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.)