🚀 go-pugleaf

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

>It's important to bear in mind that, with program plans and air-drag
>forecasts as they were in the mid-70s, it was clear that Skylab would
>not re-enter until well after the shuttle was flying and something
>could be done about it.  There wasn't any feeling of urgency about
>reboosting Skylab.  Then the US scrapped its remaining manned-spaceflight
>capability, the shuttle schedule slipped repeatedly, and air drag
>ran well ahead of schedule...  The Skylab rescue mission progressively
>moved up in the shuttle manifest until it was scheduled for only the
>second flight, but even that wasn't good enough in the end.

It always seemed to me that there wasn't any interest in keeping Skylab
even back then. Skylab as I understood it, was cobbled together out of
left overs (I presume ground spares mostly) from as far back as Gemini and
hence I always assumed they wanted to be rid of it so that when the time
came to build something new, no one could point to it and say they already
had a space station.

There is of course little evidence to support this point of view (and more
importantly, the facts at hand are adequately and more simply explained by
the difficulties NASA encountered building and flying the shuttle).


Cheers,

Enno.


-----------
usual disclaimers, etc.

Enno Davids
enno@eng.monash.edu.au