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Remembering Skylab

Posted by michael on from the don't-look-up dept.

linuxwrangler writes "It was 30 years ago today that NASA launched Skylab, the first US space station. An article at New York Times remembers Skylab. It was hardly a flawless launch with a meteroid shield getting ripped loose causing one of the solar arrays to partially deploy and then be blown into space by the exhaust from a retro-rocket but the speed and effectiveness of the astronauts' repairs showed human's ability to operate in space and helped pave the way for today's projects. Skylab reentered on July 11, 1979 leaving a debris field across parts of Western Australia and the Indian Ocean."

30 comments

  1. Obligatory Star Trek Reference by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why do I keep hearing Spock in my head saying, "Remember..." ?

  2. 20 Years? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    20 years ago today would have been in 1983 - about 4 years after it plunged into the ocean.

    Come on people!

    1. Re:20 Years? by darksaber · · Score: 1

      yeah, so much for mailing daddypants (the "on-duty editor" and pointing this error out... the launch was 30 years ago today. NASA has a page about this by the way.

  3. 30 Years. by GreenHell · · Score: 1

    The very first line in the NY Times article says 30 years.

    Either somebody can't read, or they can't do math.

    --
    "I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
    1. Re:30 Years. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And no, that wasn't the first line in the NYT article either.

    2. Re:30 Years. by GreenHell · · Score: 2, Funny

      You're absolutely right, it's the 3rd sentence.

      So it's official then. I can't read.

      --
      "I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
    3. Re:30 Years. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      but you're still a sexy, powerful man.

  4. Don't worry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    One of the Slashdot Editors will make the correction before the story is posted.

    Oh, wait.

  5. remembering Skylab joke from Omni magazine... by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

    Skylab: (n) Government dogs trained to retrieve fallen spacecraft parts. :)

  6. Time travel too!!! by karrde · · Score: 2, Funny

    So among all the other feats it managed to reenter the atmosphere 4 years before it launched.... Amazing!!

    Perhaps it should say it reentered in 1989.

    1. Re:Time travel too!!! by darksaber · · Score: 1

      funny, but it was the launch date that was wrong, not the re-entry date...

    2. Re:Time travel too!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > it managed to reenter the atmosphere 4 years before it launched

      Launched May 14, 1973 (30 years ago?) 2003-1973=30

      >Perhaps it should say it reentered in 1989.

      Perhaps it shouldn't, since

      On July 11, 1979, Skylab impacted the Earth surface. The debris dispersion area stretched from the Southeastern Indian Ocean across a sparsely populated section of Western Australia.

      I know NASA doesn't have the best track-record, but they do at least know which decade their spacecraft flew. :-p

      Among other feats you should try RTFA

  7. Oops, make that 30 years. by linuxwrangler · · Score: 3, Informative

    So my fingers don't always aim right before my first cup of coffee. The "2" should have been a "3".

    Now that I've made my "off by one" error for the day I can safely proceed with real work.

    --

    ~~~~~~~
    "You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
    1. Re:Oops, make that 30 years. by darksaber · · Score: 2, Interesting

      hmmm, insert obligatory "make this guy an editor since he notices, admits mistakes, and posts corrections" comment here?

      have fun at work linuxwrangler - if only mistake quotas worked that way :)

    2. Re:Oops, make that 30 years. by coryboehne · · Score: 0

      It happens to the best of us my freind! :)

  8. Someone needs coffee... by dasunt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How was Skylab launched 20 years ago, and reentered 25 years ago?

    Ah, I see that the magical slashdot gnomes just changed '20' to '30' on the front page.

    1. Re:Someone needs coffee... by GreenHell · · Score: 1

      How was Skylab launched 20 years ago, and reentered 25 years ago?

      Simple. They put it in an orbit that was the opposite of the Earth's rotation, so that it was going backwards in time until it finally crashed ~4 years before it launched.

      Either that or they shot it at the sun really fast and it slingshotted around back into the past. Take your pick.

      Today's post brought to you be pseudo-science, stupid theories, and the number 3

      --
      "I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
  9. I remember the crash. by torpor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm from Perth, and remember staying up all night to try and catch a glimpse of Skylab as it came crashing down.

    The next day there were news reports on big chunks that had landed all over the place. Nobody was hurt if I remember correctly, but it was funny to see one picture of a typical Aussie wheatbelt'er, standing next to a big ball of shredded super hight tech O2 tank in the middle of his paddock.

    That really was the beginning of my personal "Space Love Era", heh heh ... Skylab, you piece of shit you! Why didn't you stay up!!!

    --
    ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
    1. Re:I remember the crash. by bananahammock · · Score: 1, Interesting

      What was really cool, was this girl at my primary school in Perth who brought along a piece of insulation from Skylab to our class. It looked a little bit like straw (in colour at least), but the fact it was from a space vehicle made it seem priceless to a bunch of young whippersnappers. Also some of the farmers in the wheatbelt said the very small particles falling that night sounded, not surprisingly, like hail against their tin roofing. I also remember seeing that same farmer next to a huge chunk of Skylab, around a tonne or so, which they somehow loaded onto a trailer behind their car. I wonder where it is now.

  10. Last of an Era by sohp · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Skylab station was carried into space on the last of the Saturn V rockets to be launched. Hats off to the most powerful booster ever built. The Saturn V achieved a perfect launch record, rare in any rocket, much less a big one. Its computer was attached to the inside walls of a 1x6.7 meter ring, but your PDA is easily more powerful. Nevertheless the computer even demonstrated it could withstand a direct strike by lightning, twice, on the Apollo 12 launch and still keep going.

    1. Re:Last of an Era by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      The Skylab launch is one more of those things that make you wonder whether the moon landings happened.

      Yes, the Saturn V supposedly does have that rare perfect launch record. So let's look.

      The Russians were way ahead of the Americans in launch capacity the whole way through the space race. This is one of the reasons Americans got so good at electronics miniturization -- the Russians never had to, with their powerful rockets.

      Moreover, the American rockets kept blowing up while they were perfecting the designs. The Russians had comparatively few explostions.

      Then, we get to the Saturn V. It supposedly featured the F-1 rocket engine, which if it existed would have been the most powerful engine ever built. At 1.5 million pounds of thrust, it was an incredible ten times more powerful than the engines used in earlier rockets.

      The Russians, too, knew that it would take a big booster to land a man on the moon, and began developing the N-1 rocket. In spite of their success with the comparatively smaller rockets, every one of the Russian superbooster launch attempts failed.

      Meanwhile, the F-1 worked perfectly from day one. While some of the Russian designs featured huge clusters of up to 52 smaller engines, the Saturn's first stage is powered by just five F-1 engines.

      Now we get back to Skylab. In its short history, the Saturn V was used only for the (supposed) moon launches, the Skylab launch, and the 1973 Apollo-Soyuz hookup. And not once in the thirty years since. It would have been indispensable right now, to bring parts of ISS up. It could bring 120 tons to LEO, compared to the shuttle's 25 (which, it should be mentioned, gets most of its thrust not from the liquid propellant engines, but from the solid rocket boosters).

      The Skylab launch was essentially an empty upper stage, weighing nowhere near as much as a fully fueled moon shot mission. Ditto for the Soyuz-Apollo mission. The rocket can't have been fully fueled in either mission.

      What I'm saying is that if that rocket existed, why hasn't it been used for something useful since then? Empty missions such as Skylab and Soyuz-Apollo don't count.

      The Saturn V never existed as such. In the moon missions, the F-1 engine was run at lower power, bringing mostly empty shells into LEO, which is as far as anyone's gone. Similar to a Skylab mission, really.

      Think about it.

    2. Re:Last of an Era by torpor · · Score: 1

      Conspiracy theories aside, the F-1 production facility and engineering archives were all lost in a fire.

      To build the F-1 today, we would have to re-engineer it completely from scratch ... including all blueprints, designs, test material, etc. That this was all lost is a travesty, but hey ... we've moved on.

      --
      ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
    3. Re:Last of an Era by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      your PDA is easily more powerful

      Yeah, but my PDA is also easily more powerful than the first two desktop computers I owned...

    4. Re:Last of an Era by DrEnter · · Score: 1

      I know this is a bit off-topic and may seem somewhat inflamatory, but I really feel I need to respond to this.

      Implying that the moon landings were a hoax is foolish at best, but more so very insulting to the thousands of people involved in the project and the dozens of astronauts that risked (and in some cases lost) their lives for it. I'm not going to say any more about this except to recommend that you read Philip Plait's Bad Astronomy web site, more specifically the section on Moon Landing Hoax theories.

      Regarding the use of the Saturn V booster since SkyLab... Why? Whilst these were powerful and flexible boosters and had a perfect launch record, they did not have a perfect test record and it was only a matter of time before a launch accident occured (which, I might add, could have been catostrophic at and around the launch pad). They were also pretty expensive and difficult to operate. I highly recommend you take a look at one of the Saturn Vehicle Histories you'll find on-line. If you have any lingering doubts as to the existance of the F-1 or the Saturn V, there are still some in existance you might want to have a look at for yourself.

  11. Lame Skylab Joke by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anybody else remember hearing the lame AM radio joke of that era: "This just in -- Skylab has re-entered, colliding with a DC-10. The debris has landed at Three Mile Island."

    Sure seemed funny at the time.

  12. Wow. by spumoni_fettuccini · · Score: 1

    I remember when thy didn't exactly know where it was going to land and the media induced panic. I must say I was a little worried about it. Damn...'79 huh...where does the time go?

    --
    -- Some days you're the dog; some days you're the hydrant.