The Longest Walk

"Oh, what a view!" exclaimed Owen Garriott as he gazed down on the earth. Looking out into space, Jack Lousma was equally impressed: "There's nothing except a bit of light reflecting off the solar panels, a few stars and a half-moon." Both astronauts were outside Skylab, finally taking their long-postponed space walk. From inside the spaceship, Skylab Commander Al Bean sounded envious. "Well, you will surely remember this day for a long time," he said. Indeed they would. Before Garriott and Lousma re-entered the orbital laboratory last week, they had spent some 6 1/2 hours outside--nearly doubling the endurance record for a space walk set only two months ago by the first Skylab team.

During their long stroll, the astronauts worked four hours successfully erecting a second sunshade to protect Skylab's bare spot (cabin temperatures dropped as much as eight degrees into the low 70s). They also reloaded their solar-telescope array with fresh film and set up a micrometeorite-measuring experiment. Meanwhile, Skylab continued to be plagued by glitches. A coolant leak was discovered in one air-conditioning system, and suspected in another. A short circuit briefly troubled the telescope mount. Several external lights, intended for use during the space walk, failed to work, as did a video-tape recorder and an automatic camera. Skylab's on-board teleprinter also broke down, but the astronauts were able to fix it.

Skylab's new difficulties caused a little soul-searching among NASA officials. Skylab Program Director William C. Schneider, for one, vigorously rejected the idea that the problems might have been caused by sloppy manufacturing or lax quality control resulting from NASA's recent economies. Chief Flight Controller Eugene Kranz agreed, but then added: "We'll never know until we get the darn things down and look at them." There was one performance that no one could fault: a spider named Arabella, on board Skylab for a biological experiment, accommodated to space flight within only a day or two, learning to spin her complex geometric web in zero-G after only a few false starts. Said Garriott with a touch of envy: "She is a very fast learner indeed."

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