🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec31.010256.4062@ee.ubc.ca> davem@ee.ubc.ca (Dave Michelson) writes:
>Although items such as food and clothing could have been replenished
>rather easily, I'm under the impression that oxygen and nitrogen could
>not.  Skylab was essentially designed as a "throw-away" workshop...

Basically correct.  Resupply undoubtedly could have been done, if you
were willing to work hard enough, but Skylab wasn't really designed
for it.  Actually, even food and clothing were mostly pre-stocked aboard
Skylab, because the Apollo CSM as flown for Skylab did not have a very
large payload capacity.  The biggest difference between Skylab and Mir
is that Skylab lacked any equivalent of the Progress unmanned freighters.

Skylab would also have needed substantial repairs for long-term use;
things were failing, like its momentum wheels.

It would have been fairly straightforward to fly one or two more crews,
but keeping it habitable in the long term would have been harder.  Even
when NASA was planning to reboost Skylab on an early shuttle mission,
there weren't any very specific plans to use it again.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry