Swimming Lessons
Astronauts had to swim before they could walk.
- By Rebecca Maksel
- AirSpaceMag.com, August 11, 2009
NASA
Skylab, a two-story, Earth-orbiting laboratory, was launched on May 14, 1973. For NASA’s first space station, Marshall Space Flight Center’s Neutral Buoyancy Simulator took underwater training to a new level. In Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, authors David Hitt, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin wrote, “The Neutral Buoyancy Simulator was a working facility. The theory had been proven and now was being put into practice.”
The NBL could fit spacecraft much larger than the capsules of the 1960s. The authors quoted tank manager Jim Splawn: “We sort of had the vision of building a facility large enough to accommodate some pretty large mock-ups of hardware, and it really proved out to be very, very beneficial.”
Shown here is astronaut Ed Gibson (a crewmember of the Skylab 4 mission), during EVA training at the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM) mockup in November 1970. At that time, the ATM was the most powerful observatory put into orbit.
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Comments (1)
This is a great photo, in part because it documents a little appreciated facet of the Skylab program. Before it was Skylab, it was AAP--the Apollo Applications Program. To gain support, NASA offered to fly some military technology experiments on the Orbital Workshop. One is shown in this photo: the inflatable airlock developed by the US Air Force (that roundish white object to the right of the Apollo Telescope Mount). The USAF wanted to evaluate an inflatable, collapsible airlock for use in its future space vehicles. What I didn't realize was that the Air Force inflatable airlock was still (apparently) in evaluation as late as November 1970, when this photo was taken.
Recall also that Alexei Leonov made humanity's first space walk through an inflatable airlock, but (as far as I know) none have ever been used since then.
Posted by John Charles on August 28,2009 | 01:36 PM