The story of SKYLAB
Fifty years on from its launch, Jane Green takes a look back at the troubles and triumphs of the USA’s trailblazing space station
Skylab 1 was America’s first long-duration orbiting laboratory. Crewed between May 1973 and February 1974, it was the ‘great uncle’ of Mir and the International Space Station, engineered from the shell of a redundant rocket stage (part of an earlier epic space programme). Transformed with additional modules and structures, Skylab became an unmitigated success. With humans now scheduled to return to the Moon in the near future, it’s time to celebrate this venerable one-of-a-kind space station.
Skylab was ultimately the result of Cold War political hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States. When Russia launched its first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957 – aboard an R-7 rocket designed by Russian Sergei Korolev – the United States was worried. The race between these two superpowers for the domination of space began in earnest. Their next target? The Moon.
Having already sent astronauts into orbit during Project Gemini, on 20 July 1969 the Moon race was won by the USA when Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humankind’s first footsteps in the lunar dust. The next goal was to achieve a lasting presence in space: Skylab.
Rocket recycling
With the Apollo programme in the 1970s cut short, NASA began the Apollo Applications Program, its remit to adapt redundant hardware and systems developed for the lunar landing. Needing to keep his staff employed, famed Apollo rocket engineer and head of NASA’s Marshall Flight Center, Wernher von Braun, advocated launching an orbiting workshop using two-stage Saturn IB rockets. The hydrogen tank of the S-IVB stage would have ample room for what would be known as a ‘wet’ workshop. It could be launched loaded with liquid oxygen and liquid ▶