Skylab was launched 40 years ago today!

[dlazarus6660]

Skylab was launched 40 years ago today! I was in 6th grade when it was launched. I begged my parents to take me to the launch. It would be the last Saturn V launch ever. Didn't happen. It came down a month after I graduated from High School. I'm not sure if humans had been in space for long periods of time before Skylab, Russians maybe? But we found we could, indeed it was the predecessor to the ISS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab

 

[JStarStar]

I always thought on the final Skylab mission they should have boosted it up into as high an orbit as the Service Module SPS engine could take them and see if they could buy a few more years of orbital life until the Shuttle was ready to ferry crews.

It came down in 1979 as it was, you would think the SPS could have pushed it up another 50 miles or so and stretch out its life until the shuttles were flying.

That main tank construction had to be pretty durable. Heck, I suppose Skylab could still be flying today as the core module of a REALLY big space station.

 

[goldlizard]

I always thought on the final Skylab mission they should have boosted it up into as high an orbit as the Service Module SPS engine could take them and see if they could buy a few more years of orbital life until the Shuttle was ready to ferry crews.

It came down in 1979 as it was, you would think the SPS could have pushed it up another 50 miles or so and stretch out its life until the shuttles were flying.

That main tank construction had to be pretty durable. Heck, I suppose Skylab could still be flying today as the core module of a REALLY big space station.

I agree it should have been somehow saved, and brought back to Earth and put in a museum. Another part of our space history would be a big draw for a Air and Space museum. IMHO.

 

[NJRick]

I was in the 4th grade and remember it like it was yesterday. We watched it on TV in class. When she was launched I was totally into everything about the space program. Loved that 1b they used to launch the crews. I am reading a book now called Living and Working in Space by W. David Compton and Charles Benson. Its the Skylab program from conception to flight...pretty good read!

Skylab was launched 40 years ago today! I was in 6th grade when it was launched. I begged my parents to take me to the launch. It would be the last Saturn V launch ever. Didn't happen. It came down a month after I graduated from High School. I'm not sure if humans had been in space for long periods of time before Skylab, Russians maybe? But we found we could, indeed it was the predecessor to the ISS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab

 

[dlazarus6660]

While doing research about Skylab, I came across a 1/72 scale model of a Saturn V. According to their ad, 24 astronauts have been to the moon. That's twice as many as we sent. Cool! I wonder who the other 12 are?

https://www.thespacestore.com/drmo1sav.html

 

[JStarStar]

I agree it should have been somehow saved, and brought back to Earth and put in a museum. Another part of our space history would be a big draw for a Air and Space museum. IMHO.

Bringing it back to earth would have been massively more difficult than boosting it into a higher orbit. You would have to build a heat shield bigger than the entire station and also figure out how to land it (500-foot parachutes??)

Skylab would not even nearly fit inside a Shuttle so they would have had to build a vehicle roughly twice that big to bring Skylab down.

As far as a Skylab being some great museum attraction, apparently the U.S. Space & Rocket Center (USSRC) in Huntsville doesn't really think so:



https://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1639

 

[Scotty Dog]

"Darkside Of The Moon" was launched in 1973 also, and is still out there in the cosmos.
I was 14 years old.

 

[dlazarus6660]

"Darkside Of The Moon" was launched in 1973 also, and is still out there in the cosmos.
I was 14 years old.

Gawd, your an old fart!:rofl:

 

[dlazarus6660]

Not all of them went to the surface, and some went more than once.

Jim Lovell went twice, who else?

 

[dlazarus6660]

John Young and Gene Cernan. Both were on Apollo 10, Young landed on 16 and Cernan on 17.

Your right, I forgot!

 

[Larry Curcio]

I always thought on the final Skylab mission they should have boosted it up into as high an orbit as the Service Module SPS engine could take them and see if they could buy a few more years of orbital life until the Shuttle was ready to ferry crews.

It came down in 1979 as it was, you would think the SPS could have pushed it up another 50 miles or so and stretch out its life until the shuttles were flying.

That main tank construction had to be pretty durable. Heck, I suppose Skylab could still be flying today as the core module of a REALLY big space station.

I was working at NASA Goddard when Skylab came down. The story I got was that they had had a hardware failure on an IBM 360, 11 years out of date. (IIRC, they called it an IBM 360-95, which was not a stock model. I believe it would tell you it was a 90 when asked.) Hardware failures were common on that technology; we had 'em several times a day. That particular time the failure took about 3 weeks to repair. That machine was in charge of many satellites, which would be maneuvered to point their paddles and recharge. With the hardware failue, the batteries drained on Skylab and on many other satellites. After that, you couldn't point the paddles. Skylab started coning, and the (already low) orbit degraded.

My story was the common knowledge back then - which may have been correct or incorrect. NASA blamed the problem on sunspots, which may also have been correct or incorrect.

As for saving it, that was also the time when the Shuttle was about to be finished. They were taking 24-48 hours to seat each tile, and the tiles were still falling off. People were under heavy deadlines getting the software out. Still, everyone was hopeful. Skylab was the past; the Shuttle was the future.

 

[boomtube]

Kids in school today look back at the Moon Landings as something that happened in their GRANDPARESTS day.

As for Skylab being saved; saved for what? By the time it hit atmosphere it was; by all I’ve read, falling apart. Skylab was built on a shoestring budget in a short period of time, all things relative, as a means of using up the last Saturn V booster.

Even if it could have been boosted into a higher orbit it probably wouldn’t have lasted another year without serious “Rebuilding”.


I wonder how many more years the ISS will remain operational and what, if anything, will replace it when it falls down/apart?

 

[KennB]

Skylab was one of my favorite pinball games during college. It was a Williams machine and called Skylab but you had to light up the letter for SPACELAB to get the bonus. The graphics were all based on the original design, not the one "wing" and parasol craft it ended up being.

 

[JStarStar]

Kids in school today look back at the Moon Landings as something that happened in their GRANDPARESTS day.

As for Skylab being saved; saved for what? By the time it hit atmosphere it was; by all I’ve read, falling apart. Skylab was built on a shoestring budget in a short period of time, all things relative, as a means of using up the last Saturn V booster.

Even if it could have been boosted into a higher orbit it probably wouldn’t have lasted another year without serious “Rebuilding”.


I wonder how many more years the ISS will remain operational and what, if anything, will replace it when it falls down/apart?

Down toward the end of the Wiki article there's a fairly lengthy discussion of proposals to re-boost Skylab for later use by Shuttle crews.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab


These proposals were still considered feasible as late as summer and fall 1978, when it became apparent the orbit was decaying more rapidly than expected and also the Shuttle was well behind schedule. At that point they basically gave up on it and the next July, down it came.

But obviously there was still a body of thought within NASA that while it certainly would have required renovations and repair, the basic structure was still usable.