Skylab
The recent balloon launch and it’s subsequent pictures of near space has gotten my thoughts lifted skyward. I was pondering the 4-pound weight limit of the balloon and contrasting it to the heavy lifting that was once done in this country by rockets like the Saturn V. That led me to some online videos of Skylab.
Skylab was America’s first space station, launched in 1973 on a modified Saturn V rocket. The station itself was made from spent Saturn V rocket stages and was so roomy that it makes the current International Space Station look like a toy. Sadly, Skylab fell from orbit in July 1979.
Watching the footage, I was captivated at how enormous Skylab was. If ever there was a playground in space, Skylab was it. And the amazing thing is, as wondrous as it was, Skylab was almost an afterthought: overshadowed by the Apollo moon missions being flown at the time. It actually began as a project to keep the hundreds of thousands of Apollo engineers employed after the moon landings were over.
The promise of Skylab was never fully fulfilled. NASA botched an opportunity to save it when it miscalculated a solar storm forecast. The resulting atmospheric heating sped up the friction acting against Skylab, dragging it down and dooming it before the space shuttle was ready to fly. Skylab met its untimely fate in the summer of 1979, when its millions of dollars of irreplaceable space technology was deorbited over the Indian Ocean, with parts of it landing in Australia. I was ten years old at the time and still remember the media frenzy.
Yes, America used to go to space. America once assumed we would conquer space. Once we dreamed big, made big plans, and damned if we didn’t carry them out. Most of them, anyway.
Since that time we’ve discovered so much more about our universe. We’ve gotten up-close looks at our neighboring planets and confirmed the existence of hundreds more beyond. We’ve even had the first private commercial space vehicle. Yet in spite of these achievements, our spark of curiosity regarding space seems gone. Sad, isn’t it?
As a kid I used to dream of becoming an astronaut. Little did I know that was our space heyday. Our dreams of traveling the stars now belong in the museums with the other remnants of the Apollo moon missions.
Who knows how long it will be before we again look heavenward and ask, “what if?”