Skylab

Today is the 40th anniversary of Skylab’s demise.

I can still recall vividly that creepy, anxious hot summer week four decades back, when, as a young lad eleven years of age, I’d race home every afternoon after art school, nervously scanning through the New York Daily News that was delivered to our house to see when Armageddon would happen. No one knew where or when it would it, the headlines screamed. One in one-fifty chance of being hit by space debris. Death from the skies!

Well, it was somewhat anticlimactic when it finally did crash down, half a world away over the sparsely inhabited Australian outback.

I didn’t know it back then, but Skylab is directly connected to the Apollo space program. The first manned United States space station was created from an unused third-stage of a Saturn rocket, hardware that had been set aside for the Apollo 20 mission before runaway costs and diminishing public relations returns canceled it. The man who sprung the Skylab idea on NASA was Dr. Werner von Braun.

There would obviously be no command module or lunar excursion module on this flight. Instead, all the weight load would be re-allocated for equipment for the space station: three decks containing sleeping quarters, a galley, a bathroom with a low-g shower, scientific labs, an exercise area, and walls and walls of storage lockers. The interior of the station was slightly larger than a 23 x 23 x 23 foot box. Which is probably bigger than the interior of my house.

Outside Skylab, several pairs of large solar panel wings provided power. Five telescopes hung from several appendages, along with various other Earth observation devices. There was also an exterior multiple docking adapter, so more than one command module could link up with the space station at any given time.

Aerospace giant McDonnell Douglas (of which I did a detailed analysis for an Organizational Management college class way back in the late-90s) won the Skylab contract. Two space stations were built, plus a third to be used as a training facility on the ground.

The station was launched on a Saturn V rocket in May of 1973, but was damaged during its ascent to orbit: large sections of the outer shielding tore away, one large wing fell off completely, another failed to fully extend once in orbit. This delayed the launch of the first crew (to be lifted to the station in the smaller Saturn IB rockets) by ten days as NASA assessed the full extent of the damage and how to respond.

Pete Conrad, who commanded the Apollo 12 mission and was the third man to walk on the moon, led the first crew up to the damaged Skylab. Breathable air was found inside though the station baked at a sultry hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The first order of business was to reapply and reseal the outer shielding using gold foil and several EVAs. Conrad himself went out to repair one of the wings. Maintenance and repair work continued for thirty days.

Over the next eight months two more crews went up. The first mission, headed by Conrad’s associate on Apollo 12, Alan Bean, stayed aboard for 54 days, and another mission lasted 84 days. This last mission ended in February of 1974. Each mission, including Conrad’s, consisted of three astronauts, so altogether Skylab hosted nine men over the course of 171 days. The station itself orbited for 2,249 days before its unscheduled stopover in central Australia. The three missions performed over 2,400 scientific experiments, and greatly contributed to our understanding of human existence in low-gravity environments.

A second Skylab, creatively named Skylab II, was to have been launched in late 1975 or early 1976, and was to have docked with a Soviet spacecraft. This mission was canceled (along with so much of the Apollo space program) sometime in the early 70s, though the US-Soviet docking event would occur in July of 1975. And since over-budgeting and other mismanagement delayed the space shuttle from flying until 1981, Skylab’s deteriorating orbit could not be corrected and its life extended.

Skylab – May 14, 1973 to July 12, 1979, NASA’s first manned space station, carved from the third-stage hull of a unused Saturn V rocket ...