Part III: The Missions and Results, 1973-1979

Skylab’s debut as the sustaining mission for American manned spaceflight was a near-disaster. One minute into the flight the meteoroid shield-which also served as the primary means of thermal control-ripped away, leaving the workshop exposed to searing solar heat and in the process disabling its solar panels. For two hectic weeks engineers worked to devise ways to repair the damage while flight controllers maneuvered the spacecraft to minimize damage from excessive heat. Their ingenuity and perseverance saved the $2.5 billion program, and the manned missions went off with surprisingly little dislocation.

Experimenters learned much from the Skylab program. So did crews and flight planners: what they learned was something about the infinite variability of man. The resourceful “can-do” first crew was succeeded by a hard-driving group of overachievers and in turn by the methodical, sometimes stubborn third crew. No one could reasonably fault the performance of any of these crews, but once more it was impressed on everyone in the program that astronauts are not interchangeable modules.

The scientific productivity of Skylab was impressive, almost overloading some of the investigators with data. So too was the physical adaptation of the astronauts to orbital flight. After Skylab, prolonged weightlessness would no longer hang as a threat over lengthy missions. The third crew eclipsed all existing flight-duration records with an 84-day mission whose length would not be surpassed for four years.

The derelict workshop stayed aloft for five years after the last mission, while manned spaceflight languished. Technical and financial problems in Shuttle, the next manned program, pushed its first flight further into the future day by day. Since NASA had intended to use Shuttle to boost Skylab into a higher, longer-lived orbit, the workshop was doomed to an uncontrolled reentry into the atmosphere, with consequences no one could predict. For three months in 1979 Skylab was in the headlines as it had not been since the success of the first manned mission. But in spite of sometimes near-hysterical public anticipation of the workshop’s reentry, it came to the end of its road with a few spectacular but harmless fireworks.

The last section of this book deals with the launch accident, the missions, the results of the program, and Skylab’s end.