Word: skylab
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...choices were to be made on the basis of a complicated "hazard index," a computer calculation used to determine the final orbital paths that would take the spacecraft over the least densely populated areas. Frosch has already made one firm rule about reaching those last critical decisions: Skylab will not be sent into an orbit posing a high hazard in hopes of later reaching an orbit of lesser risk. That is because NASA is simply not certain that its efforts to select the precise final orbit will work. To do nothing in such a situation is preferable to taking...
Even with all the planning, the margin of possible error is uncomfortably large. At about six hours before reentry, NASA'S projected impact points for Skylab's disintegrating parts occur somewhere along a path of 40,000 miles?nearly twice the circumference of the globe. At two hours, the final anticipated flight track still extends over a 13,000mile path. Testing its prediction on a falling Soviet Cosmos booster stage on April 29, NORAD made an estimate two hours before re-entry? and missed the actual impact points in the Pacific by 4,000 miles...
...Skylab debris strikes a populated area, the U.S. Government will hear about it in a hurry. The State Department last month designated one member in each of its overseas missions as a Skylab officer to brief foreign governments on the facts of the spacecraft's fall and what the U.S. was prepared to do in case of serious damage. In India, the U.S. specialist, Thomas Vrebalovich, went to unusual lengths to pacify critics of the American space venture. He told journalists that if NASA faced the choice of steering Skylab toward either India or America, it would most certainly select...
...assembled "go teams" consisting of NASA experts, Defense Department engineers, Red Cross aides, State Department diplomats and Justice Department lawyers?all on alert to be flown by the Air Force to any nation seeking help. China has already agreed to receive such a team if Skylab wreaks havoc there. The Russians, on the other hand, have rejected the offer. "We are responsible at law; there is no question about that," concedes one NASA lawyer...
Here too the American capacity for joking about Skylab flourished. Columnist Russell Baker proposed a series of letters for NASA to send, depending on where Skylab fell. Example: "Dear Greece: It's a crying shame about the Parthenon, but as American daddies used to tell their sons back in the days when the Model T finally broke down, nothing man makes will last forever...