Science: A Farewell to Skylab

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When Skylab's third and last team of astronauts lands in the Pacific off lower California this week, after a record 84 days in earth orbit, a good deal more than an extraordinarily successful mission will be coming to an end. Except for next year's scheduled space rendezvous between American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts, there are no plans to send anyone from the U.S. into orbit before the close of the decade. Friday's splashdown concludes not only the ambitious $2.6 billion Skylab program but an entire era of space exploration.

The final voyage set records that should last for years. If all goes well, Astronauts Gerald Carr, William Pogue and Edward Gibson will have traveled 34½ million miles in their 1,214 revolutions around the earth, made four long space walks and watched the sun rise and set more than 1,300 times. In their Apollo ferry ship, they will be carrying 900 lbs. of scientific experiments, thousands of pictures of the earth, sun and that elusive visitor to the solar system, the comet Kohoutek. Magnetic tapes holding scientific data about the earth alone could stretch for 19 miles.

Scientists will be kept busy for years studying the accumulated findings — to say nothing of the dramatic observations already reported from space. Astronaut Gibson, a solar physicist by training, managed to photograph for the first time the very beginnings of a solar flare — a sudden, violent release of enormous energy from the sun's interior. Looking earthward, the astronauts observed strange, swirling eddies in warm ocean currents that are apparently involved in the exchange of heat between water and atmosphere, an important factor in global weather and climate.

All this followed a very shaky start. Pogue and Carr came down with motion sickness shortly after liftoff. Pressing hard to keep up with their heavy work load, the astronauts bungled several experiments and misunderstandings arose between crew and Mission Control. That, in turn, raised concern among NASA officials about the ability of the men to endure prolonged isolation and weightlessness. To compound those troubles, one of the space station's three stabilizing gyroscopes broke down and another periodically faltered —threatening the photographic studies of sun and earth, which require an extremely stable vantage point. Finally, the crew grew so edgy that Skylab Commander Carr asked for a full-fledged appraisal of the crew's performance—in effect, the space program's first encounter session between orbit and ground.

Hungry Guppy. The bold tactic worked. Following the blunt dialogue between astronauts and Mission Control, relations improved enormously. So did the spacemen's performance. Helped by a steady program of exercising (bicycle and treadmill), the astronauts made a physical as well as emotional adjustment to their life in orbit. They also got more tune to relax; for amusement, Carr would open a jar of peanuts and "swim" after them as they drifted off, swallowing them up like a hungry guppy. "From what we've seen on Skylab," Astronaut-Physician Story F. Musgrave said last week, "I don't think there is any limit on how long man can stay in space."