Skylab Survives

SKYLAB: A DECADE ON ORBIT, 1973-1983

This year we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the US space station Skylab. Launched on a Saturn V moon rocket, and using surplus Apollo and Gemini
hardware throughout, Skylab was a temporary station that has stood the test of time. Now, with the Space Shuttle operational, Skylab has entered a
new era of scientific research high above the Earth.

However, had it not been for an international snafu, Skylab might not be in orbit today. The final flight of the Apollo program was supposed to be a
joint mission with the Soviets, culminating in a docking between the Apollo spacecraft and a Soviet Soyuz vehicle. However, this mission was
canceled in 1974 when the CIA learned (incorrectly) that one of the unmanned test flights of the new version of Soyuz had gone out of control and
crashed. This later proved to be false, but the Nixon White House was sufficiently spooked to call off the mission. US-Soviet joint efforts were
instead directed to the robotic exploration of Mars, starting with the parallel Viking 1/2 and Mars 8/9 missions.

This left a spare Saturn IB and Apollo CSM which NASA already had the budget to launch, just not the authorization to do so. In an effort to keep
some the Apollo workforce employed as long as possible, the Texas and Florida congressional delegations successfully pushed for a final Apollo-Skylab
mission, Skylab 5. This mission then launched on April 4, 1975 for a 20-day stay at the station. The mission objectives including some science, but
the crew, Don Lind, Vance Brand, and Bill Lenoir, spend most of the time cleaning up Skylab and prepping it for the multi-year wait for the Space
Shuttle. The most important aspect of this was reboosting to the station to a 320-mile circular orbit. At the time, this was seen as a prudent but
unnecessary gesture, given the drag rates during Solar Cycle 20. However, Solar Cycle 21 turned out to be far more active than any helioscientist had
predicted, and without the reboost, Skylab may well have reentered the Earth's atmosphere before the Shuttle could reach it.

Thankfully, however, this not the case, and Skylab welcomed its first human visitors in seven years when STS-3 arrived in February 1982. Much like
Skylab 5 before them, the two-man crew of Fred Haise and Jack Lousma docked Columbia to Skylab for just a short 3-day stay and a reboost. STS-5
brought the first 5-person crew to Skylab in August 1982, along with a suite of new scientific experiments. Challenger first arrived at Skylab on
STS-7 in January with the Crew Escape Vehicle (CEV), a modified Apollo command module outfitted to stay attached to the station and allow a long-term
Skylab crew to return to Earth without need of Shuttle. The first long-term crew will launch on STS-8 in April, bringing Skylab back into full
operations, just under ten years after it was launched.

NASA's future plans for Skylab are to keep it continuously manned with three astronauts, while gradually using the cargo capabilities of the Space
Shuttle to add on and grow Skylab into a true orbital research facility. Skylab is also to become international, with experiments and astronauts from
Western Europe, Canada, and Japan all flying to the station. The future looks bright for Skylab, and this next decade on orbit will be even better
than the last.

(I may continue this further, but thought it was self-contained enough to post as is.)
 
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GREAT idea!!! As an "Apollo kid," loss of Skylab before STS was one of the things that should have (but didn't ... then) blunt my enthusiasm for STS.

Question: Your use of a modified Apollo CM as a CEV is interesting, but I'm not aware of any discussion of that in OTL. Do you have any support for that?
 
Hello Simon,

Not bad. It's certainly one of the big "what if's" of NASA history, especially as tied in to the larger "what if" of the decision by NASA to ditch Apollo/Saturn systems for the Shuttle earlier in the 70s - the decision that did the most to doom the use of Skylab hardware for a more serious, long duration space station venture of the sort NASA never achieved until the ISS almost three decades later (and at far greater expense and risk).

At the end of the day, I think it's a close call whether Skylab would have been worth the candle as the basis for a 1980's space station destination for the STS. Certainly it would have been better than nothing, which is precisely what NASA managed in that timeframe. How much better is harder to say. Skylab was old technology, and would have required a great deal of work and modification to become useful, not least because it simply was not designed for long-term habitation. Skylab's chief value: It was a very big piece of hardware of the sort that NASA no longer had (and still does not have) the capability to launch.

A better bet for a long-term expandable station was Skylab B, the unlaunched "twin" of Skylab, the bulk of which is now sitting in the Air & Space Museum in Washington. The disadvantage of Skylab B (probably likely to be renamed Spacelab) is that it required launching, and therefore significant money. The advantage was that it was more readily capable of modification for long term habitation and expansion, and hadn't spent several years derelict in space. Thomas Freiling had a QUEST article detailing the various proposals that were made to modify Skylab B for launch in the late 70's, all of which ultimately came to nought (see link below). At the end of the day, Shuttle development was sucking up all of NASA's manned spaceflight budget, and Congress refused to add more to launch it, notwithstanding that the basic hardware (spare Saturn V and the Skylab B module) already existed.

Obviously, your ATL requires less, however. The hardware *and* the budget already existed to simply boost Skylab A once ASTP is scrapped.

As Archibold and I (and others) have discussed discussed elsewhere, the more intriguing lost opportunity is, as I said, the failure of NASA to stick with the Saturn/Apollo architecture rather than the troubled Shuttle program - a failure which lost the opportunity to establish a permanent space station, visited and expandable by a mature, reliable and flexible launch system, over two decades before NASA actually managed it with the Shuttle.

Links to relevant sources:

Thomas J,. Freiling, Unflown Missions, Lost Opportunities
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...8qXsDA&usg=AFQjCNHSTijW0s8gaG9KyFyg-mazZmiSYw

Edward Edelson, Saving Skylab: The Untold Story
http://books.google.com/books?id=kQ...le&pg=PA65#v=onepage&q=skylab shuttle&f=false

Martin Marrietta's Skylab Reuse Study
http://books.google.com/books?id=kQ...le&pg=PA65#v=onepage&q=skylab shuttle&f=false
 
Thanks guys!

Athelstane, you're absolutely right that the big advantage that Skylab has is simply that it is so very big. I volunteered a bit to help restore the Huntsville full-scale mockup, and that was always what hit me the most about it. Launching Skylab B requires an extra Saturn V flight, which is really hard to pull after 1972, and I wanted the PoD after the Shuttle design is frozen (just to reduce the amount of variables).

WRT the Apollo-based Crew Escape Vehicle, it is loosely based on a NAA proposal for a Logistics Apollo for a post-Skylab station (see below); it's basically just their modified CM with the solid retro pack. Of course, most of the Shuttle-Station designs of the era had no means of crew escape; if there were no Shuttle there at the time, they were stuck!

http://hdl.handle.net/2060/19740073531
 
A thought: might a working, manned station during the 1980s have been able to draw some funds from SDI? In-environment qualification testing, prototype troubleshooting, etc.

It would give Skylab another revenue stream, as well as another source of advocates (in Congress and elsewhere).
 
NASA made in deep study for reactivation of Skylab by Space Shuttle in 1980
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19790075817_1979075817.pdf
http://beyondapollo.blogspot.com/2010/04/nasa-marshalls-skylab-reuse-study-1977.html

from first Shuttle fight goes to Skylab and check the outside of Skylab on damaged
to Dock with STS-3 and reactivation the Skylab
wat is not easy, because the atmosphere escape the station, putridly unboard supply, also hardware failure like the gyro stabilizers, cooling system plumbing etc
also muss STS-3 install a new Shuttle docking node on Skylab Apollo-type probe docking system

STS-3 and next flights will only temporally manned Skylab during Shuttle is dock
Skylab need rescue spacecraft, I proposed not used Apollo CM modified by Rockwell to CM Escape Concept
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/aponcept.htm


also consider NASA to install additional Module on Skylab, based on german Spacelab for Shuttle
 

Archibald

Banned
As Archibold and I (and others) have discussed discussed elsewhere, the more intriguing lost opportunity is, as I said, the failure of NASA to stick with the Saturn/Apollo architecture rather than the troubled Shuttle program - a failure which lost the opportunity to establish a permanent space station, visited and expandable by a mature, reliable and flexible launch system, over two decades before NASA actually managed it with the Shuttle.

Saturn IB / Apollo has a very serious competitor Titan III / Big Gemini
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Gemini

Titan III was available in large numbers, used by USAF and even NASA science missions (!) - while Big Gemini was designed as a "poor's man space shuttle" from the drawing board - unlike Apollo.

Apollo / Saturn IB, although far from optimal from space station logistics (Skylab was launched with everything on board) BUT had one BIG advantage: it already was NASA manned ship at the time.
 
Hello Archibald,

Big Gemini was an option - it just seems (to me, at least) like a less likely one. As you say, Apollo/Saturn had the advantage of being already "there," with the Saturns already man-rated, and a fair amount of hardware already left over to jump start Apollo Applications. Gemini would, unfairly, also have the whiff of "yesterday's hardware," which might make it harder to secure funding and approval - at least by NASA.

The two spare Saturn V's (SA-514, 515) and two more unfinished ones (SA-516, 517) already give you the ability to lift equivalent mass to the ISS. Likewise, four finished and two unfinished Saturn 1b's were also unused, and a few CSM's in various stages of completion. It is hard to think that a NASA which pursued AAP instead of the STS would not make use of that existing hardware - which would create great inertia to stay with and modify Apollo/Saturn hardware into the 1980's.

Further modification of the CSM for space station logistics, and ultimately development of a new intermediate Saturn launcher or launchers (Saturn II, Saturn INT-20, etc.) would be necessary to adapt Apollo/Saturn to this new role. But that still seems to me...a more likely ATL premise.

As I think about it...Saturn/Apollo were not designed for LEO space station operations. But they still provided a much more flexible, adaptable, safer, and more cost effective platform to that end than STS ever has.
 
I think the original Skylab would be a very short term interim, but priceless nonetheless. After 10 years in space, and a generation behind in equipment, it wouldnj't be ideal but it would exert a very strong influence once the Shuttle started going to it. I could see the big dumb booster concepts for the shuttle being used to replace Skylab while the production line was still open. Legislators would be under pressure to match or beat the Soviets and not lose an existing capability A 70 ton space station module in a single launch in about 1985 to 87 would replace Skylab nicely.
 
Great TL, so stoked somebody thought of this!

I would expect the ramifications of a Skylab lasting into the '80's to be pretty wide-spread; If the shuttle can keep resupplying and re-boosting Skylab into the 80's, there would likely have been a greater impetus for continuing and advancing space travel into the decade for both nations.

Like Mir, it could have been kept aloft for some time, needing only to be regularly sped up... Having a 'mission' and an objective, something for the Space Shuttle to do, a place from which to operate and conduct research would have made an important difference going into the second half of the decade. And as mentioned, the implications for SDI would have been enough to continue funding as well as providing a dual civilian/military purpose to the station.

And as for Big Gemini, obviously the most salient issue around it was nomenclature; if they'd called it something else it wouldn't bother anybody. I'd expect in a scenario where there existed a mission-ready Station circling above and an extant Soviet contestant, some enterprising young engineer would conceive of a better name for rebranding.
 

Archibald

Banned
And as for Big Gemini, obviously the most salient issue around it was nomenclature; if they'd called it something else it wouldn't bother anybody. I'd expect in a scenario where there existed a mission-ready Station circling above and an extant Soviet contestant, some enterprising young engineer would conceive of a better name for rebranding.

An excellent point, really. Big Gemini sounds dumb, dull and silly altogether. Thinking about it, I have this image of a pair of very obese twins munching chips and drinking beers all day long. :p

Here's my atempt at a better name ;)

I’m very aware that Big Gemini sounds bad. So I checked the Greek mythology to find a better name. Once upon a time was a god. The son of a Titan, he was closely identified with Apollo. Each day he drove the chariot of the sun across the sky, circling Earth. Not only he drove the chariot, he was identified with the sun itself. Thanks to his location right in the middle of the sky he had an eye on everything happening on Earth.


We will name our ship Helios.
 
Skylab, The International Space Station
NASA publication, 1984


The first module added to Skylab was the Shuttle Docking Adapter (SDA) on the first Shuttle-Skylab mission, STS-3. The SDA connects the Shuttle
orbiter's external airlock to Skylab's Multiple Docking Adapter (MDA). The SDA also provides an attachment point for the Solar Power Module (SPM) and
the Crew Escape Vehicle (CEV). The SPM was delivered by STS-5 and more than doubles the electrical power available on Skylab. In addition, it has a
set of radiators (based on those on the Shuttle orbiter) for improved thermal control. The CEV is based on an Apollo Command Module (CM) modified for
six seats and with a solid rocket retro package. The CEV provides a means to return the crew to Earth in the event of an emergency if a Shuttle were
not present. These additions, plus the refitting of the interior, have transformed Skylab into a modern space station for the 1980s.

But Skylab's additions have not ended there. The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese National Space Development Agency (NASDA) have
developed the Skylab E1 and J1 modules. The E1, led by West Germany, is a pressurized module with a variety of biomedical and material science
experiments currently mounted on the starboard side of the SDA. The J1 will be launched this Fall with an assortment of exposed-facility and
astronomical experiments. In addition, the Voyage airlock module has been developed by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and will also launch this
year. When all these modules are added to Skylab, it will become a truly international space station.
 
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