Astronauts and Area 51: the Skylab Incident
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Groom Lake, aka Area 51, is the Air Force's most sensitive
installation, and one that the military has gone to great lengths to
cloak in secrecy. Dwayne Day explains what happened when the crew of
a Skylab mission took a photograph of the base from orbit.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/531/1

This document got me to wondering:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntr..._1979075817.pdf

What did NASA do with Skylab after its last manned crew in 1974 and before it came back to Earth on July 11, 1979? Did they do any astronomy with that big telescope it had? I would hate to think they had that big remote observatory up there and basically let it sit.

I am not even going to go into how else Skylab could have been better used if NASA had rescued it in time, rather than futz around with the Space Shuttle.

The ATM telescope package returned most of it's data via film recovered during EVAs, so I think the answer is 'no' to whether or not much astronomy was done after the Skylab 4 crew left. Aeronomy, now - they got some *great* data (sadly).

FWIW, I was always astonished by the response to the re-entry of Skylab - it wasn't the biggest object to fall back to Earth, and nor was it the only S-IVB stage by far, yet it was the only one that got the bad press (despite it's location being pretty well followed up until the final few passes). OK, it *did* have the film vault aboard, and that wouldn't have been much fun if it came down on your house...

There were perhaps nine or ten S-IVBs which fell back to earth before Skylab, as well as the biggie: the Skylab I S-II stage.

Bob Shaw

Remember the 1969 film Marooned, based on the Martin Cadin novel - which went from a Mercury stranded in orbit to an Apollo CSM stranded above Earth during the 1960s.

Marooned ranks among the few most realistic space films ever made. Check out the images from the film here, including what is essentially the early plans for Skylab:

http://www.cloudster.com/Sets&Vehicles/Mar...MaroonedTop.htm

"Remember the 1969 film Marooned, based on the Martin Cadin novel - "

Note that there are 2 Martin Cadin novels by that name. The original Marooned, where an extended duration Mercury mission after Coopers' fails to retrofire, and the rescue attempt is split between an emergency premature flight of a Gemini and a maneuverable Vostok ....

And the rewritten novel based on the movie, where a Skylab mission is stranded -- quite unbelievably -- in low orbit (they could have reentered on the RCS system, I believe).

What would it take for an Apollo CSM to be stranded in orbit yet not kill the crew immediately at the same time?

Caidin always reckoned that 'Marooned' gave us ASTP in 1975 - it was just about the first US movie of the 'real space' genre to show the Soviets as the good guys (in 'Countdown' they were at best neutral). If the post-Cooper flight *had* flown it might have been Alan Shepard in Freedom 7-II who got the Pruett role, and it's a bit ironic if Deke Slayton finally got to fly into space as a result of a novel featuring a failed Mercury flight!

As for Ironman One being able to re-enter using the RCS alone, yes - and perhaps even the CM could have de-orbited itself from that rather low orbit too, but the crew were so tired and unfit they'd probably have screwed up...

The movie remains a favourite! It's available on DVD, now too...


Bob Shaw

It's also available in another "version" (as Space Travellers) if you look hard enough!

Not one of MST3K's better efforts. Marooned was a good film. Not the greatest in the conventional film sense, but it was one of the few that showed real space exploration. They paid attention to orbital mechanics and resource supplies - that alone should get them points for a Hollywood film!

It was the only one they did that actually won an Oscar (for Visual Effects). I agree that they are at their best skewering cheesy 70's and 80's movies, with the occasional 50's space opera or Japanese monster movie.

Skylab was perhaps the first victim of bloated shuttle program cost and schedule overruns, but as we see with the current budget issues, it certainly wasn't the last.

Had we been able to keep Skylab in orbit for another decade or so, we might have learned a lot more about living in space and perhaps even found a way to keep the costs of the ISS (or whatever else would have come along in its place) down - and maybe even made it actually useful for science and getting beyond LEO!

BTW, where are all the medical records of all the months and years that the cosmonauts spent aboard their Salyuts and Mir? Are they available?

Skylab EREP Investigations Summary (SP-399, 1978).

This publication covers the Earth Resources Experiment Package.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-399/sp399.htm

The cosmosnauts never really followed the protocols and most of the Russian data is not usable