Skylab was the United States’ first and only space station to be used exclusively by US astronauts.
Skylab had a mass of 90,610 kg. It included a workshop, a solar observatory and several hundred experiments in the fields of life sciences and physics.
Skylab was launched into low Earth orbit by a Saturn V rocket on May 14, 1973. The third stage of this Saturn V was not available as propulsion because it was the Skylab space station. This was the last flight of a Saturn V rocket, which was built and used primarily for the manned Apollo lunar landing missions.
Three manned missions called Skylab 2, Skylab 3 and Skylab 4 were carried out with the Apollo capsule (Apollo CSM) to the Skylab space station. The first manned mission, Skylab 2, launched on May 25, 1973 on a Saturn IB and performed extensive repairs on the space station. The crew deployed a parasol through a small instrument door inside the station to reduce station temperatures to acceptable levels and prevent overheating, which would have melted plastic insulation inside the station and released toxic gases. This solution was designed by Jack Kinzler, who won the NASA Distinguished Service Medal for his efforts. The crew carried out further repairs over two spacewalks (Extravehicular Activity or EVA). The crew remained in orbit with Skylab for 28 days. Two further missions followed with start dates of July 28, 1973 (Skylab 3) and November 16, 1973 (Skylab 4) and mission durations of 59 and 84 days, respectively. The last Skylab crew returned to Earth on February 8, 1974. After that, Skylab was uninhabited for years.
On July 11, 1979, Skylab crashed into Earth’s atmosphere. Skylab’s final orbit was largely over water, and NASA gave the final control command to move the danger zone away from North America to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In fact, the station broke into several pieces later than expected, so the crash area was in Western Australia, where debris fell in the dark morning hours without injuring anyone. Several pieces were later recovered and brought to the United States.
