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In 1979 the first U.S. space station SKYLAB descended in a fireball over Australia. Serious confinement problems in space manifested themselves at first during the short-lived SKYLAB program. In the opinion of NASA flight director Dr. Hutchinson, "the initial purpose of SKYLAB may have been to explore simply how to live in space, but the cost of the program -two and half billion dollars - caused us to change our minds… our system was designed to squeeze every minute out of an astronaut's day…" The efficiency of the first and the second SKYLAB crewmen made the flight controllers think this way, and so they decided to plan the third crew's day without leaving a spare minute, priding themselves that, from the time the men got up to the time they went to bed, every minute was programmed for them. The flight surgeons saw what was happening and tried to stop it, but it was useless. As Dr. Herry R. Hordinsky, the crew surgeon for the third mission, said later, "we witnessed Mission Control getting off on the wrong foot, but there was no place to blow the whistle". The main reason was not only communication difficulties between flight surgeons and flight planners during the third SKYLAB mission; but also the fact that nobody of the Mission Control was familiar with psychology problems. "At conferences, when we were on the side of easing up, of saying that the flight plans were too much, the engineers couldn't understand what we meant" Dr. Hordinsky said.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-2993-7_25

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