When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions (2008) s01e04 Episode Script

They ride the biggest rocket ever built to the moon.
It's the culmination of more than 10 years of space pioneering and a foundation for more than four decades of exploring worlds beyond our own.
This is the story of our greatest adventure.
NASA fulfills John Kennedy's dream to land men on the moon and bring them back alive.
Neil, Buzz, and Mike, I want you to know that I think I'm the luckiest man in the world in welcoming you back to Earth.
But Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin clocked just 21/2 hours walking on the surface.
Their successful mission paves the way for fellow astronauts to embark on more advanced lunar exploration.
The trainers came to us one day and said, "We're gonna teach you what you need to know when you get to the moon.
" We said, "Hey, we know.
We're gonna put up the flag.
We're gonna talk to the president.
We're gonna come home.
" He said, "Yeah, that's what you think.
" Just four months after the first landing, Apollo 12 carries Pete Conrad, Richard Gordon, and Alan Bean to the moon.
257 feet.
Coming down at 5.
Unlike Apollo 11, Conrad and Bean make a pinpoint landing.
Contact light.
Outstanding, man! The area is called the Ocean of Storms, the site of an ancient volcano.
They spend nearly eight hours collecting 75 pounds of moon rocks.
Pete, you're 34 minutes into the EVA and you're right on the nominal timeline.
We were tired.
We were dirty.
It went by pretty quick, but we did a lot of hard work.
From an unmanned probe that landed two years earlier, they retrieved parts that contain a remarkable discovery.
Bacteria from Earth seemed to have survived in the vacuum of space.
When you're the only two people on the moon and everybody else is 240,000 miles some other direction, you're an explorer.
For the next moon mission, NASA geologists choose a more dangerous landing site -- the heavily cratered lunar highlands.
I've always thought that our crew, Apollo 12, could have flown any mission as good as anybody else, probably, except 13.
NASA makes scientific research a primary mission objective.
The crew of Apollo 13 takes special training in lunar geology.
The rocks astronauts bring back could begin to answer questions about where the moon came from.
The geology training was really a lot of focus on the protocol of sampling.
So when we got back, they could understand where they come from and how they fit into the context of the area.
The commander of Apollo 13 is Jim Lovell, a veteran of two Gemini missions and Apollo 8.
He's NASA's most experienced astronaut.
One of the things I wanted to do before I retired from active space flight was to land on the moon.
That's the reason why I had got into NASA in the first place.
That was the whole thing.
So I was looking forward to 13.
Jim Lovell's crew has been training together for almost a year, even before being assigned to Apollo 13.
But the team is broken up just three days before launch.
Jack Swigert is a last-minute replacement when the command-module pilot is exposed to the measles.
On every flight, we ended up getting pressed into the corner.
There were a lot of last-minute details.
Changes were still being made.
Swigert joins the two lunar landers, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise.
Their destination -- a difficult landing site in the moon's Fra Mauro Hills.
You know, when you're an astronaut, you've got to buy into a lot of risk.
Nobody's gonna save you if the hardware doesn't work.
You buy into that stuff if you're gonna be an astronaut.
If you can't buy into it, don't be an astronaut.
T-minus 25 seconds and counting, and Apollo 13 is go.
You know, you're sort of relaxed because there's only two things that are gonna happen.
Either it's gonna go as planned or something is gonna go wrong.
This was my last chance to get to the moon.
Mission sequence has started.
6 5 4 3 2 1 0.
We have commit, and we have lift-off at 2:13.
The Saturn V building up to 7.
6 million pounds of thrust.
And it has cleared the tower.
This is Mission Control, Houston.
We appear to have a good first stage at this point.
Flight dynamics officer says the trajectory looks good.
We show 1/2 mile in altitude at this time.
Apollo 13 is just the eighth launch of the most powerful rocket ever built.
Roll complete, and we're pitching.
Roger that.
Stand by for mode one-bravo.
Gene Kranz monitors all aspects of the launch from his desk at Mission Control in Houston.
The flight director's job description is very simple.
It's only one sentence long.
It says to take any actions needed for crew safety and mission success.
Crew safety is number one.
Mission success is number two.
Fred, one more thing on the TV.
If you could come down to F-22 again.
I was pretty busy getting equipment out and occasionally getting a chance to sneak a peek out the window.
Even though you've seen pictures and footage from previous flights, it's unbelievable when you're there looking out.
More than halfway to the moon, the crew broadcasts live from the spaceship for television viewers on Earth.
Okay, a couple square packages I now have my hand on here are our emergency oxygen supplies.
The astronauts don't know the networks aren't carrying their broadcasts.
Missions to the moon are becoming routine.
And not just for the public.
The controllers said they're bored to death because, really, it was -- Everything was going right down to flight plan perfectly.
The shift rotations at Mission Control had come off very smoothly.
Everything was on track.
We're just about ready to close out our inspection of Aquarius and get back for a pleasant evening at Odyssey.
Good night.
As the crew prepares for seven hours of sleep, Mission Control makes one last routine request.
This is where we turn on some fans in the oxygen tanks to basically stir them up to make them uniform so we can measure them.
Jack Swigert acknowledged our request for the stir.
Okay.
Stand by.
Swigert then threw two switches.
A light came on that said there was something wrong with your electrical system.
But before we could digest that information, two more lights came on that said two out of three of your fuel cells had just died.
It was now 55 hours, 55 minutes, and 4 seconds from launch.
My voice slips come -- "Flight, we've had a computer restart.
" Roger.
Reset.
Another one says "Antenna switch.
" Another one says "Main bus interval.
" And then down from the spacecraft, Lovell calls.
Lights were coming on, noise all over.
Jets were firing.
I had no idea what was going on.
I looked up at Fred Haise.
I could tell from his expression he had no idea.
RCS system, cryogenics, electrical power, A.
C.
power, D.
C.
power.
I quickly looked at Jack Swigert.
His eyes were as wide as saucers.
He didn't know what was occurring.
I thought that we've had another power glitch.
We had had two earlier in my shift.
And we're gonna solve this problem quickly and get back on track.
Mission Control, of course, being a couple hundred thousand miles away, was a little bit slower in realizing what was happening.
They were chasing down a trail that said it was an instrumentation problem.
Voice communications were solid, but our telemetry made absolutely no sense.
But the real impact came when Jim Lovell was looking out the hatch window and says, "Hey, Houston" Yeah, that's the tip of the A.
C.
I could see a sea of debris around us of little twinkly things moving out away from the spacecraft, which I'm assuming is frozen oxygen.
I was in Mission Control.
And Jim Lovell said, "We got a problem.
" And he was right.
I thought we'd lost them when I saw that second oxygen tank leaking out.
We were in serious, serious trouble.
From then on, it was survival mode.
Okay, now, let's everybody keep cool.
Let's solve the problem, but let's not make it any worse by guessing.
What they do know is bad enough.
Both oxygen tanks are losing pressure quickly.
Two of three fuel cells are dead.
Without oxygen, the remaining fuel cell won't last long.
The quantity indicator on the second oxygen tank was moving downward.
Not very fast, but nevertheless diminishing.
And so it was apparent that we were gonna lose that second oxygen tank.
The command module is dying.
Its fuel cells need oxygen to produce electricity.
And the crew needs oxygen to breathe.
Their only hope is the lunar module.
I realized we were shortly gonna be out of oxygen and that we're gonna have to use the lunar module as a lifeboat to get home.
The lunar module has its own oxygen and power.
But it's only equipped to support two people for two days.
It's going to take four days to get three astronauts back to Earth.
Every minute is critical.
We figure we've got about 15 minutes' worth of power left in the command module, so we want you to start getting over in the LEM and getting some power on that.
Following standard procedure, it should take lunar-module pilot Fred Haise two hours to activate the LEM.
I drifted down.
We had our activation checklist that we used.
As I went through the checklist, draw a big "X" through whole sections and move on.
With just moments to spare, Haise powers up the lunar module.
But living in the LEM means they can't fire the powerful command-module rockets to reverse course back to Earth.
They'll need to make the longer trip around the moon.
I made the decision that we would go around the moon as opposed to use a direct abort because I would have to jettison my lunar module.
And I didn't want to lose my lunar module, which I considered a lifeboat.
We're looking -- now looking towards an alternate mission.
Swinging around the moon and using the lunar module power systems.
That sounds like good news.
Lovell fires the engine of the lunar module to set their course around the moon and home again.
The lightweight LEM offers little protection against the extreme conditions in deep space.
To conserve power, only essential instruments are turned on.
It was flimsy, and it was not designed for long habitation between the moon and the Earth, which is pretty cold.
The temperature kept dropping all the way down to zero Celsius -- you know, 34 degrees Fahrenheit.
It was a pretty bad environment to be sitting in for the number of days that we had to exist.
77 hours into the mission, Apollo 13 circles around the far side of the moon, using its gravity for a slingshot back to Earth.
We're out of communication with the ground during that period.
For 26 minutes, Mission Control hears nothing but static.
There was a point, call it a sort of a second point of disappointment on my part, that we weren't gonna get to go down there.
The biggest question for Mission Control is whether the limited supplies in the LEM will keep the crew alive long enough to reach Earth.
Everybody was making constant calculations.
"Do we have enough electrical power? Do we have enough water? Do we have enough oxygen?" The answer is definitive.
The crew won't survive.
They have to get home faster.
After we passed behind the moon, we had to come up with a technique to accelerate our return journey.
We were gonna have to use the engine of the lunar module the second time to speed up to get back.
Otherwise, we'd be out of power.
The extra boost cuts nine hours off the return journey.
With careful rationing of water and power, their supplies should last.
Should nothing else go wrong, we had a shot at getting back to an entry.
While conditions in the LEM are miserable, the low temperatures won't kill them.
But every breath they take produces a poison that can.
Carbon dioxide was beginning to build up in the lunar-module atmosphere.
The canisters to remove carbon dioxide in the lunar module -- there are only enough of them for two people.
We were three.
And as the CO2 level in the blood goes up, your muscle function is gonna stop.
And you're gonna lose consciousness and die.
There are spare canisters in the command module, but a basic design error renders them useless.
The command module carbon dioxide scrubber was square.
But the lunar module was round.
So we had to rig up a deal that would work this square deal in this round hole.
The crew was faced with suffocation.
So engineering came up with the idea to fabricate an adapter.
They brought it in.
We got down on our hands and knees, and they made me build it.
And once I had built it, they said, "Okay, now you know how to build it.
Now go tell Jack Swigert how to build it.
" We did it with duct tape with a piece of plastic a piece of cardboard, and an old sock.
And then he plugged it in, and, lo and behold, that CO2 level just came down so slick.
It was great.
As they approach Earth, the crew prepares for one of the most dangerous parts of their mission -- reentry.
They need to get back in the command module and jettison the LEM that's kept them alive.
We were concerned because this command module had not been powered up for days.
And so it had gotten very cold inside.
And how was the heat shield going to respond? And is it gonna work through the heat of the reentry? They're not gonna be able to do anything about it, and we got to get through the entry.
It's the only way to get home.
We lost communications.
There was what we call blackout due to the ionized atmosphere.
The blackout should last three minutes.
Apollo 13.
Apollo 13.
Over.
"Hello", you know, "Aquarius".
"Hello, Apollo 13.
" And no response.
It's been two minutes now from time of drogue deployment.
After four minutes, still nothing.
You just had to sit there and listen through all that static, waiting for somebody to say "Houston".
Okay, Joe.
This is recovery.
Over.
Photo one splashed down at this time.
And when we finally hit the water, then we knew that we were 100% safe.
They landed right where they were supposed to land.
It was awesome.
There was a big, big celebration at Mission Control.
We were all very joyful and all very tired, and there didn't seem to be anything else to say, you know? Any mission that you can bring your crew back home from is a success.
The men of Apollo 13, by their poise and skill under the most intense kind of pressure, epitomize the character that accepts danger and surmounts it.
Theirs is the spirit that built America.
NASA is determined to maintain an aggressive schedule of lunar exploration.
Nine months later And we're free.
Apollo 14 is racing to the moon.
The commander is Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
Their destination -- Apollo 13's landing site.
Good show.
Thank you.
The Fra Mauro Highlands.
We're on the surface.
Okay, we made a good landing.
Scientists think this region could hold clues from the time the moon was just being formed.
The astronauts bring a handcart to haul 90 pounds of rocks back to the LEM.
And Alan Shepard even finds time to convert the rock sampler into a golf club.
Once again, large audiences are watching when astronauts broadcast from the moon.
With the success of Apollo 14, NASA plans to expand its lunar explorations with a bold new series of missions.
The whole objective was to put out a whole suite of geological experiments and scientific experiments.
We wanted to collect enough data so that we can analyze the moon and see what it's made of.
What is the structure of the moon? Is it like the Earth? Is it like an asteroid? You know, what's the structure of the moon? For the new missions, astronauts will spend more time on the lunar surface and bring back heavier payloads of moon rocks.
For more ambitious explorations, they'll have to cover a lot more territory.
NASA develops a revolutionary vehicle.
The lunar rover was a very, very creative effort.
We knew we wanted a vehicle that could roll along on that very -- what seemed like sandy kind of a surface.
And it had to be operable by people in suits that were very, very stiff and without a whole lot of mobility.
The lunar rover is a four-wheel-drive two-seater.
It has a top speed of 8 miles per hour.
A magnetic compass won't work on the moon, so a computer constantly plots a straight line back to the LEM Charlie and I worked on the lunar-rover vehicle over at the Marshall Space Flight Center.
And it was a great driving machine.
We had the car to broaden our exploration base.
Before the car, we had no ability to walk more than 300 or 400 yards.
But with a car, we could cover a radius of about 5 miles.
Apollo 16.
John Young, Charlie Duke, and Ken Mattingly blast off into the Florida sky.
Young and Duke use the lunar rover to explore an area known as the Descartes Mountains.
We had trained that John Young would be the driver, and I would navigate.
Yow! Whoo! Well, just to see how fast the thing would go downhill, and it would do pretty good.
Huh? It was fun riding the rover.
It was a lot of fun.
Bounced a lot.
That moon dust was pouring down on us like rain.
And so after a half of a moonwalk, our white suits turned gray.
I spent a lot of time saying, "Charlie, don't bump my arm.
" 'Cause he was sitting right next to me, and so any time he moved his hand, it would make my wrist turn the steering wheel.
Not a good thing when you're heading for big blocks.
Okay, Tony.
The rover's TV camera beams pictures to a team of scientists.
Okay, we copy that.
Working from the rover, they collect a record 209 pounds of moon rocks.
We could collect a lot more rocks, and we could see a lot of variety of rocks as we journeyed across this landing area that was selected for its geological significance.
So it really revolutionized the lunar surface exploration.
Duke and Young drive the rover hard for nearly 17 miles over rugged terrain.
Parked at the landing site, it documents Apollo 16 blasting off from the lunar surface.
What a ride.
What a ride.
Apollo 17 targets another geologically rich area of the moon.
But this will be Project Apollo's final lunar landing.
Budget cuts force NASA to scrub three more missions already scheduled.
We were disappointed 'cause they canceled 18, 19, and 20.
We had the hardware.
We had crews picked.
And all it was was operational money.
NASA wants the last moon mission to be their greatest.
The landing site demands the first night launch of the giant Saturn V rocket.
On board, Ron Evans is command-module pilot.
Harrison Schmitt is NASA's first scientist in space.
And the commander of Apollo 17 is Gene Cernan, a veteran of Gemini 9 and Apollo 10.
Apollo 17 was a was a real goal of mine.
I knew before we launched that Apollo 17 was gonna be the last flight to the moon.
And I knew I would be the guy to make the final steps on the moon.
There were a lot of people, I think, in positions of responsibility within NASA who, being the last flight, just wanted me to get back alive.
More than half a million people come from all over the world to watch the final lunar launch.
Rog.
We're go for lift-off here, Cap Com.
Apollo 17 is Gene Cernan's second trip to the moon.
On Apollo 10, he flew a lander to within 47,000 feet of the lunar surface.
This time, he's cleared to land.
I needed to go back on Apollo 17.
I wanted to cover the last 47,000 feet.
I've been to the moon, folks.
I'm not going back again not to land.
And I think people knew that.
Obviously, I was not gonna do something dumb, but I was gonna land.
You're looking real good, Gene, right down the line.
Stand by for touchdown.
Stand by.
25 feet, down at 2.
Fuel's good.
20 feet.
Going down at 2.
10 feet.
10 feet.
Got contact.
Stop, push.
Engine stop.
Okay, Houston.
The Challenger has landed.
Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt join an elite fraternity.
Only 12 men have landed on the moon.
Over the next three days, Cernan and Schmitt spend more time walking on the moon than any other astronauts.
I was strolling on the moon one day In the merry, merry month of December.
No.
May.
- May.
May the month is.
- That's right.
May is the month.
A team of scientists monitors their work.
Hey! There is orange soil.
Well, don't move it until I see it.
It's all over.
Orange! Don't move it until I see it.
I've stirred it up with my feet.
Hey, it is! I can see it from here.
It's orange! Let's think about this logically.
They're up against a constraint anyways, so they got to leave at a certain time regardless of what we got.
We'd like you to leave immediately.
Okay.
My golly, this time goes fast! Three years after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, Gene Cernan prepares to be the last.
When I crawled up the ladder, I knew I wasn't gonna be coming this way again.
And I just wanted to stop time.
I wanted to freeze time.
I want to take advantage of this moment.
Hey, one minute, Houston.
We're 50 seconds now, and we're go.
You're looking good here.
It's only 11 years since Alan Shepard became the first American in space and John Kennedy challenged the U.
S.
to go to the moon.
Now Apollo 17 is the end of an era.
It's like breaking off a love affair.
You've had a marvelous time, but now it's time to bring that relationship to an end.
3 2 1.
Ignition.
We're on our way, Houston.
Rates are good.
AGS saw it.
Pitch over.
Okay.
You have good thrust.
Cernan and Schmitt start the long journey home.
The camera on the rover will transmit pictures back to Earth for another 27 hours -- the final images from man's last trip to the moon.
Having explored the lunar surface, NASA shifts gears to learn to live long-term in space.
You know, engineers want to do something different.
They said, "Hey, we've been there.
We've done that.
And let's do something else.
" We proved to ourselves that we can go somewhere and survive.
So now the next step's gonna be a much bigger one.
If we're ever gonna go to Mars, we've got to understand what happens to humans and machinery when they spend a year or two in space.
NASA develops a radical new spacecraft using a Saturn V rocket left over from the scrubbed Apollo missions.
It was a good use of the hardware we had to develop Skylab.
It was a space station.
The big insight was that you could use the third stage of the great big Saturn V rocket as a habitable place to live.
Launching Skylab into orbit won't demand the rocket power that sent men to the moon.
NASA converts the top of a Saturn V into the first American space station.
It's been compared to the size of a small three-bedroom house.
Each had our own bedroom.
Each bedroom was about the size of a telephone booth, and the beds were fastened to the wall.
The commander of Skylab's first crew is Pete Conrad, who flew two Gemini missions and Apollo 12.
Rookie Paul Weitz is the pilot.
And another rookie, Joseph Kerwin, is the science pilot.
We could stuff it with experiments.
We could put the food and water up there for three missions.
We could do it all, and it was great.
Skylab and crew will launch on separate rockets.
This beautiful big Saturn V with the workshop on it was to launch on May 14th, and it would get into the correct orbit.
The next day, we would launch.
Not since Gemini 6 and 7 has NASA attempted two launches so close together.
The unmanned Skylab flies first.
The Skylab lifting off the pad now, moving up.
Skylab has cleared the tower.
It looked like a great launch.
Went up into the sky as far as we could see it and was on its way successfully.
Pretty soon, the news from Mission Control began to get bad.
There had been a "G" shock, a sudden acceleration, on the way up.
They didn't know what caused it.
Skylab space station now in orbit.
Still some doubt in the minds of flight controllers here in Mission Control as to whether the main solar panels on the workshop have indeed deployed.
One of them didn't respond at all.
The other one, just a trickle of current that they could see.
The planned 28-day mission is not possible without the workshop main solar panels.
Meanwhile, the temperatures both outside and inside of the workshop began to rise.
We have insufficient electrical power, we have temperatures that are out of control, and it looks like the heat shield is gone.
We just had to sit around and wait and worry and wonder whether or not we were going to end up getting a mission or whether we were gonna lose the whole mission.
People in Mission Control were about ready to give up, I think.
The second response five minutes later was, "Come on, we're engineers.
Let's get to work on this thing and see what we can do.
" They stopped the next launch, and they said, "Now, your job has changed from activating the workshop to saving the workshop and then activating it.
" Skylab's biggest problem is heat from the sun.
Engineers quickly design a giant parasol.
They not only had to understand the problem, they then had to design the hardware, they had to built the hardware, test the hardware, package it for flight, and get it to the spacecraft.
After a 10-day delay, Kerwin, Conrad, and Weitz finally launch -- NASA's first repairmen in space.
T-minus 7 6 5 4 3 Engine sequence start.
2 1 0.
We have launch commit, and we have lift-off.
The clock is running, and Skylab has cleared the tower.
Eight hours after launch, they rendezvous with Skylab and see the damage close-up.
Houston is now controlling.
Pete flew our command-service module around, and we took not only photographs but also television, whose images could be dumped to the ground.
And that was priceless because it gave the engineers working on the ground a good look at what was wrong.
Roger.
Copy.
The crew has to enter Skylab to repair it.
270 miles above the Earth traveling at more than 17,000 miles an hour, Pete Conrad must perform a precise hard dock.
We went to dock, and the soft dock failed.
There were little capture latches in the nose of the docking probe, and for some reason they were stuck shut, and they never came open.
We're sitting there contemplating the fact that if we can't dock, the mission is over.
They'll bring us home tomorrow.
But there was one final backup procedure that had never been used.
If you got in there tight, they would go.
So Pete gets all set for one more go, and he bumps in, and he's applying the rocket thrust.
Ground said it would take about 10 seconds.
If it doesn't work in 10 seconds, it's not gonna work.
And the probe nestles into the drogue.
And we're counting -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Rat-a-tat-tat! Man, and all the latches latched.
It was like an explosion up there.
We got a hard dock out of it! Hey, way to go! And, oh, we were so relieved.
It didn't smell very good.
It had a sort of a burned smell to it.
The crew gets to work in Skylab's searing heat.
The astronauts take turns trying to deploy the parasol.
They put out this parasol, which was extended out through a little 10x10-inch aperture.
Okay, Houston, we had a clean deployment as far the rods clearing and everything.
And then a spring was released, and the fishing rods pulled up.
oscillated the rod in and out, stroke-wise, rapidly.
It was successful, and the temperatures began to come down.
They came down from the 130s to the mid-80s.
But Skylab has an even bigger problem.
One solar panel had been damaged during launch and still isn't working.
The problem with the solar panel was out where there were no handholds, no footholds, no lighting -- where no crew member was supposed to go.
Yet it had to be done, so let's figure out ways to do it.
A backup team works with a full-size model of Skylab in a neutral-buoyancy tank.
Their solution is unprecedented in manned space flight.
For the first time, crews going outside in their space suits to repair problems.
That had never been done before.
The other solar panel is jammed by a small piece of metal preventing it from opening.
If they can cut it, the panel should unfold.
We had a limb lop, the kind of thing that they use to trim tree limbs away from power lines.
It had two brown ropes attached to it.
One would close the jaws, and the other would open the jaws.
That's it.
You got it right there.
I pulled on the close-the-jaws rope and completed cutting the aluminum scrap.
We did it.
The best sight of the entire mission -- that solar-panel cover all the way up at 90 degrees.
And the people on the ground were so pleased, too, because we were gonna get our power back.
We were gonna be able to complete the mission.
That was a good day.
That was a very good day.
The space station is open for business.
Over the next eight months, Skylab is home to three crews, each setting new records for astronauts living and working in space.
You fly from one side to the other.
We had erected handrails in there to move along.
You don't do that.
You don't use any of that stuff.
I can remember the first week or so I'd do flips on the way.
The feeling of being Peter Pan, of being your own spacecraft flying around the Earth is awesome and incredible.
We were zipping around there as if we had never been other than weightless.
Skylab crews log more than 3,000 hours of scientific experiments and transform our understanding of the sun.
The work itself was fun.
This is a kind of work that had never been done before.
Skylab is the first step toward the human habitation of space.
Jerry Carr, William Pogue, and Edward Gibson are Skylab's last crew.
They went for 84 days.
Came back with less weight loss, less loss in muscle strength, in better shape all around than either of the first two crews.
When we returned from the mission, the doctors opined that maybe we were in better condition when we got back than when we left.
We demonstrated that you could go three months in space and come back in good shape.
That was a triumph.
The technology of the Apollo program not only carries astronauts to the moon and back, but allows humans to live and work in space longer than ever before.
Space is basically a test of survival -- our ability to invent things that will allow us to use very limited resources.
You have to use everything.
And you have to use it as most efficiently and effectively as possible.
Skylab provides the foundation for a permanent human presence in space and the exploration of worlds deep into the solar system.
The power of space was to raise our aspirations to those things that are possible if we will commit.