Astronaut Visits Space Center Students

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Astronaut Gerald Carr visited the Arkansas-Oklahoma Center for Space and Planetary Sciences recently to present a seminar on his experiences to undergraduate students participating in the summer interns program of the space center. Carr was the Commander on Skylab 4, an early space station mission that was assembled by NASA when the last three Apollo Moon landing missions were scrapped. Carr described his career and the grueling process by which he was selected for the astronaut corps.

After being Cap-Con, the astronaut on the ground that handles all the radio communications with the astronauts in space, to several Apollo landing missions, Carr was the first rookie commander in the U.S. space program. The Skylab 4 mission lasted 84 days and performed a variety of scientific experiments, but probably its most important contributions were to space medicine.

In space, the body loses bone calcium and heart muscles weaken because the body is not working against gravity. The Skylab crew demonstrated that these effects could be minimized by regular exercise, a lesson that will be important to long missions such as those going to Mars. Carr described the everyday activities aboard Skylab, and the problems and advantages of living in weightless conditions. He also described his three space walks, during which he removed film from the camera on the astronomical telescope and made adjustments to it.

One thing that surprised him was the amount of material that spills off the human body everyday- including hair and dead skin-which clogged the air filters, making it necessary to clean them regularly. He also described how his dreams featured weightlessness after 15 days in space, but returned to normal as soon as he descended to Earth.

About 20 students attended the talk, some from Oklahoma State University. OSU students who could not be there in person took part in the discussion via two-way interactive streaming video.

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