The Inquiring Mind; Space Stations: Science or Fiction

from the center for telecommunication services the university of texas at austin this is inquiring mind produced by public station in association with a news and information service at ut austin these discussions examining ideas and activities of a major university community yes your producer cathy clever once upon a time that people in the united states spoke of space stations orbiting units where people could live and work in space is their dream still a possibility what would be the next step in the space program after the shuttle with me as cultural car who served as capsule communicator for the apollo eight and twelve missions and commanded the eighty four day skyway admission is joined the university of texas at austin as project manager for the three hundred inch telescope proposed by the mcdonald observatory colonel carsten stations really a viable possibility for

the near future oh yes indeed i think the russians have to have the prewar proven at that point they have a space station call saul youth that has been out for a long time and has been continuously re visit by cosmonauts or record a few years what about the ap economics or the politics of doing such a project well how i think there will definitely be economics and politics involved in that not only in the united states but they'll be international politics because i think that term and the united states say in the construction of its neck space station at target date may very well have to involve international participation because of economics the fact that i'm building a space station is going to be such an expensive venture that it might well be worth further work consideration to include some more hours and this kind of adventure one of the closest thing we've ever had with some sky landy the

closest that we get to space station's go i was indeed americans for space station describe it for us i think get that people don't have a very good idea of what all included and perhaps if there everything about it there ever that it fell have a morbid bosco i was a young i guess you'd call low budget space station back in the apollo days in the late sixties they decided that they were going to have a a long duration that facility at their end the scientists engineers were trying to figure out a good scheme from building one and somebody came up with the idea of taking the third stage of the the lunar booster system the s for the booster that minister was the one that was used to boost the guys selma lunar emissions from the earth's orbit how to lunar orbit and the us for b boosters about term goal twenty four twenty three feet in diameter and it's nothing but two great big tank for the motor on the back the large tank

was a hydrogen tank and that's and that was on the front end of the thing and so it's a cylindrical tank was for a gold caps on and then underneath that between in the engine was a spherical tank of the same diameter which contain the oxygen and so as for bieber hydrogen and oxygen to make for us to boost the guys to the moon or someone said i am why don't we take this service for the booster and let's remove all baffles and the insides of his big hydrogen tank and let's make that a living compartment turned into a laboratory and um we'll put an airlock in and between that tank in the emmys for a call her oxygen tank and we use the oxygen tank for trash for a dempster dumpster undone so that was the idea that was kicked off early in yemen and so i would say in the mid sixties the fog here was a role once this thing in order and then the you know the crew would visited and would cut their way into it and remove all the battles and set up

housekeeping in their well as the thing got more and more real people began to realize that it didn't make sense to do it that way that we would just take as for me offer the assembly line and turn into a scam on the ground and then the plan was to boost in orbit on saturn five booster which was the big main booster that lets the the crews off on their way to the moon so that ended up being in the plan and the program her shift and it was called skin became skyline album before there was calling up our applications program soul on the skyline program really got moon about nineteen sixty seven nineteen sixty eight and this forest final design concepts and construction in nineteen seventy one they canceled or just a few weeks after they canceled the last three apollo missions they only announced the crews of the head of the three of skylight missions and i and my crew of bill pullman and gibson were were designated they're the third manned mission

and this was in nineteen seventy in nineteen seventy three and made is why no one thing was completed and they boosted in orbit all about me than sixteen for something fifteen something like that you may remember that when that happened as it was lifting off and going up through the ears atmosphere the vibrations caused a film or shield to shake loose and the thing the thermal shield deployed it was exposed to deploy until about an ordered world deployed earlier was torn away and the shock of that thermal she'll being deployed and torn away cause one of the us solar panels that look like wings on the skyline vehicle to deploy also it was probably towards off so coral skylight workshop ended up at two hundred and thirty five nautical mile or two hundred seventy statute more work missing a wine the other solar panel weighing had a piece of

strapped middle of that had to debrief or a mile from the formal shield the briefer matt had wrapped over and wouldn't allow that going to deploy so the and the wizards on the ground finally got the solar panels on the top of the very top of the space station to this girl a vehicle to deploy solis' to heads or power but here we had one wing still strapped to the side and no formal shield the temperature in a vehicle started going out and peeked out of a hundred and thirty degrees fahrenheit and air and so it looked like things were pre while sharpton i remember that day we're all three skeleton crews were down at the cape at that time i'm watching the workshop go that they were gonna go visit and i remember that was a very bad day at blackrock for a for my crew because we could see very clearly that there was a very very high probability they're mission would be scrubbed

well as it was planned twenty four hours later the first sky live crew was supposed to lift off from under the accompanying paddock a kennedy and rendezvous with ian skyline vehicle and awkward and set up housekeeping for twenty eight days well with all the damage they're they decided they'd better hold off that first mission silly held for about ten days while a jury rigged up a lot of special tools and things for these guys to go up and see if they can get in that thing and find a way to shade it so they can get the temperature back down under control again and find a way to deploy it that when it was still strapped up against the side well pete conrad and paul white cinder joker one finally launched and about ten days later and they took with them a lot of tools used by a year people who do tree pruning and they had gone to use the lighting and power company and looked at some of the tools they use because their thought was due to come up alongside the sky with the command module

and open hand to the command module and that was their suits on have one guy standup that was paul whites with his big tree pruning saudi was never reach out their cortisol that piece of work of a metal strapping so that the wing would deploy well that didn't work but they went ahead and talked and earth and gotten the spacecraft and they say yes indeed it's just thought was a dickens and here at eight hundred and thirty they deployed to sort of a parasol oral squirm brought one of the side windows of the skyline vehicle the workshop and had provided the shade that they needed in order to to bring that after back down under control so essentially those guys saved the whole mission they got the temperature the formal system down under control by pulling on a per soul they waited a few days and rested up and then they went outside with a bunch of other special tools like bolt cutters and things like that and they are did some were comments or peril and finally got it to the strong outfitted to martin wolf for

a loop on it when they're deployed and they're but they got a deployed in and start generating more power and so as of that time the mission was saved pete end paul banjo stayed out for twenty days and came down and after about thirty day hiatus sir i l bean and jack lost mine on garrett one of them spent fifty nine days up there they brought with them some more tools and some or widgets to be fixed and did some or repair work up there they put out another awning over the top with a parasol and got us a little bit more shooting and that the temperatures set down into a better range down into the sixties and seventies instead of an eighties and a repaired some gyros and did a lot of repair work and a lot of science fair and after their mission there was about a sixty day hiatus until november the sixteenth and at that time our launched

with my crew bill pullman ed gibson and we rendezvous then balked with the spacecraft and that brought with us also some repair kits because the refrigeration system that failed and we had to repair the refrigeration system testers like elvis about one thing it's a measure it or turn your trip the washing machine or refrigerator fails or something sure enough the refrigerator failed we spent eighty four days up there finishing up all scientific observations and experiments that were to be done and i came back so that's pretty much how the whole skyline program went to tip from the david lifted off it was a bag a war isn't a lot of trouble but it's at a monument to man's ingenuity and flexibility that we were able to send isaac there and turned what was a disaster and to probably one of the most productive scientific missions it's ever been flown what was it like to do and therefore you're there for just over three knots yes as a longtime aids institute

a land that's far away well you want who was really not very bad know one of the question yes nearly which i never did answer and as how big was the skyline i can do tell you that in this context the un the workshop a living space itself was so bummed the us for b is about as i said twenty three or four feet in diameter on the outside and the whole thing from stand a stern from one into the other with the command module blocked it was a hundred nineteen feet long the liveable volume inside the shuttle is about the same size as a more modest three bedroom house the biggest compartment ana workshop was twenty two feet in diameter and three four feet high and that's were living quarters were or for food and sleeping in our bathroom and while the medical experiments were carried out on that large one tacked onto the end of it was a smaller compartment color multiple talking an actor and that was the the nerve center for the soul or

physics experiments and the earth observations experiment and it was also the nerve center for the year informal system that the oxygen system that we used our spacecraft and of course tech domino that was there that the command module it took a soap and prosper but what was it like to live up their own it really was quite comfortable and clean and will refer it was it was a very comfortable existence so we we had took a little while to learn how to cope with a weightless environment and how to manage loose flying and floating objects but turn it is remarkable how adaptive a human is in terms of learning how to deal with the thing that that and the fact that she can play anything now because if you do is float away unless you got magnets or store will grow or some kind of stickers or something that too make things stay where you put on but it was a it was a very interesting existence up there

being a three dimensional person were you not limited to walking around the war is all but you're also vertical person you can use jump off like superman floating the vertical direction if you want to do you know not to face the prospect of people being out for longer periods facing some kind of unusual medical problems because of the weightlessness well there was a concern in the beginning as the mercury gemini apollo programs developed of the doctors were noting that the astronauts who are flying those missions were coming back with them with a problem a call cardiovascular de conditioning at all and he uses it when you put a human body in a weightless environment the heart and the muscles of the body don't have to be as big and strong because you're not fighting gravity and that because the heart muscle gets weak because it's not pumping blood against gravity and all is to pump blood in a weightless informant you know he suffered his de conditioning unit and the worry of the medical community was that if if something isn't done about that the man could go up and stay may be for four five or six months or so and of weakening the heart muscle so much really comes

back dirty dutch word failure they also noticed in their measurements that theory the density of and the guys bones in your program they were losing calcium other bones in her bones were becoming less dense and again this is just because mother nature isn't adapting it to your environment you don't need real strong dance loans in a weightless environment because you're not snacking your heels on concrete walking around so that was the other concern that a guy could end up coming back with enough calcium last words bones would be brittle and am weak and he could end up breaking bones and then and becoming an invalid what we learned on sky lab was that term and neither of those two things has to be any great concern if you exercise in and keep them in good shape and that means go to fool mother nature so we did a lot of very very heavy exercise in skylight in order to keep our muscles on our cardiovascular system toned for the eventual return to earth and we had a funny little rube goldberg oh i'm a treadmill that we used to stress or skeleton with

voters so that true we greatly reduced in our bones the calcium loss as a result of being weightless i want to move on to the un through that the prospects of a space station or our why is it that we haven't seen and next steps and scott bland well as warm words money there just isn't enough money to do all things that we would like to do and there is there are studies now going on nasa has funded several studies for space station concepts and planning and they're beginning to look ahead at the space station and they're pleading with them the administration for more funding in order to do this work does that mean that it became the camera priority your thing so we're at in my opinion i think in the next two or three years nasa really ought to shrug the shuttle program off on to some kind of hope private enterprise it ought to go to the management of a say a consortium what comes

after some maybe they could form a consortium or turn over to a major company i know that united airlines and i think he'd only a hand boeing corporation have all all made proposals to the knesset to take over the shuttle program and run it like an airline like a commercial business and un i think that's the really want more to be done nasa never has been an operational kind of an organization into research and development and a technological development out that they have developed a shuttle and it works and it's time to turn over i think to an operator and get on with the next step that needs to be done and in my view that space station and in their in the view of many people in the us that they agree with that that assessment why we need a space station which began here well man is certain is by nature inquisitive beast and needs to be exploring needs to be learning more about what's going on around the man what he really is and then where he really isn't a space

station is an excellent way to begin to learn those kinds of things just as is astronomy physics and all the others the value of space station is that it puts it allows a man to to continue to expand and self want to get out into a and a different informants and we're more we're finding already just from some experiments done on skyline and some that are being done today on the shuttle program that there are indeed some very interesting industrial applications to space like the the growth of electronic crystals like the development of serum so pharmaceuticals can be done that some of them can be done very nicely and weakness and mormons were they cannot be formulated in a gravity environment because gravity interferes with the molecular combination and flow so a space station allows us to dig out their own and develop manufacturing and industrialization in space it allows the astronomer and the saur physicist to get outside of the

confines of the earth's environment so that he can see clearly i think you could say to david at the astronomer and solar physicist is is looking out at the stars at the sun through per glasses evidence and west and he's only get part of the light that that he can study but when you put down an observatory outside years atmosphere you get all it undone and that said we in scotland took a lot of sword at that time has had a very profound effect on plants or physics theory today also from space station's see you can look back down at the earth and understand better the the mechanisms and phenomena that are going on down here on the earth and i think from that vantage point men will become a better and manager of his environment we're learning a lot of things about whether whether formation and geology and urban urban will land use i guess is a better word in urban sprawl land

use the physicist the earth scientists know that there's a tremendous amount of energy interchange that goes on between the surface of the earth and the atmosphere around and a chorus evidence of that is tai films hurricanes tornadoes thunderstorms and the massey energy that's available is from one thunderstorm could you know run a power station to like the city austin probably for a hundred years just one thunderstorm an and we know that tone all of this energy comes from kind of an energy exchange goes on the twenty in the atmosphere and the earth's surface that the temperature the heat that radiates off of the ear and i'm from the vantage point of space we're finding out that we can learn a whole lot more about those very large scale phenomena that we can do more down and it's like being able to back off from the forest and look at the trees would you envision people being able

to spend quite a bit of time just going up and saying how long might they be able to stay well we've proven you can stay three months the russians have proven that you can you can stay six months and you don't have to be careful if you design an ex playstation to make sure the man sterling or creative spirit is taken care of you can't use artificial environment creates an eve you got to put people in a comfortable environment where they can be created that something that we learn on skeleton that they stare all spartan kind of mix of environs of becomes rather boring and we did an experiment called the habit ability experimental was him for eighty one nineteen forty seven was the number of experiments in which iran each of us said babbled into a tape recorder for hours talking about every little nitpicking detail was good or bad or spacecraft and it was used to it was used by these have that ability experts in

that in evaluating the acceptability of the habitat that we have there and i think we learned a whole lot from that that will be applied to a new space station color or smell sound all those kinds of things we really got into exquisite detail about because you wanna make it as livable as possible if you have the and i think that man kagan can stay up in that kind of informal as long as they're a private place we can go if you're grumpy if he's got a place to look at the view and he's got opportunities for creative activity like music art hobby shop and what would every wants to do there there's got to be work time and leisure time and time to recharge your batteries and that sort of thing that term there is no reason in my mind why person can stay in a weightless environment for long periods of time if you keep busy and happy take your the morale take care of the body with exercise make sure that you don't you know closing doors mind is we can go back to the earth because part of your

body is deteriorated and it is now really any reason why men can stay up there for a long period of time is there on anyone paying or or possibly few things that you see that would stand in the way of the us distilled in developing a space station in the near future is it is it the nanny asked their money i think probably is the biggest single problem to be overcome right now there's lots of interest in people who are ready to go there's lots of interesting engineers and contractors who helped build it i think the big problem is we just got to we got to take it off we've got to commit to do if you commit the resources to go ahead and engage with them designing public support is that where it's going to take or i think there's quite a bit of public support right now i think lots of polls and then taking indicated there's the grass general philosophical grassroots support to the space program most everybody think it's thinks it's a fine thing is it's in a spiritually uplifting kind of the thing

for the whole country our guest has been cultural carle former astronaut and project manager for the three hundred inch telescope at mcdonald observatory speaking on space station's i'm terribly clever afford inquiring mind you've been listening to the inquiry line a series of programs about the members of the major university community their ideas and opinions expressed in this programme do not necessarily reflect the views of the university of texas at austin inquiring mind is produced by public station in association with the news and information service and distributed by the center for telecommunication services all at the university of texas at austin a map this is the longhorn radio network