Skylab Debris – Preserved in resin, 1979
It may not look like much, but this piece of metal represents an important event. This is a piece of debris from Skylab, America’s first space station and first crewed research laboratory in space. It spent 6 years (1973-1979) orbiting Earth until its decaying orbit caused it to prematurely re-enter the atmosphere. The station broke up as it fell, scattering debris like this over the Indian Ocean and parts of Western Australia.
Skylab was a significant achievement for the US, but it’s not a well-remembered mission. Why? This was the first, and only, space station that America launched, and it was the first working research laboratory in space. Astronauts onboard conducted 270 different experiments in life science, biomedical science, solar astronomy, and Earth observations. They were also investigating the effect of long-term space flight on the human body. Three crews lived on board the station for 28, 56, and 84 days as it orbited, each time pushing the boundaries of how long humans could spend in space.
But Skylab was in the immediate shadow of the historic Apollo missions. For many, those missions were the pinnacle of achievement for the space program. Once the Apollo program ended in 1972 (the year before Skylab launched), public excitement died down and NASA funding was reduced. Skylab’s last crew left in February 1974, leaving the station in orbit. Although NASA planned to send more crews, that never happened. Financial issues hurt the program, and the start of the shuttle program stole attention away from the lonely orbiting space station.
What we learned from Skylab helped us understand more about long-duration spaceflight, preparing us for the shuttle program. Skylab missions also paved the way for living and working on the subsequent space stations, Mir and the International Space Station. The legacy of Skylab will extend even further once NASA constructs its planned lunar space station, the Deep Space Gateway. While this may seem like the stuff of science fiction films, we have to remember that like Gateway, Skylab was once a spectacular dream that became reality.
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