All true and a great post (and the show is excellent -- really telling for those guy sthat they achieved this, walking on the Moon, at age 35-45 and that was the peak of their lives -- hard for some to deal with).
Pete Conrad was my dad's hero. My dad was an MIT educated engineer; graduated in 68 and came up back when Kennedy and the can-do generation really pushed science, aeronautics, space travel and engineering. He graduated with an aerospace degree and went to work for McDonnell Douglas on some cool stuff -- some of the follow on Apollo mission concepts (the Venus wetlab -- google that sometime) and then Skylab.
He wasn't on the time that designed the Skylab meteorite shield, but he knew those guys. Apparently, they didn't do sufficient vibration testing on the shield which was to be deployed by explosive bolts. The vibration of launch set the bolts off, and the shield deployed during ascent, banging around in the cargo compartment and taking out two of the solar arrays and jamming the rest.
So, when Conrad and the first crew went up, Skylab was crippled. It had no power as the solar arrays were not deployed, was too hot inside to be livable as a result, and did not have a meteorite shield.
With a marathon spacewalk, Conrad and crew got the remaining arrays deployed, and spread a big yellow tarp over skylab as a replacement meteorite shield. Amazing work. All of the Skylab engineers loved the guy before (he worked closely with them on habitability and other design issues), but after that, he walked on water.
He's pretty accurately protrayed in HBO's From the Earth to the Moon as well -- Apollo 12 was a tight fun loving crew. Way different bunch than Aldrin/Armstrong/Collins.
This is a very good show, one of the astronauts featured is my long time hero, Pete Conrad. Pete was everyone's favorite astronaut, and was favored to be the first person to walk on the moon.
As comander of Apollo 12 it was felt that one of Apollo 8-9-10 or 11 would have a problem and the first landing would go to Apollo 12.
Things would have been very different if Pete were the first moon walker instead of the very quiet and shy Armstrong.
Pete was as far from Armstrong in personality as you can get!
What a fun guy, the first half of the book "The Right Stuff" was about Pete!
He was a great story teller, to quote Astronaut Bill Anders "everyone wanted to be on Pete's crew, no one had more fun, worked harder or was better".
He was always a very active guy, flew on Gemini 5 & comanded Gemini 11, went to the Moon on Apollo 12 and flew the Skylab repair mission, later raced cars and unfortunatlly was killed in a motorcycle accident at age 70.
