Word: skylab
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More practically, the watching world would have to depend on the men who put Skylab into space to find the best means of bringing it back to earth with minimal risk to human life. The first priority was to track Skylab's decaying orbit as precisely as possible. That is the job of the North American Air Defense Command, whose joint U.S.-Canadian computers deep within a pink granite mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., continuously monitor the movements of 4,506 hunks of space garbage now orbiting the earth...
...worldwide array of NORAD'S space-tracking stations, using infra-red detection devices as well as radar, is so discerning that it can track an object even smaller than a basketball at a range of 20,000 miles. Even an astronaut's glove is being tracked. Beyond Skylab, the heaviest object aloft is now Salyut 6, the Soviets' manned spacecraft. Every month about 40 man-made objects re-enter the atmosphere, but only a fourth survive to strike the earth. There has never been a reported injury, although the fall of Cosmos 954 over northern Canada in January...
...round the clock. On one wall hangs a lO-ft.-high chart detailing the altitude of the falling lab, day by day. The room, No. 314, is far plainer than the control center from which the Apollo moon missions were directed. The watch teams receive fresh telemetric data from Skylab whenever it gets within radio range of one of five NASA tracking stations (in Santiago, Chile; Bermuda; Ascension Island; Madrid; and Goldstone, Calif). On these "passes," controllers can still make small adjustments in the space vehicle's position relative to earth. This is possible for only four minutes...
...crucial final countdown will begin when Skylab drops to about 120 miles above earth, roughly 48 hours before its re-entry into the atmosphere. At that point, a higher-level interagency team of experts, including NASA Administrator Robert A. Frosch, will take up positions in the Skylab Coordination Center on the sixth floor of NASA headquarters in Washington. Getting his information and recommendations from the Houston center, NORAD and the Marshall Space Flight "enter at Huntsville, Ala., Frosch will make the final decisions on what, if anything, should be done to try to influence Skylab's final fall...
...decision is to be made when Skylab falls to a height of about 90 miles above earth, some twelve hours before estimated reentry. At that point the controllers could use some of the 6,000 remaining pounds of fuel to rotate the craft into various nose-forward, "low drag" positions, in the hope that this would prolong Skylab's life by anywhere from one to five more orbits. By contrast, a second option would be to send the vehicle into an early tumble, which would cut from one to three orbits from its natural, uncontrolled reentry. A third option would...