May 19 1973
From The Space Library
The Economist commented on Skylab mission plans as mission engineers worked to purge the Skylab 1 Workshop of gases that might have emerged from overheated insulating material and the Skylab 2 astronauts trained for their May 25 launch: "The American genius with a spanner has never been more in evidence than when the astronauts have shown themselves capable of dealing with anything from a computer on the blink to the catastrophic break-up of Apollo 13 in mid-flight. But what NASA has to weigh now is that this is not an emergency -the men are safely on the ground-so is it really justified in taking the risk of sending them up to an already damaged and overheated Skylab? If the Americans decide to try emergency repairs, the nature of the Skylab mission will take on a new dimension." It had been a trial of man's ability to endure in space. "Now it could become a trial of his ability to work there and carry out improvised engineering. Not according to the book, but a good deal more interesting." (Economist, 5/19/73, 22)
The U.S.S.R. had canceled the launch of two cosmonauts because an unmanned Salyut spacecraft with which they would have docked had failed in orbit, Western observers believed. The Salyut, identified as Cosmos 557, was launched May 11 into an orbit similar to that of the crippled Salyut 2 space station, launched April 3. Observers believed the satellite would be a docking target for a manned Soyuz but its maneuvering engine apparently failed; it made an early reentry May 22. The tracking ships that had steamed to stations off Newfoundland and the Gulf of Guinea were returning to their home port in the Black Sea. (O'Toole, W Post, 5/19/73, A12; SF, 1/74, 39-40; Lyons, NYT, 9/26/73,33)
The U.S.S.R. Tu-144 supersonic transport had reached a speed of 2100 km per hr (1300 mph) during a test flight, Tass reported. It had carried Soviet journalists to an altitude of 17 km (11 mi) on a 90-min flight between Moscow and Saralov. The designer, Gen. Aleksey A. Tupolev, had said new design changes included extendable wings on the front that improved aerodynamic performance. The engine and landing gear had also been improved. (Tass, FBIS-Sov, 6/1/73, L4)
Creation and detection of antitritium-the counterpart of heavy, radioactive, hydrogen isotope tritium-was reported in the Soviet press by a Soviet scientific team using the U.S.S.R.'s largest nuclear particle accelerator at Serpukhov. The New York Times later said the discovery further strengthened the hypothesis that the universe was made up symmetrically of ordinary matter and antimatter. In a joint project of the Soviet Institute of High Energy Physics and the Institute of Nuclear Research, nuclear physicists Valentin I. Petrukhin and Vladimir I. Rykalin and team had examined 400 billion particles over several months be-fore identifying four antitritium nuclei. It was the second identification of an antinucleus at the Soviet accelerator. In February 1970, Soviet scientists had reported the creation of antihelium. The search for anti-matter was being spurred by the theory that the mutual annihilation of matter and antimatter might ultimately yield a new form of useful energy. (Shabad, NYT, 5/20/73, 41)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
