Mention the word Skylab to people of a certain age and their eyes will most likely look skyward for a fraction of a second. This is because during the spring and early summer of 1979 the abandoned U.S. space station was drifting from its decaying orbit and was heading back to earth. The cry went up: “Skylab is falling! Skylab is falling!”
On March 28, the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania had a partial melt down. Coming two weeks after the release of the nuclear disaster film, The China Syndrome, the dream of nuclear power as a peaceful, environmentally sound option was over. Then Skylab crowded Three Mile Island out of the headlines. People were initially afraid there would be death and destruction. Technology suddenly seemed demonic.
On July 11, over six years after it went into orbit, Skylab fell to earth, breaking up in the atmosphere and scattering its remains across the Indian Ocean and the Australian outback. While there was no damage to life or property, there was more than a little damage to NASA’s reputation, which in its post-lunar landing phase was, as Time magazine later put it, “starting to look as adrift as Skylab itself.” Nine days after the fall of Skylab the world celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, suggesting backward rather than forward movement.
If there was anyone rejoicing, it was a seventeen-year-old beer truck driver who found some charred Skylab fragments in his backyard. He bagged them up, grabbed the next flight to California, and claimed the $10,000 prize, which a San Francisco newspaper had offered to the first person to bring a piece of Skylab to its office.
To this day there are many whose only recollection of Skylab was the fiery return of the largest machine man had put into space. This is unfortunate because the real story of Skylab is more complicated, heroic, and successful than that.
For starters, America’s first space station was something of a makeshift thing. It was retrofitted from the enormous, nine-story tall, third stage of a Saturn V booster, which would no longer be needed to send men to the moon after the cancellation of the Apollo program. Skylab also picked up practical technology developed by the Air Force, which had decided in 1963 to develop a program to send crews into orbiting space stations called Manned Orbiting Laboratories (MOL). The purpose of these stations was primarily for military reconnaissance. But over the years that the MOL was being developed, unmanned satellites became more efficient eyes in the sky, and the need for them diminished and finally disappeared. When the MOL project was cancelled in 1969, NASA picked up various contracts from the Air Force for Skylab including one for the technology to feed a crew in the weightlessness of a space station.
The unmanned Skylab was fired into orbit on May 14, 1973. It immediately developed technical problems, the most significant of which occurred during the launch. The flow of air caused a meteoroid shield to come off, tearing off one of two solar panels and preventing the other from deploying in the process. The damage resulted in reduced power for the station. The first crew, Pete Conrad, Paul Weitz, and Joe Kerwin arrived eleven days later in an Apollo Command and Service Module and their first task was to repair the damage. Once repairs were complete, full power was restored. That crew spent twenty-eight days in orbit. The second crew, Alan Bean, Jack Lousma, and Owen Garriot spent fifty-nine days in space, but only after overcoming their own problems and some very tense moments. First, a thruster leak caused rendezvous with the station to be more challenging than expected, and then, once the crew was on board, a second thruster developed a leak. Plans were drawn up for a rescue but the crew was able to make adjustments and complete the mission as planned. The final Skylab crew, Jerry Carr, Bill Pogue, and Edward Gibson spent eighty-four days in space.
Each Skylab crew set new spaceflight duration records. The record set by the final crew was not broken by an American astronaut until the Shuttle-Mir program more than twenty years later. Skylab was decommissioned in February 1974 and the $2.5 billion habitat was now debris. It was thought that if nothing was done, according to early estimates, gravity would return it to earth in 1983. The hope was that a shuttle, then in the planning stages would be sufficiently developed so that before the fall a booster could be attached to Skylab to send it to a higher, more permanent orbit. But sun spot activity changed the dynamics of the orbit. The estimate was lowered and the shuttle wasn’t ready. The rest is history.
Skylab had two objectives: to prove that humans could live and work in space for extended periods and to expand our knowledge of solar astronomy well beyond earth-based observations. Despite technical problems, it succeeded. It served as the greatest solar observatory of its time, a microgravity lab, a medical lab, an earth observing facility and a platform for more than 300 experiments. The program also led to new technologies such as special showers, toilets, sleeping bags, exercise equipment and kitchen facilities designed to function in microgravity.
For the twenty-first century reader, the delight in W. David Compton and Charles D. Benson’s Living and Working in Space is in the details. For example, there are problems with film for the craft’s cameras which seem quaint in this digital era. The crew’s struggle with staggering workloads as they deal with the needs of daily life is fascinating. There is an interesting section on the development of the space toilet which answers questions people had about bodily functions in space and recounts the battle that took place between those planners who wanted to dry the crew’s urine vs. those who wanted to freeze it. This is not trivia but rather part of the rhythm of the story—which is the rhythm of everyday life albeit in a new environment.
The book is a vivid reminder of the first human attempt to live in space, which is often overlooked. What was learned from Skylab displayed in the deployment of the Space Shuttle (STS) and, even more directly, the International Space Station (ISS), which is its direct descendant.
—PAUL DICKSON