Skylab Rescue

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There was room for five astronauts in the converted command capsule.

Skylab Rescue was a planned space mission as part of the US Skylab project.

In the event that the three crew members cannot return to earth with their own spaceship, a special rescue spaceship with two other crew members should start to the space station and pick up the Skylab crew there. Since this emergency did not occur, Skylab Rescue was never carried out.

background

The Skylab space station crew consisted of three astronauts. The flight to the space station was carried out in an Apollo spacecraft . After the astronauts transferred to the space station, the systems of the spacecraft were switched off, but it remained operational and could ensure the return to Earth in an emergency.

In the event that the Apollo spacecraft was defective or that access to it was not possible, a rescue mission was planned for the first time in the history of space travel. The replacement spaceship, an Apollo command module converted to five places and controlled by just two astronauts, would take off with a Saturn IB to the Skylab and dock it at the second docking port. The three Skylab astronauts would get on board and the five-man crew would return.

Deployment plan

Three manned missions were planned for the Skylab space station:

After each launch, the following rocket and spaceship should be kept ready for a possible rescue mission.

After the launch of Skylab 4, the AS-209 replacement rocket and the CSM-119 spacecraft would be kept ready. CSM-119 was the last spacecraft manufactured in the Apollo series.

Planned mission sequence

In the Kennedy Space Center, only a single launch pad was available for the Skylab missions. After a rocket launch, it was ready for a new mission after 22 days at the earliest. Preparing the rocket also took a long time, so it would take 12 to 48 days, depending on the phase of the mission, before the rescue mission was ready to go.

The preparation of the Apollo command module only took about eight hours. Various storage spaces could be converted and two more loungers and life support systems installed, so that instead of the usual three, there was now room for five astronauts.

At the start, the middle of the three usual beds would remain unoccupied, but weighed down with ballast.

When the rescue spaceship was underway, the three Skylab astronauts would have put on spacesuits and gone into the docking adapter. The inoperative Apollo spaceship would be on one of the two coupling nozzles. It would have been possible to mechanically decouple this and push it away from the space station, but that was not absolutely necessary because the rescue spaceship could also have docked at the second coupling port.

The rescue flight to the space station and back should not take longer than five days.

The planning, which ran from 1970 on, assumed that the three Skylab astronauts still had enough supplies of oxygen and food to wait for the arrival of the rescue ship.

A rescue mission would not have been possible if the emergency had only occurred after the Skylab astronauts boarded their spaceship for the return flight to Earth and disconnected from the space station.

Takeoff preparations during Skylab 3

During the second Skylab mission, Skylab 3 , problems occurred with two of the four control engine systems (quads) of the Apollo spacecraft. Although the spaceship was still fully controllable with two quads, there was a risk that the two defects would be connected and the other two quads would also fail, which would make a return to earth impossible.

Under normal circumstances the mission would have been canceled. But because there was the possibility of a rescue flight, the problem could be analyzed in peace. At the same time, however, the preparations for the rescue flight were in full swing. Work on the launch pad, rocket and spacecraft ran around the clock from August 3, 1973. A start on September 9th would have been possible.

The crew for this rescue flight were Commander Brand and Pilot Lind , because they formed the backup team for Skylab 3 together with the science astronaut Lenoir .

It turned out that the two problems on the control thrusters were independent and the other two quad systems were not affected. From August 13th, the normal pace was resumed, so that a start would still be possible on September 25th. As of September 10, the spaceship was kept in a condition that would have allowed a launch within the next nine days. With the splashdown of Skylab 3 on September 25th, the start date was set again on November 10th.

Web links

Commons : Skylab Rescue  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d NASA: Skylab: A Guidebook , CHAPTER III: Profile of the Skylab Mission; 4. RESCUE CAPABILITIES
  2. ↑ NASA: A History Of Skylab , Appendix A: Summary of the Missions
  3. ↑ NASA: A History Of Skylab , Appendix E: Astronauts' Biographies
  4. ^ NASA: Skylab: A Chronology , December 23, 1970
  5. ↑ NASA: Skylab: A Chronology , September 28, 1972
  6. ↑ NASA: Skylab: A Chronology
  7. ↑ NASA: Skylab, Our First Space Station, Chapter 7
  8. ↑ NASA: Skylab: A Chronology , April 15, 1971
  9. ↑ a b NASA: Skylab: A Chronology , August 14 - November 16, 1973
  10. ↑ NASA: Oral History Project (PDF; 372 kB), Vance D. Brand, April 12, 2002