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.

Comments

Re:MIR

[The Grim Reefer]

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.

I processed some Skylab data

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.