THE FIRST SPLASHDOWN NOT COVERED ON TELEVISION SINCE IT HAD THE CAPABILITY TO DO SO
The following is an excerpt from my book "Growing up with Spaceflight- Skylab/ASTP" the text is protected by Copyright 2015 Wes Oleszewski and no portion of this may be republished in any manner.
Early on
mission day 85, the crew of Skylab 4 closed the hatch on the Multiple Docking
Adaptor for the final time and took their seats in the Apollo Command Module. It was February 8, 1974. Other
than a capture latch snagging, the undocking went off without a hitch. The only
real glitch was that the CM Reaction Control System’s (RCS) number two ring was
showing a helium leak when it was pressurized. Mission Control, suspecting an
impending fuel leak in the ring, decided not to use ring two and to simply
reenter on ring number one. If the crew were to have a problem with ring one,
Mission Control directed them to set the CM into a rolling reentry and proceed.
CBS radio’s spaceflight announcer Reid Collins, while describing the pending
reentry, stated that the crew of Skylab 4 would be coming in “on one ring and a
prayer.”
Since I had
taken the day off from school to watch this historic event on TV I had a whole
60 minute cassette tape ready to fill. I knew full well that it would be a year
and a half before the next manned American spaceflight, and so I was going to
catch every word of the TV coverage. It struck me that when the subject came up
on the morning news shows, there was no mention of when the networks would start
their coverage. At the expected time I was set up
and ready to go, but there was no coverage.
Those of us on
the outside who were growing up with spaceflight were not the only ones who
were screwed by the TV networks; the Skylab 4 astronaut’s families got the
shaft as well. Since there was no prior notice that the three TV networks were not going to cover the splashdown, the
families of the crew had invited guests into their homes to watch the event on
TV and celebrate. Instead of a joyful family moment that would be long remembered,
they were treated to a great disappointment far beyond what those of us in the space-buff ranks had experienced. Later that evening Walter Cronkite, while
talking about the Skylab 4 crew’s return, made it a point to highlight this
historic slight on his CBS evening news broadcast.
“Their landing
today,” Cronkite announced, “the first not covered live on television since it
had the capability to do so.”
In the book,
“Around the World in 84 Days,” Jerry Carr recalls that his son, Jeff, was so
upset by the fact that all of the TV networks had elected to ignore the
splashdown that he wrote letters to the presidents of NBC, CBS and ABC asking
why they had done so. Surprisingly, he received replies from all three, and essentially
they all said the same thing. The splashdown, although a historic event, was, in
their opinion, not newsworthy.
From the very beginning, the Skylab program had been given the brush-off by the snobs running the three TV networks. Thus, the snub of this historic moment should have been no surprise as it took a back seat to soap operas and game shows.
