50th Skylab anniversary at Museum of Flight

tomorrow marks 50 years since NASA launched Skylab from an unmanned rocket bringing forth a new era of space study. Now Skylab was the United States first space station which would house astronauts for a long periods of time. It crashed back in earth in 1979 and to put the impact into perspective for you three crews spent more than 700 hours living aboard the vessel and today we have the honor of having two members of those crews with us this morning we have Skylab three pilot Jack Lausma and Skylab four science pilot Ed Gibson. Thank you guys so much for joining us an absolute honor to be able to interview this morning. Well thank you. So I'm sure everybody has asked you the same question but what was life like on the Skylab when you were there? Enjoyable. Really? Yeah okay.

When you look out the window it's like being in an airplane you look out you see half a city but now when you're in Skylab you see half a country so it's all the same material but much more of it. What about you Jack? Never get tired of looking at the earth as you go along you see the deserts and mountains and the oceans and the lakes and population centers and so forth and when you're inside you just sort of be like in a train where the view is going by the window but when you go out and do a spacewalk then it's like being on the locomotive and you just see everywhere and it's just a beautiful sight and it never gets tiring. You want to stay out as long as you can you say I've got more work to do even if you don't and so doing a spacewalk I think is the ultimate in being in a station like the Skylab. And talking about your work here what was your two's mission? Well the Skylab had three general areas we looked at the earth we studied ourselves and then we did some other science medical as well as other science yeah so there's and so each of those missions specialized in those in those areas depending upon who was on board. And what about you Jack? We had 50 or 60 experiments on both all of our flights and they were focused mostly on solar studying the Sun and the way you can't do it from the earth because a lot of the information that comes from the Sun is absorbed in the atmosphere and don't get all of it down here but up there we're getting a hundred percent of it and of course the solar physics though I'm really talking his area but we all learned how to use the equipment to study the Sun. Any time the Sun was up and we weren't in the shadow of the earth why we had somebody on the solar telescopes and each crewman was educated as to how to use it. Another major idea was to study earth and its resources how to use the ones we have more effectively and more efficiently on how to find new ones and how much of the population of the or many the earth's resources could be studied very quickly from space rather than having people down in the field and so forth and turned out that worked and of course there's a very heavy emphasis on the medical aspects of being in zero gravity for long periods of time so every third day we do a medical experiments and then every day we would exercise in the bicycle we had a stationary bicycle and if you were wrote it for 90 minutes you could ride a bicycle around the world.

I bet, I bet. Jack tell me what is some of your most fondest memories about being up there? I think probably the spacewalks I did two of them and we had a lot of work to do there's some repairs that had to be done the space station for good really use it as damage down the way up and so we did a covering over the spacecraft keep it cool we had some jarrus that failed and we had to go out and hook up some wires that had never been planned and drift out there and this to do the best you could to make it work so we had a number of unplanned things that we had to do but we adapted to being there very quickly and there wasn't much not much of anything we couldn't achieve up there while we were there but we had most of these experiments and besides those three areas we had other student high school student experiments and others I think we had about 50 experiments all together something like that wouldn't that be head yes besides those three major solar and earth and medical we had a number of other experiments as well so we're busy people yeah I'm sure you guys were pretty busy up there what's something that most people would be surprised to hear about about what's happening up there maybe shower well you take a shower you know that's a little bit different one down here when you take a shower up there the water clings to your back and so when you shake you feel there's a big jelly on your back shake around other than that it's pretty much the same but we had we had a shower once a couple once a month whether we needed it or not once a month okay hey listen sometimes I do that here so we heard of a special program that's being held today at the flight museum what can people expect for those who are attending well yesterday we talked with some people over there and and what was really a gratifying is that the people were all highly enthusiastic and they understood space and they even understood skylab so the the people we normally talk to are our don't have that background so this is really enjoyable and I expect the same thing this afternoon I think one of the major objectives of skylab is kind overlooked in that we were thinking about making in a space station a big space station even when we were still flying to the moon and how do you do a thing like that from living in a capsule to making a space station like the one that's up there now so one of the major objectives of the skylab space is what's to learn how to make the one that's up there now in fact up till that time our longest flight in space had been 15 days and it was done in the Germany program in a capsule with its two people sitting in this capsule about the size of the front seat of a beautiful Volkswagen Beetle for 15 days doing eating sleeping wasting and all that sort of thing and how do you make a space station and so the skylab was invented and developed and studied in order to make the space station that's up there now well the skylab 50th anniversary program it will be held today at the museum of flight at 2 p.m. a Colonel Jack Lausma and Ed Gibson will be joined by skylab flight director Neil Hutchinson you definitely don't want to miss that thank you both so much for coming in it was an honor to enter thank you very much welcome thank you.

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