Defending the Planet

Features

(Page 2 of 3)

Tuesday, November 14, 2006
By Gigi Marino

That unscripted presentation was "probably the best speech I've ever given in my whole life," Schweickart says. "I don't know where it came from, but when I was finished, half of the audience was crying, including me."

After his Apollo 9 experience, Schweickart volunteered "to be a guinea pig," as he puts it, for space motion-sickness testing. By participating in this research, which led to an improved but not complete understanding of the phenomenon, he took himself out of rotation for the remaining Apollo crew assignments. After nearly a year of spending time in spinning rooms and gravitational drums, he had figured out how best to adapt to the space environment. He was subsequently selected as backup commander for the first manned Skylab mission; he and his crew had to be prepared to fly the Skylab 2 mission should anything happen to the prime crew.

When the unmanned Skylab space station was launched in May 1973, its sunshade and solar panels got damaged: a minor part failure caused the sunshade to tear free, and debris wrapped around one of the solar arrays, preventing it from deploying properly. The Skylab 2 crew had been scheduled to launch the next day, but the space station was not habitable. In the absence of a functional shade, the station's internal temperature had reached 126 °F and would have continued to soar. Schweickart was charged with developing hardware and procedures for erecting an emergency sunshade and with figuring out how to deploy the jammed solar array; both of his solutions worked, ensuring Skylab's future.

Schweickart led a crew at the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, AL, that worked around the clock for 10 days to develop a twin-pole spinnaker as a replacement sunshade. On the Skylab 2 mission, NASA sent up both Schweickart's spinnaker and a "parasol" sunshade constructed by Johnson Space Center engineers. The crew initially deployed the parasol, but it began to degrade within 30 days. They then put up the spinnaker, which proved sturdier. "You're never certain that what you've designed will work, but we were reasonably certain," Schweickart says. "The crew could not have launched until we figured out how to fix the problem, since they had to carry all the new hardware up to Skylab." If the repair effort led by Schweickart hadn't worked, the multibillion-dollar Skylab mission would have failed. "It was very intense," he recalls. "Some of the people on my team didn't sleep for 60 hours straight."

Schweickart's C.V. is chock full of such extraordinary experiences. In 1979, California governor Jerry Brown named him commissioner of energy for the state. By the early 1980s--well before the iron curtain lifted--he saw a need for an international association of astronauts and cosmonauts. In 1985 Schweickart founded the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), a professional organization that now includes more than 300 astronauts and cosmonauts from 30 nations. In 1987 and 1988, he chaired the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Program Safety Review Panel. Because of his leadership, the program, which oversees all U.S. research in Antarctica, was restructured to decrease the risks run by Antarctic researchers. The panel also recommended that the U.S. keep a year-round presence in the Antarctic. Through his satellite and telecommunications work in the private sector, Schweickart got involved in developing international communications regulations and policies. And along the way, he's earned dozens of fellowships and awards, including an Emmy (for transmitting the first images from space in 1969) and NASA's Exceptional Service Medal (for his role in rehabilitating Skylab). He's been portrayed in movies, is regularly approached by moviemakers, and is on a first-name basis with Tom Wolfe, who wrote The Right Stuff, a nonfiction account of the space program. But nothing on his résumé means more to him than his current work.