00:08Mark team minus one minute and continuing to count a water deluge system now has been turned

00:14on activated at the pad area pressurization taking place.

00:20Now, the various tanks aboard the vehicle being pressurized, switching to internal

00:27power all stages, switching now to internal power, all propellant tanks being pressurized

00:34count continuing smoothly.

00:37The water at the pad covering the flame deflectors.

00:41Now we've passed the 32nd mark.

00:44We will also be coming on to the deck of the mobile launcher at the ignition point T minus

00:4922nd and the countdown continues to go smoothly.

00:53Guidance release T minus 1312, 1110 eight.

01:00We have ignition sequence has started 6543

01:0610

01:13prepared. Now moving up the tower, Houston is now

01:19controlling 18 seconds, pitch and roll

01:26program started and now maneuvering to a skylab was an incredible game changer for human space

01:32flight. From the moment that NASA was created very

01:36quickly, the the focus became the moon landings and with the focus on the moon landings,

01:40it became about going through space. They weren't really paying attention to what is

01:45it like to be in orbit in microgravity. Very much focused on what does it take to set

01:51boots on another world skylab becomes the first time that we really focus on what it's really

01:58like to live in space and work in space and be in this new environment.

02:04And that lays the groundwork for everything that happens afterwards.

02:07The space shuttle program, the International Space Station are built completely on the

02:13foundation of the work that was done in Skylab homesteading the space environment.

02:18If Skylab fails, who knows what's next.

02:25So if you're at the Kennedy Launch Center that day, you see this Saturn five rocket roaring

02:31into the sky. It is an amazing sight.

02:36What you don't see if you're watching from the ground is the anomaly that you have in flight.

02:42Once the rocket is in the air, there is actually airflow between the structure of the

02:48stage and a heat shield that had been mounted to the exterior of this airflow actually

02:54crosses between the structure of the stage and that heat shield and rips the shield away

03:01when it does two things happen. On one side,

03:05you have a solar array, that's your electric power generation system that was being held

03:11into place by that heat shield with the heat shield torn away it deploys and you can think

03:17about, you know, rolling down your car window, sticking your hand out the air pressure that

03:22you're experiencing.

03:24Now, picture doing that, not at, you know, 50 or 60 miles an hour,

03:27but at you know, thousands of miles an hour. And you can understand just how quickly that

03:32thing would have been ripped off of the vehicle.

03:34There's another solar array on the other side of the space station,

03:40it starts to deploy but a small strap of metal as the heat shield was torn away,

03:45wrapped around the solar array.

03:48It keeps it from deploying which keeps it from being ripped off,

03:51but it also keeps it from being able to extend out once the space stations in orbit.

03:57You have now a skylab space station in orbit, but you have a space station that's crippled

04:03and that nobody fully understands initially, the condition of I'm Charles Lewis.

04:08I go by the name of Chuck from time to time. Uh at the time of Skylab's launch,

04:14I was working in the manned systems integration branch as a crew systems engineer concentrating

04:20on the E VA activities where we were in the operations control center in Huntsville.

04:25We had access to the uh voice loops from mission control,

04:29not all of them but some.

04:31And it became clear after a little while that somebody was concerned about something.

04:36We went back to the uh to the office and subsequently got called up to uh one of the

04:42large conference rooms on the second floor where our boss had spread out the full cluster

04:47on the table. He reminded us that several months earlier,

04:51we had put together an analysis along with the Johnson guys of what sorts of anomalies we

04:58could fix and what sorts of things we could not fix.

05:01And, uh, one of the things we said we could not do was do an E VA up the airlock and down the

05:07side of the S four B, Bob Thompson. Our boss said,

05:12all right, you guys, uh, we said we weren't gonna do this,

05:14but we actually are and you're gonna do it and we're gonna do it in the next couple of days.

05:19We started thinking about the fact that it might be a good idea.

05:23If, when the crew finally got to launch, they would do a fly around E VA.

05:29Uh It's called a stand up E VA where one of the crewmen holds another one's boots.

05:34Then the first guy extends his body out to hatch and uh takes a look around.

05:41We began thinking about what we might do as part of that stand up B VA.

05:46And one of the things that was obvious is uh gosh, if you see things,

05:50something that started to deploy, maybe with a little uh urging from a,

05:55a hook or something like that might get it to break loose and come on out all the way.

06:00So we began thinking about um safe ways to put some load on the end of that

06:07solar array that was stuck.

06:10And um got thinking about a pole or something that would extend the reach.

06:16So the command module didn't have to come too close to the array.

06:21And I remember um quite clearly one of the mcdonald Douglas guys who was across the aisle

06:27from me, um tapped me on the shoulder and put a piece of paper on my desk.

06:32And it said A B Chance company, Centralia Missouri in the late sixties and early

06:38seventies, when I started to work for A B Chance company centre was a nice little quiet

06:43town. A B Chance was, of course, the large almost

06:48single employer in town, the town had a lot of pride in those days as a bulk of the

06:54people that worked at A B Chance lived in town and all of the management uh from the president

07:00of the company on down, lived within the cent of school district Cliff.

07:04Bosch was the product manager at chance. In those days,

07:08he knew everybody and everything about tools and the utility industry,

07:12Cliff was a very down to earth sort of individual, uh easy to work for.

07:18Uh He would tell you what he wanted and let you do it.

07:22Dad was uh um he had an amazing guy. Um Now, if you would have asked me when I was

07:28in high school, I probably would have had a different answer uh as he was disciplining me,

07:32but he was probably a legend in my mind in the line trade started years ago,

07:38uh back in the fifth and in the military and went to Kansas first and then into a B Chance,

07:43I was a demonstrator. He was a hotline manager for 2025 years,

07:48uh instrumental and new tools, new procedures was obsessed with lineman

07:55training. He just cared, he cared about the trade and he,

07:58and he just cared about making sure that linemen were safe and had the best tools

08:03available. And he did that through A B Chance company.

08:07I made a cold call to a B Chance and the first person that answered,

08:13um, I said this is Chuck Lewis. I'm in Huntsville.

08:15And you might have heard of the little problem that we had with our spacecraft yesterday.

08:20And he said, yeah, and I said, we kind of think you guys might have some tools and some hot

08:26sticks that we've heard about that would help us try to figure out what was wrong and correct

08:31the problem. And I was hoping you might be able to describe

08:34some of the tools that go on the end of the hot sticks.

08:37He said, yeah, I could do that.

08:39But, um, maybe the better thing, we've got a really neat catalog and,

08:44uh, why don't I just send you catalog out? And I kind of grinned and said,

08:48well, that's not gonna work because, uh, we thought these guys were gonna launch the next

08:54morning and that's passed, we're gonna delay that launch,

08:56but it's gonna happen pretty quick.

08:58He said, all right, I need to let you talk to the product manager,

09:02his name is Cliff Bosch.

09:04And so he turned me over to Cliff Cliff, picked up the phone.

09:08I went through my little spiel again and he said, yeah,

09:11I understand. Um, all right, give me 15 minutes.

09:16I'm gonna walk through the, um, the stock room and pick up some stuff,

09:20put it in a box and I'll call you back in 15 minutes.

09:24I said, that's cool. Um, hung up the phone.

09:28And at that point, the guy who had originally told me about Amy Chance tapped me on the

09:32shoulder again and he said it turns out that, uh, the president,

09:37he was either the president or CEO of mcdonnell Douglas was gonna fly as a commander into

09:42Huntsville to bring whatever it was they've been working on all night long and Centralia is

09:48not too far from Saint Louis and there's, there might be a little airport there.

09:53If your guy at, at a B Chance has some stuff we can pick up,

09:57we can stop off at that little airport and pick it up.

10:00Sounded like a pretty good deal.

10:02So when Cliff called back after 15 minutes, he said I haven't had so much fun in a long time.

10:07No paperwork. I just picked up stuff off the shelf and I've

10:10stuffed them in a box and we're ready to go. And at that point I explained to him what we

10:16heard from Mac D he said. Yeah. Um, I can go to the airport,

10:22but, you know, you, you really need somebody there to help you understand how to use this

10:27stuff. And, um, if there's an extra seat, how's,

10:31how's the possibility that I might ride along well cliff?

10:35Uh immediately after the telephone call, called me into his office and explained what was going

10:41on. He also called Richard Millholland, who was one

10:44of our marketing service people at that time and explained to us very briefly that this was

10:49an emergency and that we needed to ship them whatever they wanted immediately and get it to

10:54them overnight. And then Cliff, I think shortly after that got

10:58another telephone call and was arranged to meet the NASA Lear jet in Mexico

11:04Airport, which is 15 miles away from here. They sent a,

11:08a jet up and jetted him down to Huntsville for face to face meetings.

11:13He took literature with him and of course, years and years of experience to talk with him

11:17about what we could do.

11:19Cliff was there at the airport. Um The air commander came down and picked him

11:23up. And three or four hours later, I drove out to

11:25Redstone Airfield, picked up Cliff in his box of goodies and brought it back to our high

11:32bay area. We had, we had a one G mockup of, of skylab and

11:36a bunch of us sat around on the floor, uh, opened up the box and started taking out tools.

11:41It was just like Christmas morning.

11:42And about the time we were, it's about 45 minutes had elapsed since we started opening

11:47the box. And our boss Jr Thompson came walking in again.

11:51He said, where's the guy with the tools from Centralia?

11:54So Cliff raised his hand and Thompson said, well, uh we got your airplane ready to take you

12:00down to the cape and it's gonna leave in about 45 minutes.

12:04Uh We need you down there to help, uh help figure out how to stow the parts,

12:08the, the tools and so forth. Um, in the command module.

12:12So cliff called his wife and asked her to pack in my bag,

12:17send it to the cape. Uh, tried to explain what was going on,

12:21you know, that sort of thing we think of as you, you'll never guess where I am.

12:26I, the next thing I knew, I heard mom cussing. They came pick that up in a,

12:30in a car, they took him to a plane and they were taking him to NASA.

12:34And back then I didn't know what it meant, but over the years,

12:37it's like, hey, that, that must have been pretty neat and seeing pictures of him sitting

12:41with the astronauts and they were pretty serious pictures of sitting around the table,

12:46you know, their heads in their hands and God, you know,

12:49the discussions they must have been having. And, you know,

12:51when you think about today, how much money must have been involved.

12:54Um If this failed launch your t minus 30 seconds and the countdown continuing to go

13:00smoothly. The sky lab itself orbiting some 780 nautical

13:06miles northeast of KSCT minus 17 seconds and counting T minus 15

13:12at T minus 3.1 seconds. We'll expect the engine sequence to start on

13:17the vehicle. T minus 76543, engine sequence.

13:23Start 210. We have launch commit and we have lift off

13:30the clock is running and sky has cleared the tower in Houston Sky lab

13:37two, we fix anything. They got a pitch and a roll program.

13:41So when the first crew arrives at skylab, the original plan was,

13:46I mean, this was supposed to be nominal operations.

13:49They're supposed to enter into a fully functional space station.

13:53Here's the normal procedure for what that day one looks like.

13:58Here's the science that they're going to be performing.

14:01Here's what life looks like.

14:03Everything now has changed

14:11is God.

14:15One is in fact partially deployed in the reason that you've got different readings

14:22between your three bones of me. I heed underneath it in the middle and it looks

14:29to be holding it down. I I

14:37that and

14:44when the crew did their stand up E VA flying around the cluster,

14:48uh taking some good pictures. They reported that there was a strap holding

14:52the solar array down.

14:54Subsequently, we realized that's looking at drawings and talking to some of the designers,

14:59this was a strap on the bottom of the micro meteoroid shield.

15:05It was uh it was about all that was left of the shield.

15:09And in this particular case on that solar array, it had wrapped itself around and embedded a

15:155/16 bolt into the skin of the solar array cover.

15:21They would have tried the cable cutter except it looked like there wasn't enough room enough

15:27clearance between the strap and the surface of the solar array to get the cutter in there.

15:32So they gave up on that, but they've gotten great images and we're able to download those

15:39and, and we got to look at them and that helped a lot in the subsequent nine days when we

15:45were being a lot more specific in uh coming up with tools and techniques that they could use

15:51on a subsequent E VA.

15:53So knowing all of that, knowing that we also had a problem with the orbital workshop heating

15:58up due to the loss of the thermal shield. One half of our group along with a bunch of

16:03other people were working on a way to replace that thermal shield because it was clear that

16:07the workshop was heating up, it was gonna make it uninhabitable if we could not do that.

16:12One of the things that Marshall did was to come up with a mylar fabric that we would attempt to

16:18spread over the sun side of the surface of the workshop, the scheme that they came up with was

16:25uh to use two long poles attached near part of the structure of the Apollo telescope mount

16:31extending down over the surface of the workshop.

16:35So all this development going on concurrently, it appeared that if we were to develop an E VA

16:41that would result in freeing the solar array and letting it extend fully,

16:46we might be able to take use of some of the parts that the sale guys were coming up with.

16:50One of the modifications that the engineers in Huntsville made to the cable cutter from chance

16:56was to put the same kind of quick disconnect fastener that was being used for the sale polls.

17:01That way if we needed to use the poll, we have that available to us.

17:06The idea was to use the cable cutter from chance on the end of about 25 ft of poles to

17:12somehow get the crew down around a part of the structure that was holding the trons,

17:17the Poet telescope mount folded over from if they could stabilize themselves without foot

17:23restraints or handholds, they could put the jaws of the cable cutter around the strap which

17:29would stabilize the end of it. And there you'd have a handhold that would

17:32allow somebody to go down to where the strap was.

17:35At that point. We were still thinking about a number of

17:38alternate ways to cut the strap including a bone saw from the dental kit,

17:42bone saws did a really good job of cutting even 7075.

17:47So all this time, there was a lot of analysis going on knowing in the back of our minds that

17:52one of the things we were going to have to do is to convince the management council that this

17:57was safe and viable.

17:59And, uh, and had a reasonably strong chance of success.

18:12Guys are outside. Now, they've, they've attached the cutter to

18:15the strap and, uh, Pete Conrad tethers himself to the pole that was reaching down to the

18:21cutters and he used that as a handhold to carry another rope with a couple of small hooks

18:28attached to the end.

18:30What he needed to do there was to hook the end of that rope into the bend,

18:34relief holes on the surface of a vent. The vent cover was on the top surface of the

18:40solar array beam. And it was far enough down that the idea was

18:44that if we could get a little upward force on the bottom edge of that vent cover might be

18:49able to break the thing loose after he hooked his tether on the end of that,

18:55uh, he came back up to help, uh, Joe Kerwin, uh, put enough force on the rope to cut the

19:02tether. So after the guys got the strap cut with cutter,

19:07they used the tether that Conrad had hooked to the back end of the bent cover.

19:12They snubbed it down and tightened it up again to that same structure that they were

19:17stabilizing themselves with, took all the slack out.

19:21Conrad went down to the uh hinge end of the solar array,

19:26put his feet on the hinge end, got the tether crouched down.

19:30And while he stood up, Joe Kerwin pulled tension on his end,

19:35they fell to pop and all of a sudden it started to move out.

19:38At that point, we were in L OS loss of signal. We didn't know what was going on.

19:43It was about an hour plus of loss of signal.

19:47About the time we were planning to get a signal back.

19:51Uh We heard mission control say we've got amps meaning they saw some current draft from the

19:57solar array which was followed by Conrad coming back on and said,

20:02well, we, we got her done. Uh There was uh hooting and hollering from uh

20:08from mission control. We were, we were pretty pleased and relieved as

20:12well sitting in our little war room waiting for all this to happen.

20:17Space missions are complicated beasts and this one had a lot of opportunity for

20:23improvisation.

20:24We improvised an awful lot of stuff, some of it on the ground and some of it after the crew

20:30reached orbit. It's one of the really fun things about doing

20:34that job because you're stuck with what you got. You can't go order a part,

20:39you can't go to the store and buy it.

20:40You gotta go with what you got.

20:42So what we had was what was up there initially in the,

20:47in the workshop, uh Some of the tether and hooks and that sort of thing.

20:51We had uh we had cliffs complement of, of uh A B chance tools.

20:57Um And we had AAA smart and willing crew people offering good thoughts and wishes

21:04and prayers all working together toward a common goal,

21:08which is a, a lesson for us. In retrospect, we can use some of that today

21:13after the mission was over. I sent cliff a cigar.

21:16I wasn't sure whether he was gonna get one from anybody else.

21:20That was a traditional token of success. He certainly did his part.

21:25It's a wonderful example of how people can see that there's something there that's bigger

21:32than they are and it's something that's good for the country and willing to jump in and,

21:37and get her done. Ultimately, three crews would live and work on

21:43the skylab space station.

21:45The first crew lived there for about a month for 28 days.

21:49The second crew was there for about two months. The third crew stayed a record setting 84 days,

21:56a record that would last for decades afterwards.

22:00The work that they did in biological science, human adaptation to the space flight

22:07environment to material science, understanding that how physics works in a microgravity

22:14environment, solar astronomy, learning about space weather and the interaction between the

22:20sun and the earth and a. We had never understood it before.

22:24An Earth Resources program that's studying our planet in a whole new way that helps us better

22:30understand our environment, helps us better understand the resources that are available to

22:37us. And the resources that we need to steward on

22:39the earth were groundbreaking skylab. I think today is

22:45underappreciated because it's almost impossible to imagine.

22:50Now, not knowing the things that skylab taught us.

22:55We have today, the Hubble Space telescope, which is an amazing stellar observatory that

23:02is working today that that was working at all. Only because we knew we could send astronauts

23:08up to repair without the experience that we had on sky lab.

23:12We don't have that knowledge.

23:15It really was the program that taught us everything we needed to know,

23:20to have the space shuttle to have the International Space Station.

23:24And ultimately, it's going to be the foundation for the programs that take us back to the moon

23:29and on to Mars in the movie Apollo 13, they bring the astronauts home successfully.

23:35After the famous Houston, we had a problem on the way to the moon.

23:40Everybody celebrates as the capsule splashes down.

23:43They make the comment that, you know, rather than a failure.

23:46This was nasa's finest moment.

23:49My co-author on Homesteading Space, Owen Garriott said that's true for Johnson Space

23:55Center, like for Johnson Space Center for mission control for the astronauts working

23:59there. Yes, man.

24:01Apollo 13 was an unrivaled shining moment for NASA as a whole.

24:08It's saving skyline, the story of A B chance and the saving of skylab just demonstrates how

24:15much it wasn't just the people at Johnson Space Center trying to figure out how to get the

24:20astronauts to perform the tasks that were gonna be needed to save the space station.

24:24It wasn't just the folks at Marshall Space Flight Center studying what exactly was wrong

24:29with the space station and how it could be saved.

24:31It wasn't just the people at Kennedy Space Center getting ready to launch a rescue mission.

24:37It was Americans across the country saying here's what we can do.

24:42Here's our ideas, here's how we can contribute to making this happen.

24:46It was the finest moment for American Human Space Flight Control control

24:54center are being lit.

24:56A lot of hands being shaken backs being patted on the big forward screen,

25:02a replica of the sky lab crew patch and these words sky lab one slash two

25:08mission accomplished a tribute to the combined abilities of NASA and all support

25:14contractors who surmounted problems to begin a new era of scientific achievement.