Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a love of all things tech. And just in case this sounds different, it's because I'm once again recording on my own equipment, but in the office studio. So just in case you think it sounds weird, and it's not just me, that's why. But we recently did a history of the evolution of the space suit and how countries like Russia and the United States dedicated millions of dollars in research and development to create suits that would help astronauts and cosmonauts survive the rigors of traveling to space and then back to Earth. I mentioned the International Space Station a couple of times in that series and thought, you know, I haven't really done any episodes talking about space stations or how the I s S came to be and what folks do up there as they whizz around the Earth at four point seven six miles per second or seven point six six kilometers per second for you know, everyone who's not in the US. And I figured that it was more than past time to cover these sort of things, because you know, the modules that make up the I S S were originally rated for a fifteen year lifespan, but the first modules for the International Space Station launched in So if you do your math, that means that puts the fifteen year market two thousand thirteen, and we are well past that as it stands. There's hope that we could see the I S S continue to operate for another few years to hit that thirty year mark, but recently we've seen some claims that suggest the end might need to come a little earlier than that if we want to avert catastrophe, because parts of the I S S are a little worse for where But of course this is tech stuff that means we have to dive into a lot of history before we get to the I S S. In fact, spoiler alert, we won't be touching on the International Space Station in this episode. We'll be getting that in a later one. So the International Space Station was not the first space station in orbit. That honor goes to the first Saliot space Station, and there were multiple of those, and those came from the then Soviet Union. Now earlier this year we passed the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Saliot one that got off the ground literally on April nineteenth, ninety one. Now, this space station is important for quite a few reasons. Not only was it the first space station, but elements in the Saliot would continue down through a line of different space station and spacecraft designs out of the U. S. S R, and then later out of Russia to find their way into components that are now part of the International Space Station. So it's all going to tie together in the end. But first, let's talk about Salute, which means salute. Surprisingly enough, it got its start in the nineteen sixties with Soviet scientists discussing the possibility of developing a space station specifically for military purposes. So this project had the name alamas A l m ay Z, which means diamond in Russian and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing it. My apologies to all you Russian speakers out there. So the real purpose of the Alma's stations were to serve as reconnaissance operations, so spying. In other words. Now, generally speaking, it's not incredibly wise to advertise that you're engaged in spying. It's kind of defeats the purpose. So the Soviets decided that they would mask that and they would launch a series of civilian space stations UH specifically dedicated to scientific research, and then they would just kind of hide the military ones in the mix. So some of those stations would genuinely be about scientific exploration and experimentation, some of them were more about peeping on the neighbors. Also. The original plan was for the Alma's stations to be modular in design, but the success of the Apollo eleven moon landing in nineteen sixty nine spurred the Soviets to move up their timeline and that necessitated a change in plans. So instead of going with the modular Alma's space station, which would mean that you would have to launch components in separate launches, and then crews would need to go up into space and assemble those modules together to create a space station, the Soviets decided to instead rely on a Salute design and all in one space station that could be launched fully constructed into space. The first Saliot was one of the civilian missions, so not one of the secret military ones. UH. Saliot two, three, and five were all military projects, so they were really mixed in there also, Quickside notes Saliot to suffered a catastrophic failure just two weeks of it being launched into orbit. The station depressurized after a collision with a part of the launch vehicle system and ended up moving lower in orbit until it re entered the our atmosphere and broke apart. Now, fortunately there were no cosmonauts aboard because no Soviet crew had yet visited the launched station, which meant that no lives were lost as a result of this incident. So to visit a Saliot station, in order to get there, crew of cosmonauts would launch inside a Soyu's space capsule talked about those in the space suit episodes, and this capsule would be you know, attached to a launch vehicle, a rocket in other words, and the Soyus capsule would get launched into orbit and that would be on a trajectory to dock with the Salut station using a new probe and drogue docking system. So the probe is the part that you know, docks inside the drogue. And it was originally going to have the name Zaria, the original original space station was. In fact, it had that name so long the engineers actually painted the name on the spacecraft. It had the name Zaria on it. That means dawn by the way. However, for several reasons, and they were all pretty valid ones, the Soviets decided that they needed to rename the spacecraft, so they renamed Saliot. But there wasn't enough time to give the space station a new paint jobs, so while it was named Saliott, it had the name Zaria painted on it. Also, the development of the Saliot station had some drama attached to it, and I'm gonna have to do a full episode about the Soviet era space program to talk more about not just the program and the technology used and the goals of the program, but also the rivalries that existed within the program itself. So the guy who designed the Soya's spacecraft was Seragei Korolov, and the guy who came up with the Alma's Reconnaissance station, which eventually got merged into the Saliot program was Vladimir Chellamy and Chelloman also designed the Transport Supply Ship or the t k S that was designed to resupply the Alma's space station. And these two, these two Soviets had some pretty intense battles within the Soviet space program, and each attempted to level ridge various political favors in order to push their own projects ahead of the other. So I will have to do a full episode about that at some point. It's pretty fascinating. But let's talk about the first Saliot space station briefly. The main part of the station was cylindrical. It measured forty eight feet long or about fourteen point six meters, and it was a stepped cylinder, so in other words, like it wasn't a smooth cylinder. There were sections of the cylinder that had uh different diameters, right, so you might have a few meters of of space that are one diameter and the next few are different. So at its widest section, which was the rear of the spacecraft, it measured thirteen point nine feet or four point to five meters in diameter, and inside there was around three thousand five cubic feet of volume for the cosmonauts to live and work in, and as a NASA page on the topic puts it, it was about the size of a large in ground swimming pool. Inside there though not the shape, but you know, same sort of space. The station solar arrays that collected energy from the Sun to power the station were really important, right. They were using solar power to provide electrical power to the station, and it also had a lot of scientific equipment aboard, enough that the equipment weighed two thousand, six hundred pounds here on Earth or just under one thousand. It had antenna to allow it to transmit messages back to Earth. Very important, and the cosmonauts were meant to inhabit the station, conduct observations and experiments using the various equipment and telescopes aboard the station, and generally pushed science forward by leagues. Heck, the cosmonauts themselves were technically experiments because no one was really sure what the long term effects of a prolonged mission in space might be on the human body. Uh. And of course there were the military operations as well, where cosmonauts would be conducting reconnaissance missions rather than scientific ones. Now, the station include did a refrigerator and a food warmer. Cosmonauts wore special suits that provided resistance to major muscle groups in order to you know, exercise, and the reason for that was to fight against the tendency for cosmonauts to lose significant muscle mass while just maneuvering through a microgravity environment. The resistance meant that just moving around would require a bit more exertion than normal, and the station also had a treadmill as well as elastic restraints to hold you onto the treadmill so that the cosmonauts could take exercise. For the same reasons, you know, you wanted to fight against things like muscle loss and bone density loss as best you could. Unfortunately, when the first Saliot space station innered orbit in April nineteen seventy one, the protective cover for the scientific instruments stayed in place rather than jettisoning off from the station as was planned, and that meant that a lot of those experiments just couldn't happen because the instruments were still covered by a casing you couldn't remove. Still, the station was habitable, and on April the Saya's ten space capsule launched, carrying three cosmonauts headed off to move into the station. Only there was an issue. The probe and drogue apparatus failed to create a good docking seal, so there was no hard lock with the space station, so the crew of the capsule could not make the transfer over into the space station, so they were forced to ultimately return home without having gone into the space station. But then a subsequent crew aboard the next capsule, Soya's eleven, which had a newly designed probe to interlocked, interlocked with the drogue mechanism on the space station that launched on June six of that year. So the first saliot did eventually get a crew, it just took a couple of tries. That crew stayed aboard the station for twenty four days. That was a record for the amount of time spent in space at that point, and tragically that crew perished on their way back to Earth. In fact, from what I understand, these are the only people, at least acknowledged anyway, who have died in space. There's been a lot of accidents related to space missions, but most of them have happened within the atmosphere of Earth. Um this one did not. The Saya's capsule de pressurized and tragically all three crew member died as a result, And in fact, this was the tragedy that would change the way the Soviet Union approached the Sayers capsule and space suits. If you remember from the space suit episodes, the Soviets decided for a while that they just would do away with pressure suits and space suits for any missions that didn't require extra vehicular activities, that is, spacewalks. But after the disaster of Saya's eleven, the Soviets then redesigned the Saya's capsule and it would only carry a crew of two cosmonauts instead of three, and that would allow enough space inside the capsule for both of those cosmonauts to wear pressurized space suits during launch and landing to protect against the sort of thing and to at least give them a chance. As for that first space station, it remained in orbit for one days, and the redesign of the Sayus capsule meant that no other crew was going to be able to visit Salut before it was no longer habitable, and so the Soviets chose to de orbit the space station so that it would re enter their atmosphere and break apart over the Pacific Ocean. So only one crew actually got to the first Saliot space station, and we already mentioned that the second Saliot space station, the first of the military ones, experienced catastrophic failure, again fortunately without anyone inside it, but then the Soviets launched lots of other ones, and the third space station went up just a few days before the United States was to launch its own first space station, and we'll get to that in a little bit. But anyway, that third one also failed to achieve orbit and would receive the name Cosmos five five seven, And information on that is kind of limited. The Soviets were incredibly secretive with their space program, and so finding reliable sources that talk about hard facts is difficult. You get a lot of you get a lot of speculation, and you get a lot of reports that may or may not be reliable. In fact, NASA just described this as quote an unmanned Soya's type vehicle end quote, and that the funding agency is quote unknown end quote. But then in parentheses behind that says USSR. So I guess kind of known. Anyway, The actual Salut three mission, which was one of the military missions disguised as a civilian one, reportedly included the testing of a twenty three millimeter gun attached to the stage sation so like um like a conventional gun actually as part of a station weaponry. Now there's very little information on this, so I hesitate to relay any stories about it. And besides, a lot of stuff has actually contradictory reports, so it's hard for me to say what happened because there are accounts that contradict each other. But yeah, at least according to some stories, this was the first spacecraft to be weaponized, and at least some of the stories indicate that the Soviets did test fire it while the space station was an orbit, though supposedly not when any crew were actually aboard the space station, So the command to fire the gun was given from the ground. The way this gun was on the station. By the way, you couldn't move the gun to point at targets. You would actually have to reorient the entire station to point at whatever it was you're going to fire at. Uh, don't have much more information about that. Got a lot of speculation though. In total, there were seven official Saliot space stations, but nine attempts. The Cosmos five five seven was one of the failed attempts, and another one was called the do OS two space station. Both of those failed to achieve orbits, so they didn't get the Saliot designation. Then again, as I mentioned, the Saliot to space station achieved orbit that had to be de orbited within two weeks due to malfunctions. Saliot six and seven were of a different design than their predecessors. The older Saliot stations had a single docking port at one end of the cylinder, and that's where the Soya's capsule would connect to the station, But six and seven had two docking ports, one on either end, so the Soyas capsule could dock at one side of the cylinder and the other side could serve as a docking point for resupply ships. In addition, it made it possible for a second Soyas capsule to dock with the station, so you could have two crews aboard the station at one each with you know, two cosmonauts, and they can meet at the space station simultaneously. This allowed the Soviets to have some guest cosmonauts go on trips to the space stations in orbit. The cargo ships called Progress were automated and they would dock with new supply so there was no crew aboard these, it was just you know, resupply ships. These were all important steps towards creating the next generation of space stations. Now the first six Saliot space stations launched in the nineteen seventies. Most of them re entered the R's atmosphere just a few months after they had launched, so they didn't stay up there for very long. Saliot five stuck around a little bit longer. It launched in June nineteen seventy six and stayed up until August of nineteen seventy seven, so it was up for more than a year. Saliot six went up in September nineteen seventy seven and re entered Earth's atmosphere in July of nineteen eighty two, so it was up there for about five years. Then the final mission launched in April nineteen eighty two and stayed up until February, so nearly a decade. Pretty impressive for an early space station design. The civilian stations all had a core module that had the designation d O S, so that d O S two was one of those. The military stations had a core modular designation as h O P S. The d S design would then extend beyond the saliott era into the next phase of the Soviet Union's space program, which would include the Mirror, which spoiler alert, we also won't get to in this episode. But when we come back, we'll switch over to talk about sky Lab for a bit, but first let's take a break. So, the Soviets were launching space stations in nineteen one, and it would take a couple of years before the United States was ready to follow suit. But we've got some overlap that we need to talk about, because obviously the stuff isn't just happening, you know, one after the other. There's a lot of stuff happening at the same time. And actually we need to backtrack as far as the late nineteen fifties and the scientist Werner von Braun. His is a complicated history, which is a pretty nice way of saying he was once a Nazi, or at least he worked for the Nazis during World War Two developing long range rocket based weaponry, and he was one of the engineers responsible for the infamous V two rocket. Some accounts suggest that he wasn't particularly sympathetic to the Nazis, but rather worked under them because he had little choice unless he was to abandon his life's pursuit of engineering. And so essentially he was saying, I had to work for them. They were the ones who were letting me do science. Now I find that explanation somewhat unconvincing and certainly not satisfying, but at any rate, Von Brown, along with more than fift hundred other German engineers and scientists, where they were all secretly away to America after World War Two as part of Operation paper Clip. So while the United States and the rest of the world we're you know, seeking out Nazi officers and trying to hold them accountable for various war crimes up through World War two and and after uh, the scientists and engineers were kind of spared that because they were seen as being useful assets, so they were relocated to America to work for us instead. That's also a fascinating story, that entire story of Operation paper Clip. It's one I should probably do a full episode on and maybe I'll get some of the lads from the stuff they don't want you to know to come and join me for that one. Anyway, one of von Braun's ideas that you know once he made the transition over to America was to use a multi stage rocket in order to travel to the Moon. But he also had the idea of using the upper stage of the rocket to convert it in orbit to serve as a scientific laboratory. The upper stage would hold propellant during launch, so it would be part of your launch vehicle. But then a subsequent visiting crew could go to that, uh, that stage of the rocket which would be in orbit, and then they could vent any remaining propellant out of that. And it's an airtight container, so they could then fill the container with breathable oxygen and convert it into an orbiting laboratory. He called this proposal Horizon, and it would turn out that sky Lab, the United States first space station, would kind of follow this design. Now largely this was thanks to Van Brown advocating for this approach, as he anticipated he and his team wouldn't have a whole lot of work to do once the Apollo missions completed, and you know, guy has got to get paid. So in the late nineteen sixties, NASA began to consider, and not for the first time, the potential for establishing a space station in orbit around Earth for a more lasting presence in space. The Apollo program was proving to be a success after an initial catastrophe with Apollo one, and you had the first astronauts landing on the Moon in nineteen sixty nine, so the agency really began to look ahead while still pursuing additional lunar missions. The Soviets were planning out how to combine military operations with a civilian space station program, but NASA was looking to create a more persistent presence in orbit, and that became the origin of the sky Lab project. Now, the plan originally was to launch sky Lab as a wet works station. That means following the style of von Brown, having a multi stage rocket in which all the stages are holding propellant and one of them you then convert into a workstation. However, that changed for a couple of different reasons. One is that NASA originally had plans for additional Apollo missions after Apollo seventeen, but those got scrapped, and it meant that effectively NASA had a couple of extra Saturn five rockets, so they could then launch sky Lab on a Saturn five rocket, one of the ones that was originally going to be part of the Apollo program, and thus they could have a special payload attached to this rocket that would hold the scientific instruments and a solar observatory, as well as an orbiting workstation where astronauts would actually live and work, so the upper stage of this launch vehicle, the S four B stage, would become the orbital workstation. Again. Originally the plan was this was gonna be a wet workshop. They were going to pump out or vent out the propellant, the extra propellant inside of it and then converted into a workstation. But as it would turn out, by the time it came to launch, the plans had changed, so the S four B stage didn't need to hold any propel and at all, so it could be just a dry workshop, which dramatically simplifies things. Uh, there would be no need to do that conversion stage while in orbit. You could actually set everything out here on Earth. And the reason that was possible is that the Saturn five launch vehicle, which again was not originally intended to be a sky Lab launch vehicle, is powerful enough with just the earlier stages to get the payload into orbit without the need for the Saturn four B stage to also be part of the launch vehicle. So the station itself would have lots of different scientific instruments aboard. A large focus was on the study of the Sun and tightly wrapped around the S four B stage was this micro meteoroid shield. Uh. This shield was meant to do two major things to protect the the space station against micro meteoroids, so tiny particles traveling at intense speeds that could would cause massive damage if they were to collide with the space station. But was also supposed to be a heat shield because since this laboratory was meant to study the Sun, it was going to be exposed to solar radiation and it could get pretty warm out there if you didn't have a way of you know, throwing some shade, I guess. And this was all supposed to deploy once the station achieved orbit. The idea was that the sky Lab would get into orbit, it would deploy its solar arrays, and it would deploy its micro meteoroid shield. That did not happen. See I used words like it was it was to deploy and it and that the solar panels were to provide electricity. Because these things did not go smoothly when it came time for Skylab to actually launch, which was in May nine, three two years after the first Salut station went into orbit. So during launch, the micro meteoroid shield was damaged. It became dislodged and it tore away from the spacecraft. It also damaged one of the solar panels, which subsequently also tore away from the spacecraft. So you only had one main solar panel left behind. I mean you had one, had some for the solar observatory, which was part of the scientific instruments, but the main orbiting workstation only had one solar panel left, and it was partially jammed, so it was unable to fully extend to the way it was supposed to be. The shield, like I said, was meant to provide protection not just against micro meteoroids but also heat. So without it, the station started to reach temperatures of fifty two degrees celsius, and that's about a d degrees fahrenheit. That's way too hot for astronauts to take up residents for any sort of extended stay. The first Skylab mission with a crew was called sky Lab two. This gets a little confusing because, I mean, if you look at the Soviets and the Saliot missions, those numbers like salut to sell at three that refers to separate space stations, right, Each of those are space stations that either got into orbit or suffered a failure. But sky Lab, when we talk about Skylab to Skylab three and sky Lab four, those are just missions that were going to the one sky Lab station. There was only ever one sky Lab, so when you're sky Lab two, that's referring to the mission that went to the station. It brought the first three astronauts up to the Skylab station, and obviously one of the top priorities for that mission was to repair the space station after it's troublesome launch and try to get it into working order. Several days had passed since it had launched, and there were already some big issues that the astronauts had to address. First of all was that problem with the heat so they installed an ingenious little thing to fix it, and um it was good because there was a real fear that the entire mission was going to have to get scrapped because of the launch problems that had happened. But the crew of Skylab two were able to install a new sun shield of parasol. Essentially, it was a temporary fix. A later Skylab mission would install a more permanent heat shield, but this was like a little parasol, like just like you would hold up you know, if you were a Victorian and you wanted to take a stroll in the park, and they installed it into the station, which kept the station at a more tolerable temperature. The crew also made repairs to the exterior of the space station and a couple of e v A s extra vehicular activities spacewalks. In other words, they unjammed the remaining main solar panel. And the duration of Skylab two's mission aboard the space station was twenty eight days, so they were up there for four weeks. Uh, pretty phenomenal. Then you had two other Skylab missions, he had Skylab three and sky Lab four. Those would see crews spend fifty nine days with Skylab three and eighty four days for sky Lab four. Pretty phenomenal. And Uh, here's a cool personal connection that I just thought I would throw in there. One of the astronauts in the sky Lab three mission was Owen Garriott, a scientist astronaut. He was up there for that fifty nine day period. As I said, he would later go on a second space mission in nine three he was aboard the space Shuttle Columbia. And he also was the father of Richard Garriott. Then they might not mean anything to you unless you're a big computer game fan like computer role playing game fan. Because Richard Garriott is also known as Lord British. He is the guy who created the Ultimate series of computer games. He's also one of just a few civilians who ever got to visit the International Space Station. I'll talk about that in another episode. I used to chat with Richard Garriott at conventions. I met him and like we knew each other a little bit and would talk. I wouldn't say we were friends, because we were never that close, but we were friendly with one another. Uh. And that is as far as my personal connection to sky Lab or the I S S goes, But it's still be kind of cool, I think anyway. So the first mission with a crew launched in May seventy three. The final mission with a crew returned to Earth in February ninety four, so you're looking at less than a year for all the Skylab missions. However, Skylab itself stayed up in orbit for quite some time, longer than that. NASA actually hoped to be able to boost sky Lab to a higher orbit and to send Space Shuttle missions there and extend its mission even longer. However, the spatial program ran behind schedule, and sky Lab ultimately ran out of time. Increased overer activity and a deteriorating orbit meant that sky Labs days were numbered. It was going to re enter Earth's atmosphere. There was no way to avoid it, because there was no way to push it further out into orbit. In July, sky Lab re entered or atmosphere. NASA had previously attempted to adjust sky Labs orientation. This wasn't an effort to kind of try to steer it toward like an ocean, so it wouldn't fall over a populated area. There was a real concern and in some places, like a media circus, regarding where this space station might fall, and that it could potentially you know, kill someone, or cause massive damage or or collide with, like, you know, a population center. A NASA study indicated that the agency itself was concerned about such an outcome. Now as it happened, the station did not hit the ocean as intended, at least not all of it. Some parts of it hit the Indian Ocean, but it broke apart in Earth's atmosphere much lower than anyone expected. Actually, it's it remained intact far longer than people thought it would, and pieces of it hit a largely unpopulated region of Western Australia. Uh and a lot of folks retrieve pieces of sky Lab and put them on display. I think that was even in like a Miss Universe pageant or something. But yeah, crazy stuff. So let's talk about some of the tech aboard sky Lab and what it was doing of there. So the parameters of the Skylab mission were to quote, observe the Earth to study natural resources and the environment, observe the Sun to study high energy solar activity, study the effects of weightlessness on the human body and assess crew adaptation to long duration spaceflight, study materials processing in microgravity, and perform experiments submitted by students for a classroom in space. Much of the scientific instrumentation aboard sky Lab was optical, which means tell Us hopes and related cameras and sensors. Chief among these were the instruments attached to the Apollo Telescope Mount or a t M. This major part of sky Lab had an octagonal structure that measured three point four meters across and four point four meters long, and within this octagonal structure was a cylindrical canister mounted in gimbal rings. These are rings that can turn in a different you know, different planes, so that you can reorient something that's mounted inside them. The gimbal rings allowed for a range of motion that let the cylinder point towards a specific region of the sun, despite you know, other things going on in space. Now, this was something I had not considered. Banasa had to solve a problem in order to get all of this to work, because we know from the laws of motion that every action has an equal but opposite reaction. So when we push against the Earth, technically the Earth is pushing back. It's just most of us are not dense enough for anyone to really notice this. But in microgravity, astronaut movements in the Skylab living quarters could conceivably cause enough motion to disrupt sensitive scientific experiments that required instruments to be precisely aimed at a specific point on the Sun. So if you need to be focused on a very specific region of the Sun, but you're worried about motion, you have to solve that problem. So to mitigate this Skylab itself, the entire space station had installed three control moment gyros or cmgs to stabilize the station, and these gyros were a double gimbal mounted and electrically driven system that could keep Skylabs orientation relatively maintained. And I say relatively because it wasn't quite finally tuned enough to stabilize the instruments aboard the A t M. I'll quote a NASA document about how they achieved even greater precision. Quote. This was accomplished with a solar pointing control system PCs. The PCs sensed the sun's center to a few tenths of a second of arc and sent error signals into the torque motors that controlled the rotational positions of the A t M canister gimbals. Offset pointing in yaw or in pitch by steps of one point to five seconds of arc. Up to twenty four minutes of arc could be introduced by counter rotating a pair of quartz wedges placed in the solar beam incident on the yaw solar sensor, or a similar pair for pitch. These solar sensors were one of the few items inherited from the AO s oh okay h end quote right there, so, Jonathan. Here, here's a side note. The AO s O stands for Advanced Orbiting Solar Observatory, which was a project that NASA had planned in the nineteen sixties but ultimately had to scrap when it was clear that the tech wasn't really ready yet and the spense of the project would be way beyond NASA's budget. All right, let me get back to the quote. Control of offset pointing by rotating the prisms was accomplished by the crewman with his panel joystick. Digital indicators read out yaw and pitch to one second of arc and roll to one minute of arc. End quote. All right, that's really complicated. It gets really technical, but essentially what it's saying is that this system could correct for those motions and keep the canister relatively uh stable with regard to whatever it was aimed at. So kind of like if you think of like stabilization technologies and digital cameras, it's in concepts similar to that. So much of the observational work done aboard sky Lab had to do with the sun, with the instruments taking multiple images of the Sun at a specific wavelength of light. These instruments are called spectro heliographs, and they produce a mono chromatic image, so you know, black and white image. So why would you focus on a specific wavelength of light. Well, it's one way to study the various elemental components of a star, as different materials will give off different wavelengths of light, So by looking at which wavelengths are the most intense, you can kind of get an idea of which elements are the most plentiful and something like a star like the Sun. Onboard sky Lab, astronauts performed all sorts of scientific experiments, including medical experiments and some designed by students back on Earth. The crew also conducted some observations of Earth, which was quite an achievement because the planned experiments and instruments for that purpose have been part of a previously canceled NASA project called the Apollo Applications Mission. The history of NASA is one that's filled with lots of projects that were meant to be but never came to fruition or were only partially developed before they were abandoned, and it's not always possible to salvage stuff from that. But in this case, sky Lab was able to incorporate some of the plans for the Apollo Applications Mission and incorporate some Earth observation experiments with sky Lab. In all, the astronauts oversaw more than a hundred experiments, ranging from using X ray and ultra violet cameras and spectrographs to stay the Sun to measuring stuff like mineral loss in a human body due to an extended stay in microgravity. Some of the student projects included things like observing Earth's atmospheres, ability to absorb radiant heat, X ray emissions from Jupiter, and capillary action studies in a state of free fall. While the collective times spend aboard Skylab amounted to one seventy one days for all of the crude missions, the amount of work done was truly little astronomical. I guess now when we come back, I'll cover one other really big aspect of sky Lab, and that's what it's like taking a shower in space. But first let's take another break, so I'll really have to do a full episode about sky Lab in the future, so that I can actually cover the whole thing and all the the science and technology aboard, because I know I'm just glancing over the topic in this episode, but that's because we have so much to cover to talk about space stations in general. However, one thing I just could not leave behind was the shower aboard sky Lab. Now you might wonder how does one shower in microgravity? If you've ever seen astronauts playing with I'm sorry, I'm sorry, experimenting with liquids in outer space, you know that those liquids tend to form little wobbly globes and float around their environment. You don't have gravity, or really you don't have sufficient gravity to have them form into drop shapes and fall to the ground. And yet sky Lab had a shower aboard, a true luxury when compared against earlier US spacecraft like the Apollo and Jimini capsules, which reportedly could get really stinky, particularly as missions stretched beyond a week in length. All right, so imagine that you've got a round shower curtain and it's on quote unquote the floor. The top of the shower curtain is connected to a metal ring. So really you see a metal ring and some material folded beneath it. So you step into the middle of this metal ring. Then you squat down, you grab the ring, and you lift it all the way up to the ceiling where it locks in place, and you essentially create your own little shower cylinder. Now, okay, how do you do that? Because of micro gravity because you're gonna be floating around everywhere. Well, the on the floor of the station, which is weird to think of, because I mean up and down are such weird concepts when you're talking about space. But on the floor were a pair of bands where you would just kind of slip your feet in a little restraints to hold you down against the floor of the station so you don't float off with the SuDS. The shower itself was a handheld nozzle attached to a hose and you would put heated water which was taken from the waste management compartment water heater. However, it was not I should point out the actual wastewater that'd be gross, uh, and it served as the bathing liquid, or at least the heated liquid. This water in a canister would get a pressurization boost from some nitrogen gas. So now you have some pressurized water in this canister, and then you would connect it to the shower mechanism, so the pressurized gas that had enough of the pressure to propel the water out of the nozzle. When you had the switch on the nozzle set to open a soap dispenser with eight whole milli liters of soap in it would serve for each shower, and uh it had velcrow on it so you could attach it to the quote unquote ceiling of the shower. So you also couldn't just use a drain for the shower, right because the water is not just gonna flow down to the floor. So to take care of the water, you also had a suction device. You were using essentially a vacuum to collect the water because the water wouldn't, you know, drain out otherwise, So astronauts would use a vacuum to remove water both from the shower and off of themselves as well. According to Jack Loosma, the experience was not necessarily relaxing. You had to mix water in a three quart container and make sure you've got the right mix of hot to cold so that you would have a comfortable shower temperature. The soap, he said, often left the astronauts feeling itchy. He said that it was better served as a veterinarian soap as opposed it for humans. Um He also said that the water would evaporate off of your skin very quickly because you're in a low pressure environment, and that that that you would start to get really cold. Because that evaporating process would pull energy away from you, heat energy, so you'd start to get the chills after a shower. Also, drying off took a really long time, so long in fact, that some astronauts opted for using a sponge bath rather than using the shower, though they could take as many showers as like one every week or ten days if they so chose. Now, according to the astronauts, it took about an hour to take a shower. Some accounts I've seen suggest it might have even taken longer than that when you factor in all the different prep work and clean up work needed to do the whole process, And in fact, some of the estimations I saw said it was closer to two hours. That's not two hours of you taking a really long, luxurious shower, that's rather two hours come to complete the entire task from you know, prep to clean up. And that's another reason that a lot of astronauts chose to go with sponge baths instead, because they felt it was a hassle. NASA eventually concluded that the shower was ultimately perhaps a little too complicated to operate, and if astronauts weren't going to use it, there might be better ways to make sure folks don't stink up the joint rather than incorporating a piece a gear that people would avoid using anyway, kind of like a stinky sullen teenager. And oh, I also need to talk about the toilet. So we talked a bit about how awkward pooping in space was for the Apollo cruise, and you know they had to use you know, essentially a bag with adhesive on it to glue to their butts in order to collect their poops. Well, the sky Lab version was better, I guess. Sky Labs toilet was mounted on the wall of the bathroom inside the space station. The toilet had a hinged seat on it. Inside the toilet was a mesh bag, So if you need to poop, you would first put a fecal collection bag inside this mesh liner. Um. Then uh okay, well let me just read from NASA to make sure I get this right. Here we go quote. Air was drawn through the fecal bag from holes in the seat and exhausted through the bags vapor port through the mesh liner into the fecal collection recept icle, and then through a filter where odors were removed before it was recirculated into the cabin by a fan. To use the toilet for defecation, the crewman sat on the contoured seat, then fastened a belt across his lap to hold him securely in position. Hand Holds and foot restraints allowed him to maintain a sufficiently tight seal on the seat, as airflow from the fans separated the fecal matter from his body and deposited it in the fecal collection bag. A separate fecal bag was used for each defecation end quote, which thank goodness for that right. As for urination, well, again to quote from NASA quote, the crewmen could urinate from either a standing or sitting position. A urine collector, located on the wall just below the fecal collector, also utilized airflow as a substitute for gravity to draw the urine through a receiver and hose into a urine collection bag. An alternate device incorporated a funnel like attachment through which the bag could be filled by bladder pressure. So I suppose by the way end quote, I suppose it's good to remind ourselves that around this time all astronauts were male. Not that I'm saying that was a good thing, only that it was a true thing at that time. Because many of the experiments aboard Skylab related to medical studies, like the effects of microgravity and being in space for prolonged periods, much of that waste was meant to be returned to Earth for examination. So these bags would be vacuum dried and stored for return to Earth. That included feces and, according to NASA, vomit because motion, sickness, and nausea were a thing up there too, so space sure is glamorous. As for the urine that went into a centrifuge to separate the gases inside the liquid from the liquid itself, then the liquid sample would be frozen for storage and to prevent any chemical changes that might occur otherwise in order to be returned to Earth. None, not all of it was stored and saved for for examination, some of it was some of it actually would go into a waste containment system aboard the space station. So I just want to make it clear that the astronauts weren't bringing all of their poops and peas back home, just you know, some of them. Oh and some other fun and less disgusting anecdotes during the Gemini missions, astronauts typically didn't really complain about the space food that NASA packed for them, but in the Apollo missions that changed astronauts really hated it, and so there was an effort put forward to make the food aboard sky Lab more palatable because astronauts were going to be up there for much longer, and NASA wisely judged that the food was bad. It was going to have a negative impact on crew morale and thus potentially a negative impact on productivity, so they worked pretty hard to try and fix that while also making sure to meet the nutritional needs of the astronauts. Now, some of that food that was sent aboard Skylab in that initial launch was deemed to be dangerous by the time the first crew got to Skylab because remember that that laboratory had been exposed to very high temperatures because the heat shield had failed to deploy because it was stripped away in launch. So the stuff that was in cans had been heated to a point where it could potentially be dangerous, so that could no longer be consumed. But there was other stuff that was frozen and it was unaffected because it was protected in a freezer. And there are other types of space food that were also fine, so not everything was wasted. Also because Skylab used air flow to substitute for gravity, so you you know, used the flow of air like you had had vents that were suctioning up air and other events that were blowing out air. While astronauts found that stuff had a tendency to kind of migrate towards the air filters where the system was siphoning up air to recycle it. Uh So, if something got lost, they would just look around the air filters because typically that's where stuff was because that flow of air was pulling things toward it. So they actually made one surface that had one of these filters a workspace because the tools would tend to stay put on the filter rather than just float off, which is kind of interesting. It's something you don't necessarily think about when you're not in microgravity. Generally speaking, sky Lab wasn't just an efficient science platform, nor was it just a space station that was up in orbit for way longer than we could actually use it. I mean, when you think about it, it was up there for several years, but we only used it for less than a year. But it was also a learning experience for NASA and would go a long way toward informing the agency about designing the next big space station. We'll talk more about that in our next episode. So things to look forward to. In our next episode, We're going to talk about the Russian space station mirror. That's very important. We're gonna talk about the proposal of space station freedom, the US space station that never was, and the birth of the International Space Station and how it has a halter of the time. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.