Now as it happened, the station
did not hit the ocean as intended, at least not
all of it. Some parts of it hit the Indian Ocean,

(31:57):
but it broke apart in Earth's atmosphere much lower than
anyone expected. Actually, it's it remained intact far longer than
people thought it would, and pieces of it hit a
largely unpopulated region of Western Australia. Uh and a lot
of folks retrieve pieces of sky Lab and put them
on display. I think that was even in like a

(32:18):
Miss Universe pageant or something. But yeah, crazy stuff. So
let's talk about some of the tech aboard sky Lab
and what it was doing of there. So the parameters
of the Skylab mission were to quote, observe the Earth
to study natural resources and the environment, observe the Sun
to study high energy solar activity, study the effects of

(32:41):
weightlessness on the human body and assess crew adaptation to
long duration spaceflight, study materials processing in microgravity, and perform
experiments submitted by students for a classroom in space. Much
of the scientific instrumentation aboard sky Lab was optical, which
means tell Us hopes and related cameras and sensors. Chief

(33:03):
among these were the instruments attached to the Apollo Telescope
Mount or a t M. This major part of sky
Lab had an octagonal structure that measured three point four
meters across and four point four meters long, and within
this octagonal structure was a cylindrical canister mounted in gimbal rings.

(33:24):
These are rings that can turn in a different you know,
different planes, so that you can reorient something that's mounted
inside them. The gimbal rings allowed for a range of
motion that let the cylinder point towards a specific region
of the sun, despite you know, other things going on
in space. Now, this was something I had not considered.

(33:45):
Banasa had to solve a problem in order to get
all of this to work, because we know from the
laws of motion that every action has an equal but
opposite reaction. So when we push against the Earth, technically
the Earth is pushing back. It's just most of us
are not dense enough for anyone to really notice this.
But in microgravity, astronaut movements in the Skylab living quarters

(34:08):
could conceivably cause enough motion to disrupt sensitive scientific experiments
that required instruments to be precisely aimed at a specific
point on the Sun. So if you need to be
focused on a very specific region of the Sun, but
you're worried about motion, you have to solve that problem.
So to mitigate this Skylab itself, the entire space station

(34:31):
had installed three control moment gyros or cmgs to stabilize
the station, and these gyros were a double gimbal mounted
and electrically driven system that could keep Skylabs orientation relatively maintained.
And I say relatively because it wasn't quite finally tuned

(34:52):
enough to stabilize the instruments aboard the A t M.
I'll quote a NASA document about how they achieved even
greater precision. Quote. This was accomplished with a solar pointing
control system PCs. The PCs sensed the sun's center to
a few tenths of a second of arc and sent

(35:12):
error signals into the torque motors that controlled the rotational
positions of the A t M canister gimbals. Offset pointing
in yaw or in pitch by steps of one point
to five seconds of arc. Up to twenty four minutes
of arc could be introduced by counter rotating a pair
of quartz wedges placed in the solar beam incident on
the yaw solar sensor, or a similar pair for pitch.

(35:37):
These solar sensors were one of the few items inherited
from the AO s oh okay h end quote right there, so, Jonathan. Here,
here's a side note. The AO s O stands for
Advanced Orbiting Solar Observatory, which was a project that NASA
had planned in the nineteen sixties but ultimately had to
scrap when it was clear that the tech wasn't really

(35:58):
ready yet and the spense of the project would be
way beyond NASA's budget. All right, let me get back
to the quote. Control of offset pointing by rotating the
prisms was accomplished by the crewman with his panel joystick.
Digital indicators read out yaw and pitch to one second
of arc and roll to one minute of arc. End quote.

(36:21):
All right, that's really complicated. It gets really technical, but
essentially what it's saying is that this system could correct
for those motions and keep the canister relatively uh stable
with regard to whatever it was aimed at. So kind
of like if you think of like stabilization technologies and

(36:42):
digital cameras, it's in concepts similar to that. So much
of the observational work done aboard sky Lab had to
do with the sun, with the instruments taking multiple images
of the Sun at a specific wavelength of light. These
instruments are called spectro heliographs, and they produce a mono
chromatic image, so you know, black and white image. So

(37:03):
why would you focus on a specific wavelength of light. Well,
it's one way to study the various elemental components of
a star, as different materials will give off different wavelengths
of light, So by looking at which wavelengths are the
most intense, you can kind of get an idea of
which elements are the most plentiful and something like a

(37:23):
star like the Sun. Onboard sky Lab, astronauts performed all
sorts of scientific experiments, including medical experiments and some designed
by students back on Earth. The crew also conducted some
observations of Earth, which was quite an achievement because the
planned experiments and instruments for that purpose have been part
of a previously canceled NASA project called the Apollo Applications Mission.

(37:47):
The history of NASA is one that's filled with lots
of projects that were meant to be but never came
to fruition or were only partially developed before they were abandoned,
and it's not always possible to salvage stuff from that.
But in this case, sky Lab was able to incorporate
some of the plans for the Apollo Applications Mission and

(38:10):
incorporate some Earth observation experiments with sky Lab. In all,
the astronauts oversaw more than a hundred experiments, ranging from
using X ray and ultra violet cameras and spectrographs to
stay the Sun to measuring stuff like mineral loss in
a human body due to an extended stay in microgravity.
Some of the student projects included things like observing Earth's atmospheres,

(38:34):
ability to absorb radiant heat, X ray emissions from Jupiter,
and capillary action studies in a state of free fall.
While the collective times spend aboard Skylab amounted to one
seventy one days for all of the crude missions, the
amount of work done was truly little astronomical. I guess

(38:56):
now when we come back, I'll cover one other really
big aspect of sky Lab, and that's what it's like
taking a shower in space. But first let's take another break,
so I'll really have to do a full episode about
sky Lab in the future, so that I can actually

(39:18):
cover the whole thing and all the the science and
technology aboard, because I know I'm just glancing over the
topic in this episode, but that's because we have so
much to cover to talk about space stations in general. However,
one thing I just could not leave behind was the
shower aboard sky Lab. Now you might wonder how does
one shower in microgravity? If you've ever seen astronauts playing

(39:42):
with I'm sorry, I'm sorry, experimenting with liquids in outer space,
you know that those liquids tend to form little wobbly
globes and float around their environment. You don't have gravity,
or really you don't have sufficient gravity to have them
form into drop shapes and fall to the ground. And
yet sky Lab had a shower aboard, a true luxury

(40:04):
when compared against earlier US spacecraft like the Apollo and
Jimini capsules, which reportedly could get really stinky, particularly as
missions stretched beyond a week in length. All right, so
imagine that you've got a round shower curtain and it's
on quote unquote the floor. The top of the shower

(40:25):
curtain is connected to a metal ring. So really you
see a metal ring and some material folded beneath it.
So you step into the middle of this metal ring.
Then you squat down, you grab the ring, and you
lift it all the way up to the ceiling where
it locks in place, and you essentially create your own
little shower cylinder. Now, okay, how do you do that?
Because of micro gravity because you're gonna be floating around everywhere. Well,

(40:47):
the on the floor of the station, which is weird
to think of, because I mean up and down are
such weird concepts when you're talking about space. But on
the floor were a pair of bands where you would
just kind of slip your feet in a little restraints
to hold you down against the floor of the station
so you don't float off with the SuDS. The shower
itself was a handheld nozzle attached to a hose and

(41:11):
you would put heated water which was taken from the
waste management compartment water heater. However, it was not I
should point out the actual wastewater that'd be gross, uh,
and it served as the bathing liquid, or at least
the heated liquid. This water in a canister would get
a pressurization boost from some nitrogen gas. So now you
have some pressurized water in this canister, and then you

(41:33):
would connect it to the shower mechanism, so the pressurized
gas that had enough of the pressure to propel the
water out of the nozzle. When you had the switch
on the nozzle set to open a soap dispenser with
eight whole milli liters of soap in it would serve
for each shower, and uh it had velcrow on it
so you could attach it to the quote unquote ceiling

(41:55):
of the shower. So you also couldn't just use a
drain for the shower, right because the water is not
just gonna flow down to the floor. So to take
care of the water, you also had a suction device.
You were using essentially a vacuum to collect the water
because the water wouldn't, you know, drain out otherwise, So

(42:15):
astronauts would use a vacuum to remove water both from
the shower and off of themselves as well. According to
Jack Loosma, the experience was not necessarily relaxing. You had
to mix water in a three quart container and make
sure you've got the right mix of hot to cold
so that you would have a comfortable shower temperature. The soap,

(42:35):
he said, often left the astronauts feeling itchy. He said
that it was better served as a veterinarian soap as
opposed it for humans. Um He also said that the
water would evaporate off of your skin very quickly because
you're in a low pressure environment, and that that that
you would start to get really cold. Because that evaporating
process would pull energy away from you, heat energy, so

(42:56):
you'd start to get the chills after a shower. Also,
drying off took a really long time, so long in fact,
that some astronauts opted for using a sponge bath rather
than using the shower, though they could take as many
showers as like one every week or ten days if
they so chose. Now, according to the astronauts, it took
about an hour to take a shower. Some accounts I've

(43:20):
seen suggest it might have even taken longer than that
when you factor in all the different prep work and
clean up work needed to do the whole process, And
in fact, some of the estimations I saw said it
was closer to two hours. That's not two hours of
you taking a really long, luxurious shower, that's rather two
hours come to complete the entire task from you know,

(43:41):
prep to clean up. And that's another reason that a
lot of astronauts chose to go with sponge baths instead,
because they felt it was a hassle. NASA eventually concluded
that the shower was ultimately perhaps a little too complicated
to operate, and if astronauts weren't going to use it,
there might be better ways to make sure folks don't
stink up the joint rather than incorporating a piece a
gear that people would avoid using anyway, kind of like

(44:03):
a stinky sullen teenager. And oh, I also need to
talk about the toilet. So we talked a bit about
how awkward pooping in space was for the Apollo cruise,
and you know they had to use you know, essentially
a bag with adhesive on it to glue to their
butts in order to collect their poops. Well, the sky

(44:23):
Lab version was better, I guess. Sky Labs toilet was
mounted on the wall of the bathroom inside the space station.
The toilet had a hinged seat on it. Inside the
toilet was a mesh bag, So if you need to poop,
you would first put a fecal collection bag inside this
mesh liner. Um. Then uh okay, well let me just

(44:45):
read from NASA to make sure I get this right.
Here we go quote. Air was drawn through the fecal
bag from holes in the seat and exhausted through the
bags vapor port through the mesh liner into the fecal
collection recept icle, and then through a filter where odors
were removed before it was recirculated into the cabin by

(45:05):
a fan. To use the toilet for defecation, the crewman
sat on the contoured seat, then fastened a belt across
his lap to hold him securely in position. Hand Holds
and foot restraints allowed him to maintain a sufficiently tight
seal on the seat, as airflow from the fans separated
the fecal matter from his body and deposited it in

(45:28):
the fecal collection bag. A separate fecal bag was used
for each defecation end quote, which thank goodness for that right.
As for urination, well, again to quote from NASA quote,
the crewmen could urinate from either a standing or sitting position.
A urine collector, located on the wall just below the

(45:48):
fecal collector, also utilized airflow as a substitute for gravity
to draw the urine through a receiver and hose into
a urine collection bag. An alternate device incorporated a funnel
like attachment through which the bag could be filled by
bladder pressure. So I suppose by the way end quote,
I suppose it's good to remind ourselves that around this

(46:10):
time all astronauts were male. Not that I'm saying that
was a good thing, only that it was a true
thing at that time. Because many of the experiments aboard
Skylab related to medical studies, like the effects of microgravity
and being in space for prolonged periods, much of that
waste was meant to be returned to Earth for examination.

(46:30):
So these bags would be vacuum dried and stored for
return to Earth. That included feces and, according to NASA,
vomit because motion, sickness, and nausea were a thing up
there too, so space sure is glamorous. As for the
urine that went into a centrifuge to separate the gases
inside the liquid from the liquid itself, then the liquid

(46:53):
sample would be frozen for storage and to prevent any
chemical changes that might occur otherwise in order to be
returned to Earth. None, not all of it was stored
and saved for for examination, some of it was some
of it actually would go into a waste containment system
aboard the space station. So I just want to make
it clear that the astronauts weren't bringing all of their

(47:15):
poops and peas back home, just you know, some of them.
Oh and some other fun and less disgusting anecdotes during
the Gemini missions, astronauts typically didn't really complain about the
space food that NASA packed for them, but in the
Apollo missions that changed astronauts really hated it, and so
there was an effort put forward to make the food

(47:37):
aboard sky Lab more palatable because astronauts were going to
be up there for much longer, and NASA wisely judged
that the food was bad. It was going to have
a negative impact on crew morale and thus potentially a
negative impact on productivity, so they worked pretty hard to
try and fix that while also making sure to meet
the nutritional needs of the astronauts. Now, some of that

(48:00):
food that was sent aboard Skylab in that initial launch
was deemed to be dangerous by the time the first
crew got to Skylab because remember that that laboratory had
been exposed to very high temperatures because the heat shield
had failed to deploy because it was stripped away in launch.
So the stuff that was in cans had been heated

(48:20):
to a point where it could potentially be dangerous, so
that could no longer be consumed. But there was other
stuff that was frozen and it was unaffected because it
was protected in a freezer. And there are other types
of space food that were also fine, so not everything
was wasted. Also because Skylab used air flow to substitute
for gravity, so you you know, used the flow of

(48:40):
air like you had had vents that were suctioning up
air and other events that were blowing out air. While
astronauts found that stuff had a tendency to kind of
migrate towards the air filters where the system was siphoning
up air to recycle it. Uh So, if something got lost,
they would just look around the air filters because typically
that's where stuff was because that flow of air was

(49:01):
pulling things toward it. So they actually made one surface
that had one of these filters a workspace because the
tools would tend to stay put on the filter rather
than just float off, which is kind of interesting. It's
something you don't necessarily think about when you're not in microgravity.
Generally speaking, sky Lab wasn't just an efficient science platform,

(49:21):
nor was it just a space station that was up
in orbit for way longer than we could actually use it.
I mean, when you think about it, it was up
there for several years, but we only used it for
less than a year. But it was also a learning
experience for NASA and would go a long way toward
informing the agency about designing the next big space station.
We'll talk more about that in our next episode. So

(49:43):
things to look forward to. In our next episode, We're
going to talk about the Russian space station mirror. That's
very important. We're gonna talk about the proposal of space
station freedom, the US space station that never was, and
the birth of the International Space Station and how it
has a halter of the time. Text Stuff is an

(50:07):
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.