Word: skylab
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...course of its troubled flights, Skylab crews established an endurance record of 84 days in space?a mark since surpassed by Soviet cosmonauts. More than 50 scientific, technical and medical experiments were conducted. Some 183,000 unprecedented pictures of the sun were snapped through Skylab's telescope...
Ironically, despite NASA'S concentration on solar research with Skylab, the agency's failure to anticipate the extent of sunspot activity during the vehicle's years in orbit contributed substantially to the craft's death. Russian scientists as well as America's own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had predicted considerable solar disturbances, including great magnetic storms and solar flares. When they erupted in 1977 and 1978, they warmed the gases in the earth's outer atmosphere, increasing the drag on Skylab. Never fully powered because of its lost solar wing and failing batteries, the craft began to slip ever...
...methods of rescuing Skylab were considered by NASA and then discarded as impractical. There was talk of a joint Soviet-American mission, using the Soviet Soyuz system, but it had to be abandoned because the Russian craft's docking hardware was incompatible with Skylab's. Soyuz also lacked sufficient propellant to maneuver with the ailing U.S. vehicle and then give it a powerful boost into higher orbit. Declared NASA'S Frosch: "The obstacles involved were insurmountable, in the time remaining." Russian scientists, in effect, agree, although they note that if plans for a cooperative effort had been started two years...
...NASA engineers studied a plan to send a McDonnell Douglas F-15, America's hottest jet fighter, into a computer-guided supersonic climb to about 80,000 feet and then blast Skylab out of the sky with a non-nuclear rocket. This idea was dropped when the scientists concluded that Skylab would merely be blown into more pieces scattered over a wider area, increasing rather than reducing the danger of damage on earth...
While most Americans neither mourned nor feared Skylab's menacing death, some saw in it yet another in a series of examples of technology outracing man's means of control. A sequence of human and mechanical failures never envisioned by its builders had nearly caused the meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. The mysterious cracks emerging in engine mountings of the DC-10 jumbo jets had led to the grounding of the fleet and America's most tragic air disaster. Now a giant spacecraft, crippled at birth six years ago, is plunging toward a premature...