Word: skylab
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Wallops Island, Va., and interviewed a universe of scientists and astronauts. To track Skylab, Hannifin returned to several old haunts: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. But he was haunted by the sight of a souvenir displayed at the North American Air Defense Command facility near Colorado Springs: a 10-lb. container from a Soviet Soyuz that had hurtled through the atmosphere dangerously intact a few years ago, just as hundreds of Skylab chunks were expected to do this month. Said Hannifin: "That 'bottle...
Despite all their wondrous tracking stations, bristling with huge radar antennas and feeding the most advanced electronic computers, America's top military and civilian space scientists could not predict even roughly where Skylab would fall. Until the final hours, they could narrow the area of eventual impact only to a vast global band between 50° north latitude and 50° south latitude?a sweep of about 109 million sq. mi., or nearly 56% of the earth's area. Conceded Hal Sierra, one of the technicians monitoring Skylab's death throes from the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center near Houston...
Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which conceived and launched Skylab six years ago, took comfort in the mathematics of probabilities. Some 500 fragments of the huge space workshop will be dispersed over an area 4,000 miles long and 100 miles wide, a scattering that the scientists call, with anthropomorphic archness, Skylab's "footprint." Moreover, on each of Skylab's 90-minute orbits of the earth, nearly 67 minutes, or 75%, is spent over water. What all that means, contend NASA'S statisticians, is that the chance of any remnant striking a human being is only...
NASA, however, was not taking the potential danger at all lightly. One of the heaviest pieces of Skylab, a two-ton lead-lined vault used for film storage, is capable of digging a hole 5 ft. wide and 100 ft. deep. And within the band of Skylab's orbital paths lie some of the world's most populous areas, including all of the U.S., much of Europe, India and China. Indeed, the chance of debris falling in some city of at least 100,000 inhabitants is a sobering 1 in 7. Only 10% of the earth's inhabitants...
Despite the perils, many Americans seemed to take a perverse pleasure in spoofing the unwelcome visitor from space. Skylab stimulated a lot of harmless hucksterism, revived some old promotional gimmicks, even became an excuse to throw parties. Inevitably, Chicken Little emerged as a dominant theme, now crying, "The Skylab is falling! The Skylab is falling!" The analogy was not quite apt, but feathers and beaks were the dress of the day for Skylab watch parties from Minneapolis to Manhattan. Guests at the "first and last annual greater New Orleans Skylab observation party" were asked to bring binoculars, telescopes and crash...