Physics Science

This is the official NASA history of the Skylab orbital workshop program. Long the dream of spaceflight enthusiasts, space stations became the core mission of both the American and Soviet space programs during the 1970s. From virtually the beginning of the twentieth century, those interested in the human exploration of space have viewed as central to that endeavor the building of a massive Earth-orbital space station that would serve as the jumping off point to the Moon and the planets. Always, space exploration enthusiasts believed, a permanently-occupied space station was a necessary outpost in the new frontier of space. In 1903 Russian schoolteacher Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskiy studied this possibility and argued for the creation of a dramatic wheeled space station that rotated slowly to approximate gravity with centrifugal force. During the 1920s Romanian-German space flight theorist Hermann Oberth and Austrian engineer Hermann Noordung both elaborated on the concept of the orbital space station as a base for voyages into space. In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun also emphasized the role of an orbital space station as a laboratory, observatory, industrial plant, launching platform, dry-dock, and military facility.

Although it did not pursue a space station during the Apollo era, as the program was reaching completion in the 1960s NASA began to forge ahead with a plan to use Apollo technology to realize at least partially the longstanding dream of a space station. What NASA built was a relatively small orbital space platform, called Skylab, in 1973-1974. After initial problems with the workshop, NASA sent three crews to Skylab. During the three missions, a total of nine astronauts occupied the Skylab workshop for a total of 171 days and 13 hours. In Skylab, both the total hours in space and the total hours spent in performance of EVA under microgravity conditions exceeded the combined totals of all of the world’s previous space flights up to that time.

Following the final occupied phase of the Skylab mission, ground controllers performed some engineering tests of certain Skylab systems (tests that ground personnel were reluctant to do while astronauts were aboard), positioned the orbital workshop into a stable attitude, and shut down its systems. Unfortunately, on 11 July 1979, Skylab reentered the Earth’s atmosphere. The debris scattered from the southeastern Indian Ocean across a sparsely populated section of western Australia. It was an inauspicious ending to the first American space station.

This story is well told in this very fine historical study. The book was published through the Government Printing Office by NASA in 1983. It is now out of print, but available on the second-hand market. For those who do not need a physical copy of it on their shelves, it is also available for downloading free of charge by NASA at http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4208/sp4208.htm courtesy of the NASA History Division.
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