“I turned on the camera and I was finished.”Īlso finished was Pogue’s experience of spacewalking, for this second excursion would be his last the next two EVAs would both be undertaken by Carr and Gibson. “The instructions were clear and it was a fairly easy job,” he recalled. He could not physically see the comet, but Mission Control had earlier sent him a diagram on the teleprinter. Pogue carefully set up his camera, mounting it onto a strut and positioning it such that one of Skylab’s ATM arrays barely blocked the Sun. We repeated the procedure and were finished in record time.” Next came the photography of the comet. I operated an extendable boom to transfer the first film canister to Gerry he removed it and loaded the exposed canister to the boom I retracted the boom while Gerry loaded the fresh canister to replace the one he had just removed and when he gave me the okay, I sent the second canister out. “Gerry went hand-over-hand to the end of the solar observatory,” Pogue related, “while I got the replacement film magazines ready.
Photography of Kohoutek was one of Bill Pogue’s tasks, and in his NASA oral history interview he remembered floating in the station airlock, surrounded by cameras, two large film magazines for the station’s Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM), and tools which Carr would use to routinely service the solar observatory. This image of Comet Kohoutek was acquired by a member of the final Skylab crew, 40 years ago (Credits: NASA).
I was just amazed that, after seven hours, I wasn’t pretty interested in streaking to the urinal!” When I got back in, I was really sweaty, but I really didn’t have to urinate. Apparently, I’d gotten rid of a lot of fluids in the form of sweat through my pores. “I was amazed when I got back in, because I expected that I’d have to go to the bathroom something fierce, but I didn’t. “Bill and I were out for seven hours,” Carr recalled. Another EVA, conducted by Carr and Pogue, took place on Christmas Day, one of whose objectives was photography of Kohoutek. By the weekend before Christmas, more than a dozen such observations had been completed. Systematic studies of Kohoutek from Skylab had begun on 23 November, when Pogue used a photometric camera to record its intrinsic brightness, followed by analyses of the composition of its coma and tail a few days later. They even crafted a small, long-tailed star from silver foil and put it in pride of place at the top of the tree, in honor of their cometary visitor. Carr’s crew built a crude yuletide tree out of packing material from food containers and decorated it with makeshift ornaments. There the issue rested for a time and little more was said during the last couple of weeks of the month.Ĭhristmas-the second one to be celebrated by Americans in space, after Apollo 8′s message from lunar orbit in 1968-helped to distract the men from their workload, together with the anticipated arrival of Comet Kohoutek. His crew would not be expected to work for 16 hours a day, every day, for 84 days, on Earth, so it was unfair to expect it of them in space.
Having made it known prior to launch that his crew intended to take the activation of the workshop at a slow pace and ease their adaptation to the strange microgravity environment, on 6 December-two weeks into their mission-he spent several minutes explaining to Mission Control that the schedule was too full. The three men took a stoical outlook, trying to push on with their work and hope that circumstances would improve. As circumstances would transpire, the experience of Carr, Gibson, and Pogue would teach the agency to regard long-duration spaceflight in a quite different manner to its earlier, shorter-duration missions.Īlready, space sickness had stricken Pogue within hours of arriving at Skylab, and within a few weeks the excessive workload began to take its toll on them all. The enormous success of Skylab’s first and second crews-who repaired and revived the crippled station, then went on to accomplish 150 percent of their science goals-imbued NASA with a false sense of confidence that it could fully load the final crew with an excessive amount of work. As recounted in last week’s history articles, Commander Gerry Carr, Science Pilot Ed Gibson, and Pilot Bill Pogue were tasked to complete a mission of at least 60 days, open-ended to 84 days, either of which would produce a new world endurance record. They were the first humans to spend New Year in space in 1973-74 (Credits: NASA).įorty years ago, in November 1973, NASA launched its third and final crew to the Skylab space station. The crew of America’s final Skylab mission: Gerry Carr, Ed Gibson, and Bill Pogue.
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