Skylab

Day 333 / 365

We now have the International Space Station orbiting the earth, where several scientists conduct research. People have stayed on it for several months at a time. But this space station is not the first attempt of man to put a laboratory in space. Another one was Skylab, which went into orbit way back in the 1970s!

Skylab was the first US space station. It was launched in 1974 and orbited the earth for another 6 years. The trouble was that NASA had not figured out how to get it back down. Everyone was horrified when the station’s orbit started getting smaller and smaller. If was certain that it was going to crash.

NASA couldn’t figure out how where exactly it was going to crash, which created panic all over the world. I remember my dad telling me that the schools in his village had declared a holiday, preparing for a doomsday situation.

When in 1979 the station finally started to crash, the engineers were able to remotely fire booster rockets on the station to try and make it land in the ocean. They were quite close, but some chunks of the station did land in parts of Australia. No one was injured.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — How does our body process sugar?