Outside for a look at a comet: A Skylab 4 astronaut holds onto a strut to the Apollo Telescope Mount.

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Grab a comet by its long tail and shake it.  It’s December 30, 1973.  We’ve been chasing a comet for days now, even though it’s more than a hundred million miles from us.  Comet Kohoutek, making it’s first visit to the inner solar system, has just swung around the sun, passing within 13.2 million miles on December 28.  That day marked the halfway point in our 84-day mission aboard Skylab.  

We’ve just made two spacewalks four days apart to view the comet and photograph it with a special camera.  We are Jerry Carr, Ed Gibson, and Bill Pogue, the third and final crew to live aboard Skylab, a space station the size of a three-bedroom house.  

We ventured outside outside on Christmas day, with a laundry list of tasks, including the routine changeout of film in our suite of solar telescopes in the towering Apollo Telescope Mount.  And we brought out a special camera to photograph the comet, attaching the bulky unit to an ATM strut.  After aligning it in the correct direction, we let it do its thing automatically to capture the comet approaching the sun.  In the glare of the sunlight, we actually did not see Kohoutek.  We were outside for a record spacewalk of 7 hrs. 1 min.

Tell me we’re not working hard?  We ventured outside again yesterday, Dec. 29, photographing the comet after it had swung around the sun.  Shooting away at more than 238,000 mph, Kohoutek was already 19 million miles from the sun — and 106 million miles from Earth.

“Hey, I see the comet,” Ed exclaimed.  “There’s the tail.  Holy cow!”

Jerry sees it, too, and observes, “It appears yellow and orange, just like a flame.”

We could see swirls of vapor stretching toward the sun and a vapor cloud looping the tail.  “It certainly is beautiful.”   We fewer tasks to accomplish, we complete the spacewalk in 3 hr. 28 min. 

Now on Dec. 30, we watch the comet from inside our home in space.  “The tail is larger.  It’s exceptionally bright.  It’s almost orange in appearance.”   It’s developing faint streamers, thin bluish streaks.

Aren’t comets portents of disaster?  The first days days of flight were a strain.  We were constantly behind the curve of the relentless timeline, every moment scripted, with no slack in the schedule for the unforeseen — such as hunting down equipment that had not been stowed by previous crews where it should be or had seemed to disappear, no margins for delays if tasks took longer than plotted neatly by Mission Control, then rushing and making mistakes that only us further behind, constantly racing the clock.  Frankly, spaceflight seemed pure hell at that point, leading to friction between us and mission control.  Yes, we became testy, gaining a bad reputation as a rebellious crew.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  Mission planners were supposed to ease off the exhausting pace set by Al Bean’s crew who proceeded us, a pace that could not be sustained for three months.    Yet here we are.  It’s been getting better as our efficiency kicked in and Mission Control eased back a bit on the experiment load.  Yet we’re still run relentlessly by mission control like rats in a maze.  

It’s the evening of Dec. 30, and we use our normal private medical conference with Houston as an opening.  We request an update on how we’re doing, knowing it won’t be good.  But it’s time to clear the air with some frank talk.

We receive a long teletype reply.  “You’re running behind, and your exercise and free-time constraints are killing us.”

We spend several communication passes over the U.S. clearing the air, each taking a pass to speak.  We go first.  The schedule is too rigid.  “We need more time to rest.  We need a schedule that isn’t so packed.  . . .We need to get the pace of things under control.”  We don’t like having exercise scheduled after meals.  We need more time between experiments.  We need our evening free from extra work and all the communications chatter. 

The ground, on the next orbit, responds with their complaints, voiced by Capcom Dick Truly.  He says there’s been a lack of dialogue between the crew and ground.  They need some flexibility to schedule activities.  It’s hard to work around all our requirements.  He admitted there’d been a whole lot of schedule changes that compromise crew time.

He says they’d intended not to go at the pace the previous crew achieved at the end of their mission, but some planners, used to going all-out all the time, didn’t get the message.  Here’s the thing — they admit we’re actually working at the same pace at as Bean’s crew at the same point in their flight.  Yet they’ve been expecting us to work at the efficiency achieved near the end of their mission — in addition to a requirement that we increase our exercise 50 percent above previous levels.  No wonder we always feel behind!  Houston admits they over-scheduled us in the first weeks. 

We give ourselves overnight to solidify solutions.  Here they are:  The ground agrees to change the schedule plan.  Not every task will be rigidly scheduled on the daily timeline, only those with specific requirements.  Routine housekeeping tasks will be placed on a “shopping” list, which we will tackle when we can.  They say they’ll no longer call us during meals or give any more assignments for evenings.  They’ll sign off at 9 p.m. instead of 10 p.m. to give us relaxation time.

We say just having time to look out the window is a big morale booster.  And then we compliment the capcoms as providing a moral boost, too.  “We’re greatly appreciative of the attitude you guys take and your cheery words and your occasional bit of music and all that really help make our day.”

The conversations turn out to be the turning point of the mission.  Right away our productivity goes up, soon to match that of Bean’s crew.  We’re having more fun, too — and the days are passing faster.

Comets, we find out, can be portents of good things, too.