Skylab

Happy Skylab Launch Day to all who celebrate!  Weird to remember that it happened, as did all the Apollo missions, with Vietnam as backdrop.  Anyway, 53 years ago today:

Skylab was launched on May 14, 1973, by the modified Saturn V. The launch is sometimes referred to as Skylab 1. Severe damage was sustained during launch and deployment, including the loss of the station's micrometeoroid shield/sun shade and one of its main solar panels. Debris from the lost micrometeoroid shield became tangled in the remaining solar panel, preventing its full deployment and thus leaving the station with a huge power deficit.

Immediately following Skylab's launch, Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center was deactivated, and construction proceeded to modify it for the Space Shuttle program, originally targeting a maiden launch in March 1979. The crewed missions to Skylab would occur using a Saturn IB rocket from Launch Pad 39B.

Skylab 2, the first crewed mission, was supposed to launch the following day, but the damage caused delays:

The Skylab station suffered significant damage on its May 14 launch: its micrometeorite shield and one of its primary solar arrays had torn loose during launch, and the remaining primary solar array was jammed. Without the shield which was designed to also provide thermal protection, Skylab baked in the Sun, and rising temperatures inside the workshop released toxic materials into the station's atmosphere and endangered on-board film and food. 

The first crew was supposed to launch on May 15, but instead had to train practicing repair techniques as they were developed by the engineers. Ground controllers purged the atmosphere with pure nitrogen four times, before refilling it with the nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere for the crew. The secret National Reconnaissance Office used a KH-8 Gambit 3 to photograph the damaged station.

On May 25, Skylab 2 lifted from LC-39B, the first Saturn IB launch in almost five years and only the second-ever launch from Pad 39B. 

Pete Conrad, who was CDR on Apollo 12, commanded the mission.  Here's some of his perspective from Chaikin's A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts:

When Pete Conrad looks back on his spaceflight career, the high point isn’t his lunar landing: it is the rescue of the Skylab space station in 1973. The station’s outer shield, which protected it against heat and micrometeorites, was torn off during launch, taking one of its power-producing solar panels with it. Getting power to Skylab depended on freeing the remaining wing, which was lashed down by debris. 

Conrad’s crew, who had been preparing for a month-long mission aboard Skylab, was now faced with carrying out a demanding repair. Arriving at the stricken station, they sweltered in desertlike heat for days until they could erect a makeshift sunshield. Two weeks into the flight, Conrad and his crewmate Joe Kerwin made a space walk and, with some difficulty, freed the stuck solar wing. Today, Conrad looks back with a healthy appreciation of the risks he took. 

“My life was a lot further out on the line . . . on Skylab than it was on the moon,” Conrad says. “That taxed me personally, put everything that I had spent my whole life . . . learning how to do, on the line . . . . Going to the moon was basically a nice, routine flight after the lightning. We didn’t have any trouble after that. On Skylab we didn’t know whether we [would leave] or stay for fourteen days.” In 1978, Congress recognized the success by awarding Conrad the newly created Space Medal of Honor. 

“Everybody thinks I got the Space Medal of Honor because I went to the moon. I say, ‘No, it was for Skylab.’ They say, ‘Oh, Skylab. Yes. What was Skylab?’ ” It’s the moon that people want to hear about, and like all his colleagues, when Conrad is introduced as one of the twenty-four men who went there, the question he is almost always asked is, What was it like? And he gives the neat, two-second answer he developed long ago: “Super! Really enjoyed it.”

Pete really enjoyed the space shower, too, I guess.

I will never forget when Skylab came crashing down.  I was visiting my grandparents in North Carolina, breathlessly waiting for the teevee news to announce when it actually hit the planet, hoping it didn't land on us (narrator: it didn't, Chicken Little).  And now we've had continuous occupation of ISS for 25 years.  

Progress is not linear, but we do often learn...