WORKSHOP
A FIELD GUIDE TO SKYLAB & THE FIRST STATIONS
Ten chapters on the leftover Moon rocket that became America's first space station, nearly failed on launch day, and was saved by three astronauts with an umbrella and a pair of pliers. Scroll to begin the mission.
BEGIN — CHAPTER 01 →Built from a Moon rocket's third stage
With Apollo winding down and Saturn V rockets already built and paid for, NASA's Apollo Applications Program looked for a second use for the hardware. Skylab's answer: hollow out the S-IVB third stage — the same stage that sent Apollo crews toward the Moon — and outfit it as a two-storey orbital workshop on the ground before it ever launched.
Wrecked sixty-three seconds in
On May 14, 1973, barely a minute after launch, aerodynamic forces tore away Skylab's micrometeoroid shield — a lightweight sunshade meant to protect the station from both space debris and overheating. The debris took one solar array completely off the station and jammed the other, leaving Skylab critically short of power and dangerously overheating before a single astronaut had reached it.
Ground controllers scrambled to find a survivable attitude — angling the station to balance power generation against heat — while engineers on the ground had eleven days to invent a fix nobody had planned for.
Saved with an umbrella through an airlock
Room enough to somersault in
At 352 cubic metres, Skylab was roomier than anything flown before it by an order of magnitude — astronauts described being able to run laps around its interior. Select a component.
Each mission longer than the last
Nine astronauts flew to Skylab across three missions, each one deliberately longer than the last to build confidence in extended spaceflight. Scrub through the program.
The first real space workplace
Two nations, two first stations
The Soviet Union reached orbit with a station two years before Skylab — but Salyut's early triumph was followed by the worst tragedy in the history of human spaceflight.
A reentry nobody could quite predict
NASA hoped the still-new Space Shuttle would reach Skylab in time to boost it to a higher, safer orbit. Shuttle delays meant that never happened, and atmospheric drag pulled the station down years ahead of schedule. Step through what happened.
Longer than anyone thought possible
From a workshop to a permanent home
Skylab flew for less than a year of crewed time, across just three missions — but it proved the case for everything that came after it.