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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.
No it didn't. Nobody was hurt by Skylab debris. It landed in the middle of nowhere, specifically the Great Australian Desert. Yes the esperence council fined NASA for littering but it was done as a publicity stunt and it was NEVER paid by NASA. It was paid by funds raised by a radio show host in 2009.
Mir was launched 13 years after Skylab. Big surprise it was more advanced.
MIR was leaking oxygen and had several fires. Most of MIR was completely uninhabitable for most of its life.
Mir was occupied by humans for 12.5 years out of it's 15 year life.
It was designed for a 5 year lifespan, which was extended by 10 years. While in orbit, Mir suffered some mishaps, and it was an old and dilapidated beast in the end, but as successes go, it was one hell of a good one.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Mir was launched 13 years after Skylab. Big surprise it was more advanced.
Why let facts get in the way of America bashing?
The Soviet Union launched four space stations, starting in 1971, before Skylab went up in 1973 (not including prototypes and tests). Of course Skylab spent more time in orbit than the first five Salyut stations, Komos 557, and DOS-2 stations combined. And it wasn't until Salyut 7 (launched in 1982) before they kept a station in orbit for a longer period. Stupid piece of junk Skylab
Skylab had a puny 360 sq meters of pressurized volume. Until Mir, the largest pressurized volume in a Soviet space station was 100 sq. meters. But Mir dwarfed Skylab with it's 350 sq. meters of pressurized volume. Oh, wait. Crappy American space station.
I read about the reason, on the net, why America gave up on Skylab-B. Apparently they couldn't get the time machine working to get Pentium processors for the computers before Mir was launched. True story.
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
As others noted, nobody was hurt.
I worked on the Teleoperator Retrieval System (TRS) which was a small booster with an Apollo docking ring that an astronaut would remotely pilot from the Shuttle. The docking ring was supposed to clamp onto the Skylab docking port and then the booster would either push Skylab to a higher orbit or perform a controlled de-orbit. It was initially scheduled to fly on the 5th Shuttle. Then as the Shuttle main engines were being debugged at Stennis, it was scheduled for the 4th, the 3rd, the 2nd, the 1st and then it was, "Incoming!".
The uncontrolled reentry was pretty much a non-event except that it took a while to find any debris.
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
Using a bit of creativity to fix something which can't be repaired or put together in a standard way, is exactly what "hacking" is. Both in the original hardware sense & in the software sense.
See: "To hack something together"
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.