Joe Kerwin knows a thing or two about emergencies in space.
The former naval commander physician was the science pilot on the first US space station habitation mission, Skylab 2 launched in May 1973.
Another Navy doctor, Jerry Linenger, has just returned from a stay aboard the Russian Mir space station, a flight that had its share of emergencies.
Survival
Kerwin recalls his Skylab mission as a "-fight for the survival of the station rather than the crew". Skylab was crippled during launch when a micrometeorite and thermal shield tore loose, jamming one of its solar panels.
Kerwin and his two crewmates erected a new thermal heatshield outside Skylab and, during one of the most hazardous spacewalks attempted, Kerwin and his commander Pete Conrad used tree branch cutters to cut aluminium straps loose from jamming the solar panel.
Saved
Then, using ropes wrapped around their bodies, they hauled the stuck solar panel loose, but were hurled out into space at the end of their umbilicals as the panel sprung open suddenly. Skylab was saved.
Kerwin, now president of Krug Life Sciences in Houston, says that another leak in the coolant system on Mir could be the "showstopper" and the crew would be called home in the attached Soyuz capsule.
The NASA astronauts who fly to the Mir are half-expecting to face an emergency, he says. "But that's what makes space exciting."
Source: Flight Daily News