NASA Johnson Space Center
Houston, TX 77058
January 5, 1976
Mr. William C. Schneider
Deputy Associate Administrator for Space Flight
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Washington, DC 20546
Dear Bill:
In answer to your request for a listing of the five most important managerial or technical lessons learned from Skylab about space flight development and operations programs, I submit the following:
1. In the design and development of multimodule systems, extreme care should be exercised to assure that systems such as environmental control, electrical power, propulsion, and communications are similar from the operational standpoint. That is, the systems should be designed compatible to the extent that they can be interconnected, as required, and a common or uniform operation and control procedure can be used by the crew in order to reduce the complexity of training and the potential for operational errors due to multiple procedures.
2. Zero-g is an aid to manned space flight activities rather than an encumbrance as long as systems and components are designed for accessibility. Quoting Alan Bean, Commander of Skylab II, "If man can do it on the ground, he can do it in space with the same tools."
3. It is mandatory to have a system such as a television uplink with onboard hard copy capability to provide for transmittal of information, instructions, and procedures from the ground during low activity periods, thus unburdening the flight crew from copying complex messages.
4. The program flight control organization must be the final authority for establishing onboard integrated procedures, inflight constraints, and sequence of flight activities where there is an interaction between spacecraft and experiment operations.
5. All experiment/science hardware should be tested both as a subsystem in accordance with experiment/science requirements and finally at the integrated system level to assure the equipment operation, accuracy, and validity of the data as well as to verify that there is no electromechanical interference.
My apologies for being late with these remarks. I hope they will serve your purpose and good luck on your thesis.
Sincerely,
Kenneth S. Kleinknecht
Director of Flight Operations
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