Today in Aviation History: Skylab

Only ten years prior to Skylab’s launch in 1973, we 10-year-olds were dreaming in 1963 of space and space stations, even playing with them in toy form like the one pictured below.  It is the imaginations of kids that lead to innovations by adults such as the Soviet Salyut Space Station, and just two years later the first U.S. Space Station, Skylab. 

I wonder if cell phones stoke imagination in kids?  Perhaps they do.  But it’s yet to be seen how much, in what ways, and whether there will be Skylabs spawned in the future by the imaginations of kids brought up glued to their cell phones.

Toy Space Station. Credit: Pinterest

Today in 1973 Skylab, America’s first space station, according to History.com and downloaded today from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/may-14/skylab-launched, “was successfully launched into an orbit around the earth. Eleven days later, U.S. astronauts Charles Conrad, Joseph Kerwin, and Paul Weitz made a rendezvous with Skylab, repairing a jammed solar panel and conducting scientific experiments during their 28-day stay aboard the space station.

“The first manned Skylab mission came two years after the Soviet Union launched Salyut, the world’s first space station, into orbit around the earth. However, unlike the ill-fated Salyut, which was plagued with problems, the American space station was a great success, safely housing three separate three-man crews for extended periods of time and exceeding pre-mission plans for scientific study.

Skylab. Credit: NASA

“Originally the spent third stage of a Saturn 5 moon rocket, the cylinder space station was 118 feet tall, weighed 77 tons, and carried the most varied assortment of experimental equipment ever assembled in a single spacecraft to that date. The crews of Skylab spent more than 700 hours observing the sun and brought home more than 175,000 solar pictures. They also provided important information about the biological effects of living in space for prolonged periods of time. Five years after the last Skylab mission, the space station’s orbit began to deteriorate faster than expected, owing to unexpectedly high sunspot activity. On July 11, 1979, the parts of the space station that did not burn up in the atmosphere came crashing down on Australia and into the Indian Ocean. No one was injured.”