WHEN SKYLAB CAME CRASHING DOWN
Four decades ago, NASA’s pride and joy plummeted to Earth. No one was hurt, but that was down to luck, not judgement.
THE SWAMPY COAST of east Florida and the scarred desert of Western Australia couldn’t have felt farther apart – culturally and geographically – in the late 1970s, but one July night reminded us in spectacular fashion that we’re all passengers on spaceship Earth.
IT WAS THE night the first manned US space station came home.
Skylab was the last program to take off from Kennedy Space Centre’s famed Launch Complex 39 before it was decommissioned and retooled for the Space Shuttle program which would dominate America’s space aspirations for the next generation. It was also the last unmanned mission to lift off from Complex 39 until February 2017, when current tenant SpaceX launched its CRS-10.
Carried aloft on a modified Saturn V – the same rocket that had carried Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins to the moon – it was the result of NASA’s “wet workshop” space station concept to use a spent rocket body as a living and working quarters. The idea had come from German rocket scientist Werner von Braun in the mid ’60s, long after Operation Paperclip spirited the best and brightest minds from the Nazi war effort to America.
With public interest in space travel waning and the popularity of the US government plummeting thanks to the quagmire in Vietnam, budget cuts scuppered further moon landings and a Saturn V was freed up. NASA reworked von Braun’s plans for the hardware available, and Skylab was born.
After a successful gestation, it had a troubled delivery. Its protective shield-sunshade and one of its main solar panels were damaged during the launch on 14 May 1973. Fragments from the destroyed sunshade stopped the other solar panel from deploying, leaving things overheated and underpowered. Skylab 2, the first follow-up mission, had a lot of repair work to do just a few weeks later.
Skylab was soon back in business, however. Weighing 77 tonnes, and measuring 25 metres in length and about six and a half metres in diameter, it packed a lot of living and working activity into its compact size, with about a quarter of the dimensions and a third of the pressurised volume of the International Space Station.
Eighty experiments yielded almost 300 findings, covering everything from human vestibular function to copper-aluminium eutectics. Some of the topics were suggested by US high school students who designed the experiments and analysed the data when it was reported back.
Skylab could change direction and attitude without liquid propellant, using large spinning gyroscopes, which saved a lot of fuel, but the real killer app was the solar observatory.
For the first time, we saw the existence of coronal holes in the ejecta streaming away from the sun, areas of lower-density plasma that are colder and darker than the rest of the fiery halo.
There were as many as 10 film and still cameras on board, one of them a television camera that recorded video electronically, to be transferred to magnetic tape or sent back to Earth by radio. It was the mid ’70s version of emailing a jpeg.
None of the crew was terribly interested in movies or games, so NASA provided books and music. It also pioneered new approaches to food (after Apollo astronauts had complained bitterly about the cubes and squeeze tubes of the space race age) and engineered a toilet and shower. However, as vacuuming excess water out of the air so it didn’t damage equipment was tricky, wet washcloths were used just as often.
Each of the three crew members had a small sleeping area with a curtain, sleeping bag and locker, but despite all these various concessions to comfort, Skylab was no paradise. Bending over to put on socks in minimal gravity strained stomach muscles, utensils and bits of food floated away, and gas in drinking water led to considerable flatulence.
Experiments, repairs and exercise filled the crew’s days, and after dinner it was time for household chores and preparing for the next day’s work. Instructions radioed from Mission Control were printed out on spools of paper that sometimes ended up 15 metres long. And despite the dart set, playing cards and their books and music, staring out the window back towards Earth was the most popular pastime.
Skylab’s cameras took 150,000 exposures and 173,000 frames of film across six years in flight (171 days of which were crewed). All were stored in five aluminium vaults to protect against the radiation that would otherwise cause the film to fog over. The largest vault weighed just over a tonne, and the 80-kilogram piece of aluminium recovered after re-entry (the heaviest piece of wreckage found) was thought to be its door.
Skylab orbited Earth nearly 2500 times during its three crewed missions, each breaking the record for human spaceflight set by the Soviet Union’s space station Salyut in 1971. The record for Skylab 4, 84 days, would stand until broken by Norman Thagard’s 155 days on Mir in 1995.
With its birthplace already undergoing a massive retrofit and the US space program knee-deep in the next phase of spacecraft technology with the Space Shuttle, Skylab’s days might have seemed numbered. In fact, the three missions had only used 17 of the 24 months’ worth of supplies and life support, and plans were drawn up for further research, including having the Space Shuttle propel it to a higher orbit where it could perform a whole new swathe of experiments. The Skylab 4 crew had even left the hatch unlocked and a bag of supplies to welcome the next mission.
Skylab wasn’t supposed to reach the atmosphere until 1983, giving the Space Shuttle program plenty of time to mount a mission to retrofit, reposition and repurpose it.
It was still drifting about 450 kilometres up when ground control re-established contact in March 1978 to recharge its batteries.
However, when it became clear by the end of the year that no shuttle mission would be ready in time and the orbit had degraded much faster than planned, NASA unwittingly created the media event of 1979 by abandoning Skylab to its fate.
Public interest was already high because of the Soviets’ loss earlier in 1978 of Kosmos 954, a nuclearpowered reconnaissance satellite that came down along a 600-kilometre path near Great Slave Lake in the west Canadian Arctic, prompting a 124,000-square-kilometre operation by US and Canadian authorities to recover the irradiated debris.
Where, the world now wondered, would nearly 100 tonnes of US space junk land? NASA calculated a onein-152 chance that debris would hit a human, but only a one-in-seven chance it might strike a city of 100,000 or more. And the public – still primed for all things space thanks to events from Apollo to the global phenomenon of Star Wars a couple of years before – loved every minute of it.
Hats and T-shirts sold by the thousands. Residents in Bellevue, Nebraska, painted a huge target at the end of their cul-de-sac to give Skylab something to aim for. Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos appeared on national television to reassure everyone they were safe. The San Francisco Examiner offered $10,000 to the first person to deliver a piece of Skylab wreckage to its offices.
Re-entry was estimated to start between 10 and 14 July 1979. In the final hours, NASA radioed a last command to reorient Skylab, aiming for the ocean 800 kilometres south of Cape Town, South Africa.
Re-entry began at 16:37 UTC on 11 July, almost 10 years to the day after Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind. But because of a 4% calculation error and the fact that Skylab didn’t burn up as fast as NASA had counted on, they were way off.
ESPERANCE IS STILL A SLEEPY BEACH TOWN along Western Australia’s southern coast, about 700 kilometres southeast of Perth. A few hundred kilometres north you’ll find townships like Norseman, Balladonia and eventually Kalgoorlie, all of them characteristic of the country’s inhospitable desert interior.
With global interest in the re-entry high, residents around the region had word Skylab might pass nearby, and the lucky ones who’d gathered at the Esperance town lookout just past midnight got a light and sound show to remember.
Skylab entered the atmosphere at almost 29,000 kilometres per hour – it’s orbital speed of 28,000 kilometres per hour plus the effect of Earth’s gravity pulling it down faster the lower it fell. By the time it approached Australia from the Southern Ocean, friction that heated it to 1600 degrees Celsius had slowed it to around 400 kilometres per hour.
It passed over Esperance in a fireball of different colours as the glass, plastic, metal and paint burned,
shaking the town half a minute later with a sonic boom and racing overhead towards Balladonia and Rawlinna, 270 and 470 kilometres northeast respectively.
It had been just 16 kilometres up, much lower than expected while still intact, its smouldering remains slowing to a near-vertical descent in the middle of nowhere.
The nearest civilisation is an airstrip at Plumridge Lakes, nearly 200 kilometres west.
The next morning Canberra assured the nation that Skylab had fallen into the ocean, but Esperance residents – including 17-year-old truck driver Stan Thornton who’d been at the lookout with his sister and her boyfriend – knew better.
His mother had heard noises on the tin roof of the chook shed, but it wasn’t until the next morning that he found about 20 fragments, looking much like charcoal from a barbecue, on the back lawn.
Thornton’s boss, who picked him up for work later that morning, had heard about the $10,000 competition on the radio, and the next day Thornton, who’d never previously been outside his home state, found himself on a Qantas plane to California. He presented his fragments at the offices of the San Francisco Examiner, then spent a week sightseeing while experts at NASA’s labs in Huntsville, Alabama, determined that they were in fact balsa wood from Skylab’s insulation.
Thornton was filmed receiving his giant cheque by a Channel Seven news crew that had flown from Perth for the occasion. But that wasn’t the end of the story.
Capitalising on the global interest in his coastal community, Shire President Merv Andre issued a $400 fine to the US State Department for littering, a council ranger presenting it with a flourish to a NASA official who had flown Down Under to retrieve more wreckage for research.
NASA never paid, but 30 years later, in 2009 a Californian radio DJ asked listeners to donate money to clear the debt. He was invited to Esperance and given a key to the city for his efforts, even though the Shire Council had written the money off years before.
NASA representatives came to Western Australia not just to humbly accept their littering fine but also to retrieve wreckage for further research. Some is back in the US on display in various NASA and museum facilities, including a battered oxygen tank that enjoyed a starring role on stage during the 1979 Miss World Pageant a week or so later in Perth.
It was an occasion no less dramatic than Skylab’s return when, moments after the crowning of Venezuela’s first ever winner, the stage collapsed. It supposedly had more to do with the number of people rather than the oxygen tank, but Miss Malta got a concussion and Miss Turkey suffered severe bruising. Apparently Miss Japan was quite traumatised.
Today Esperance Shire Museum contains over 70 items relating to Skylab, including pieces of the vehicle itself. Staff recently have been working hard to tidy up and properly catalogue everything because, along with the rest of the world, they’re going to remember that night 40 years ago when a piece of human spaceflight history rained down on a small-town chook shed.
It’s a great example of the wonder, delight and whimsy that connects people and places who’d otherwise have nothing whatsoever to do with each other and ultimately, that’s what humans venturing into space is all about.