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How Some Creative Hacking Kept Skylab From Becoming Space Junk (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Skylab was close to becoming space junk. You may remember it crashing back to earth as space junk but that was after it was used for several research missions. What you probably don't know is that the original concept was to build it from a spent upper rocket stage that is normally just junked after launch. The module that was sent up in place of a 3rd rocket stage was damaged during launch, making it unusable until some very creative repairs paved the way for manned missions. The damage included problems with thermal shielding that turned it into an oven — nearly cooking all materials and supplies inside — and damage to solar panels which put a big hit on the station's power budget. Creative solutions and astronaut tenacity when docking and performing EVAs are all that saved Skylab from being scrapped without ever being used.
it was space junk. it crashed as space junk.
Sometimes I beat off
Hands on mouse and dick, click click
Mom knocks, fuck off bitch!
Russians had MIR, which was way more advanced. Skylab really did look like space junk in retrospect.
Some of the Skylab debris killed a girl in Australia. AUS couldn't find any laws to go after NASA, so they charged them with littering. NASA just paid out this settlement like 2 years ago, finally.
A girl with a dick
Truth unknown, could not resist
Loved those bolt on tits
At the time I was about 9 I suppose. I recorded the live news coverage of the event from TV on a cassette recorder. It was a pretty big deal. No 24 hour news channels at the time. All three of our channels were covering the crash down live preempting all of the normal daily shows.
For the time, Skylab was a success. Remember what you are talking about - In orbit, habitable zone. Back when a modern watch has far more processing power than a super computer of that generation. It was still an extremely risky, challenging proposition.
US had to pay something like 20 gold coins to AUS, because oxygen tank landed on girls head.
And someone got nailed with a gas tank. Australia tried to charge NASA with littering, but NASA told Australia where to stick it.
Well she was walking all alone
Down the street in the alley
Her name was Sally
I never touched her, she never saw it
When she was hit by space junk
When she was smashed by space junk
When she was killed by space junk
"In New York, Miami beach
Heavy metal fell in Cuba
Angola, Saudi Arabia
On Christmas eve", said Norad
A soviet sputnik hit Africa
India, Venezuela, in Texas, Kansas
It's falling fast Peru too
It keeps coming, it keeps coming, it keeps coming
And now I'm mad about space junk
I'm all burned out about space junk
Walk and talk about space junk
It smashed my baby's head, space junk
And now my sally's dead, space junk
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Well she was walking all alone
Down the street in the alley
Her name was Sally
I never touched her, she never saw it
When she was hit by space junk
When she was smashed by space junk
When she was killed by space junk
And now I'm mad about space junk
I'm all burned out about space junk
Walk and talk about space junk
It smashed my baby's head, space junk
And now my sally's dead, space junk
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Sure, he had a lot of help, but he was the person who physically heaved on one of the stuck solar panels until it deployed.
I once had the opportunity to speak with Conrad for a couple of hours during breakout time at a meeting we were both at. He's probably better known for the Apollo 12 mission, where he set down the LM a short walk from the Surveyor 3 which had landed on the Moon a couple of years prior. To me, especially at the time, that was a more significant achievement than Aldrin and Armstrong's -- Apollo 11 would have been a success if it had landed anywhere on the Moon and returned safely, but Apollo 12 proved that pinpoint landings were possible, something essential to setting up long term lunar bases. ( *sigh* )
I asked Pete what space accomplishment he was most proud of, and he explained that he was most proud of what he'd done to help save Skylab, both for his mission and the two other missions which followed. (I though his remote piloting of DC-X was pretty cool too, and he didn't want to talk about his brief role as himself in the made for TV movie Plymouth set on a lunar colony.)
Somewhere around I have a piece (about an inch square) of Skylab which survived reentry. No, dang it, I didn't ask Pete to autograph it.
-- Alastair
Back in my misspent youth, when I was cutting my hacking teeth, I processed some Skylab multispectral scanner data.
The scanner at first seemed an oddball: Instead of sweeping crossrange while the lab orbited, it swept in a cone-shaped fan somewhat forward of the flight path.
"Why?" you may ask. (I did, too.) Because that way the line-of-sight always passed through the same amount of atmosphere at the same angle from zenith (though at different angles to the sun - which you'd have gotten anyway, though differently). This equalized the absorption, and thus the spectral distortion, of the light from pixels at different distances from the flight track. Very cute.
It also made the scan artifacts on the geometry-corrected output into a series of arcs. Very odd looking.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This thread is the complete embodiment of the crazy train.
Choo, choo!!! All aboard!!!
Australia complained to the UN regarding the crash, and because of tribal laws, the US actually has to pay for the damages gold. I think the US finally settled the debt in 2010 after dragging their feet for something like 30 years.
Why? They are completely useless as launch vehicles without the people and infrastructure required to launch them. After a couple of years that was beyond easy recovery, after a few more beyond anything short of a major rebuild, now they are just a monument to what we used to be able to do.
It's a fucking tech site; you'd think we could at least agree here that "hacking" is not the same thing as "repairing".
And for God's sake, attaching a tool at the end of 3m pole to clear some debris isn't hacking in ANY sense.
-Styopa
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Nixon's Handshake in Space was also a huge waste of good hardware!
We spend gazillions of dollars to build stuff, and then via neglect, let it burn up, essentially setting cash on fire. After more than 100 Billion, in 2020, we're going to essentially do the same thing to the ISS.
We've followed the same pattern as Skylab -- we launch a space station, and then, because we don't have a working launch system, have no way to get to the thing, so we let it fall and burn up.
After putting up Skylab, we ended Apollo. Then there was a huge delay getting the Shuttle to work, so, we let Skylab fall. There was talk about launching something to shove into a higher orbit, but those plans were nixed.
Now we've got the ISS, and guess what, we ended the Shuttle and there's the same huge delay to get the next launch system working. So we're going to let the ISS fall and burn.
It seems wasteful. You would think at least the solar panels or other equipment could be joined together or repurposed. If we can't tie together bits and pieces of things that are already in space, we will never learn to build anything significant in space.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.