In the summer of 1973, an unfeasibly ordinary-looking man strolled into a gardening store in Houston, Texas. Short, pudgy, balding, middle aged, with an ugly gnome-like face, a big gap between his front teeth, wearing a baseball cap and jersey, gym shorts, and nominally picking his nose and scratching his balls, Pete Conrad wouldn’t strike the average Texas gardener as anything other than their own. But he wasn’t here for the sake of his petunias.
Hands in his pockets, whistling a Diana Ross tune, he swaggered through the aisles until he came across exactly what he was looking for. A big limb-lopper; the kind of thing they use to trim away tree limbs from power lines and telephone wires.
“Yeah. That oughta work”, he muttered to himself as he picked up the big tool and carried it away over his shoulder. Conrad and the limb-lopper were about to earn a unique place and history: the world’s first space-repairman had just bought his tool.
Skylab makes its way towards orbit on the final launch of the Saturn-V. May 15th 1973.
Orbiting two-hundred and fifty miles above his hairless head, and travelling at five miles per second, was the crippled Skylab space station. Launched without crew two days earlier, a malfunction in the rocket had violently jolted the delicate space station, causing a small scrap of metal to jam shut one of the solar arrays. Without full power, the space station couldn’t fulfil any of its science objectives. Saving Skylab from becoming a half-billion dollar dud would mean that for the first time in history, astronauts would have to go outside in their spacesuits and repair a problem on their own ship. Pete Conrad, a veteran of two Gemini missions and Apollo 12, would command the first crew to Skylab and would carry out the repair with his friend and protege Joe Kerwin.
Owen Garriott demonstrates spacewalking on Skylab during a later mission.
Four weeks later, Conrad and Kerwin were clambering out of the hatch of their docked Apollo spaceship, out into the vacuum of space and towards the bulky hull of Skylab. As Conrad struggled to secure himself against space station, Kerwin clumsily dragged the big limb-lopper out of the Apollo, smacking it roughly against the edges of the hatch, and transferred it to his commander. Then together, they grasped their safety tethers and edged out towards the damaged solar array, on the opposite end of Skylab. Nobody had ever intended astronauts to do this, and no-one thought to provide proper handholds or tethering points on Skylab’s hull. Working against the constant drift of zero-gravity and the exhausting resistance of their inflated suits, just getting to their work area was a massive struggle.
Like rock-climbers helping one another across a sheer cliff-face, Conrad and Kerwin passed one another in sequence, each securing one tether and then waiting for the next. They slowly worked their way towards the aft of Skylab. Finally, the jammed solar array came into view. Grasping a line over his shoulder, held low by Kerwin at one end and attached to the station at the other to mimic the effect of gravity, Pete Conrad was able to press his feet into the hull hard enough to get into a somewhat secure standing position, and then he leaned precariously out over the side of the space station, in a vantage point above their objective. Twisting his body so he could look over his shoulder, his eyes scanned the massive apparatus until he spotted the tiny glint of scrap metal he was looking for.
Skylab’s solar panel only partially deployed.
One hand on the tether, upon which Conrad’s life depended, Kerwin extended his other arm, and carefully handed over the limb-lopper. With both astronauts requiring one hand to keep themselves stable at all times, the engineers had rigged up a pulley system to the limb-lopper, that would allow Conrad to hold the jaws in place for Kerwin to then pull on a rope that would slice them shut.
Artist’s impression of Conrad standing on Skylab’s hull.
His arm at its full reach, Conrad grunted and moaned with the strain as he inched the jaws closer and closer to the metal scrap. Unable to get all the way, Kerwin noticed the pressure on the tether loosen off, as Conrad unspooled it a little to slide the jaws awkwardly between the solar array and the scrap. In loosening the tether, Conrad was risking his life. If his feet slipped off the hull, he might fly off into space.
“That’s it, Joe.” Conrad squeezed the words out of his lungs, “Yank that old rope with everything you’ve got!”
Joe Kerwin was not a large man. With wide owl-like eyes, wiry build and pale skin, he looked like one of those geeks who didn’t see the sun too much. A breed apart from the gung-ho rough-and-ready fighter pilot, the living body of which was Pete Conrad, Kerwin was a trained medical doctor. Where Conrad liked to ride fast motorcycles and would settle down with a beer on the lawn, listening to sports on the radio, Kerwin was bookish and enjoyed classical music. Though he was not what the general public would picture as a heroic astronaut, and neither was Conrad in his way, Joe Kerwin and his kin were the wave of the future for the astronaut corps, and at that moment he directly held NASA’s future in his hands. The hopes of the next generation of spacefarers depended on him. He tensed his right arm and pulled with all his might.
Joe Kerwin blows air into a water bubble in the microgravity of Skylab.
“Pull, Joe! Pull! Pull! Pull!”
His adrenaline must have doubled his strength, but it still didn’t seem like enough. Kerwin let out a roar fit for a bodybuilder. His fingers ends burst against the metal digits of his gloves, and a liquid cloud of blood began to creep up his spacesuited right arm and soak into his thermal long johns.
“Arggggggggg!” … SNAP!
As he pruned the space station, and the jaws clamped shut, for an instant all of the force he was putting into the rope suddenly transferred into the tether connecting him to Conrad. Kerwin’s arm flew back, the tether jumped in Conrad’s hands and he lurched forwards. His feet slipped.
In that moment, to Kerwin it seemed the whole universe was processing in horrible unintelligible motion. With Kerwin in a stupefied daze, Conrad parted with the station and started floating up and away. At the same time the solar array, free of the scrap, started groaning and shifting like some great and terrible monster awoke from a millennium sleep. Terrible thoughts flashed through his mind. Where’s Pete? Is the solar array breaking apart? What should I do?
Coming to his senses, Kerwin looked up and saw Pete Conrad floating away into the lifeless void of space. As icy fingers of panic creeped through his spine, he became aware of a vibration in his thick gloves. He looked down and saw the tether spooling through his fingers. Desperate to save his Commander from being lost in space, he tried to squeeze, but the line just continued to slip through his fingers. He looked back toward the shrinking Conrad, and noticed the limb-lopper still in his other hand. Kerwin hadn’t noticed until now that he too was still holding the rope they had rigged up, but his bruised and bleeding hand wasn’t up to the job.
Conrad and Kerwin struggle to regain their foothold on Skylab.
But it was Conrad’s only hope, so Kerwin locked the tether into his spacesuit, put both hands on the pulley rope, and squeezed as hard as he could, ignoring the searing pain. Slowly, he brought Conrad to an agonising stop. Then, pulling with one arm and then the other, Kerwin gradually dragged Conrad back towards Skylab.
Keeping his good left arm on the life-saving rope, Kerwin reached out with his damaged right hand towards Conrad. Hidden behind the golden sun visor of his space helmet, Conrad couldn’t see Kerwin’s terrible wince as the two hands met. Between the shock and stress of what they were doing, coupled with the enormous pain as Conrad squeezed his fingers, it was all Kerwin could do to keep from passing out. There was a great scramble as Conrad bumped into the space station and fumbled to grab hold of the tether and keep from bouncing back out into space.
Skylab, with all solar arrays deployed, a fully functional space station.
As the pair got secure again, Conrad looked over his shoulder and saw the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. As the pair had been fighting for their lives, they had missed the solar array deploy itself all the way out to ninety degrees, exactly where it was supposed to be. Like the petals of some great plant, the array was ready to soak up sunlight and convert it into electricity. To the two astronauts, lifelong engineers, it was an awe inspiring sight, and rich in meaning. Skylab was now ready to do all the wonderful things she had promised. After taking in the view, the pair gingerly returned to the open hatch of the Apollo. As they clambered back inside, they carried intense satisfaction in the knowledge their job was done.
Though it’s not much remembered today, the significance of the Skylab rescue is hard to overstate. Pete Conrad was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1999. Until his dying day, when he looked back, the highlight of his career was not walking on the moon, but rather it was the time he saved Skylab.
Joe Kerwin performs a routine medical examination of Pete Conrad aboard Skylab.
Conrad, Kerwin and Weitz spent nearly a month on Skylab, shattering the previous space endurance record. The next expedition, led by Conrad’s Apollo 12 crewmate Alan Bean, would more than double it. The final crew to Skylab spent nearly three months living and working in space. Demonstrating that was a triumph in itself. It showed conclusively that human beings were fully capable of undertaking journeys to Mars, the moons of the outer planets and eventually the stars. During their time on Skylab, the three crews made earth-observations that provided some of the first direct evidence for deforestation, climate change and the global effects of pollution. They studied materials that transformed the way we build aeroplanes and ships, and they dramatically advanced the science of the human body. From high above, they studied oceans, farmland and cityscapes, and revolutionised our understanding of the workings of the sun.
The enormous International Space Station is a descendant of Skylab.
Skylab was the first inroad toward the permanent habitation of space. Today space stations, spacewalks and orbital science are a fact of daily life. Since the year 2000, there has not been a single moment without people in space, doing useful work that advance the practical knowledge and skills of our global society. That progress would have been significantly curtailed had it not been for Pete Conrad, Joe Kerwin, and the thousands who supported them, going to work in the vacuum of space, to save Skylab with gardening tools.
