- Skylab is also the name of a research station at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.
Drawing of Skylab with components labelled
Skylab was the first space station the United States launched into orbit. The 75 metric ton station was in Earth orbit from 1973 to 1979, and visited by crews three times in 1973 and 1974.
History
Skylab
| Mission Insignia |
 |
| Mission Statistics |
| Mission Name: |
Skylab |
| Call Sign: |
Skylab |
| Launch: |
May 14, 1973
17:30:00 UTC
Cape Canaveral
Complex 39A |
| Reentry: |
July 11, 1979
16:37:00 UTC
near Perth, Australia |
| Crews: |
3 |
| Occupied: |
171 days |
| In Orbit: |
2,249 days |
Number of
Orbits: |
34,981 |
| Apogee: |
274.6 mi (442 km) |
| Perigee: |
269.7 mi (434 km) |
| Period: |
93.4 min |
| Inclination |
50 deg |
Distance
Traveled: |
~890,000,000 mi
(~1,400,000,000 km) |
| Orbital Mass: |
77,088 kg |
| Skylab |
Skylab was launched May 14, 1973 by a two-stage version of the Saturn V booster (the SL-1 mission). Severe damage was sustained during launch, including the loss of the station's micrometeoroid shield/sun shade and one of its main solar panels. Debris from the lost micrometeoroid shield further complicated matters by pinning the remaining solar panel to the side of the station, preventing its deployment and thus leaving the station with a huge power deficit. The station underwent extensive repair during a spacewalk by the first crew, which launched on May 25, 1973 (the SL-2 mission) atop a Saturn IB. Two additional missions followed on July 28, 1973 (SL-3) and November 16, 1973 (SL-4) with stay times of 28, 59, and 84 days, respectively. The last Skylab crew returned to Earth on February 8, 1974.
View of Skylab space station cluster in Earth orbit from the leaving
Skylab 4
Mission of Skylab
Skylab was actually the refitted S-IVB second stage of a Saturn IB booster (from the AS-212 vehicle), a leftover from the Apollo program originally intended for one of the canceled Apollo earth orbital missions. A product of the Apollo Applications Program (a program tasked with finding long-term uses for Apollo program hardware), Skylab was originally planned as a minimally-altered S-IVB to be launched on a Saturn IB. The small size of the IB would have required Skylab to double as a rocket stage during launch, only being retrofitted as a space station once on-orbit. With the cancellation of Apollo missions 18-20 a Saturn V was made available and thus the "Wet Workshop" concept, as it was called, was put aside and Skylab was launched dry and fully outfitted. Skylab's grid flooring system was a highly visible legacy of the wet workshop concept.
The mission computer used aboard Skylab was the IBM System/4Pi TC-1, a relative of the AP-101 Space Shuttle computers.
Operations on Skylab
Launch of the last Saturn V rocket carrying the Skylab space station
All told, Skylab orbited Earth 2,476 times during the 171 days and 13 hours of its occupation during the three manned Skylab missions. Astronauts performed ten spacewalks totalling 42 hours 16 minutes. Skylab logged about 2,000 hours of scientific and medical experiments, including eight solar experiments. The coronal holes in the Sun were discovered thanks to these efforts. Many of the experiments conducted investigated the astronauts' adaptation to extended periods of microgravity. Each Skylab mission set a record for the duration of time astronauts spent in space.
End of Skylab
Following the last mission, Skylab was left in a parking orbit expected to last at least 8 years. The Space Shuttle was planned to dock with and elevate Skylab to a higher safe altitude in 1979, however the shuttles were not able to launch until 1981. A planned unmanned satellite called the Teleoperator was to be launched to save Skylab, but funding never materialised. Skylab was considered junk by many. It was falling apart, according to the visiting astronauts. It had suffered great damage during launch when the solar panel tore off with the solar shield. It needed new gyroscopes, fuels, equipment, life support systems, plumbing, and much more. Increased solar activity, heating the outer layers of the earth's atmosphere and thereby increasing drag on Skylab, led to an early reentry at approximately 16:37 UTC July 11, 1979. Earth reentry footprint was a narrow band (approx. 4° wide) beginning at about 48° S 87° E and ending at about 12° S 144° E, an area covering portions of the Indian Ocean and Western Australia. Debris was found between Esperance, Western Australia, and Rawlinna, Western Australia, 31–34°S, 122–126°E. As this area was sparsely populated, there were no casualties.
Skylab's demise was an international media event, with merchandising, wagering on time and place of re-entry and nightly news reports. The San Francisco Examiner offered a $10,000 prize for the first piece of Skylab to be delivered to their offices. An Australian farmer claimed the bounty. In a coincidence for the organisers, the annual Miss Universe pageant was scheduled to be held a few days later, on July 20, 1979, in nearby Perth, Western Australia. A large piece of Skylab debris was displayed on the stage. [1]
Three flight-quality Skylabs were built. The first one was that which crashed in Western Australia; the second, a backup, is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC and the third is kept at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Skylab Expeditions
See also
External links
The content of this page is retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab under GFDL
