Skylab: The First US Attempt at a Space Station
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- Опубліковано 27 лип 2024
- And you thought going to the gym on Earth was hard.
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Thank you for covering Skylab! My grandfather, Al German, lead the team that "invented the space potty" (as he put it). As the story goes; he brought home a mock up scale model of the contraption one day, and placed it proudly on the dining room table. Grandma promptly gasped and told him to "get that thing off my table!". :D
He also worked testing aircraft engines, and on the THOR missile project, but he was most remembered around our family for "inventing the space potty". A full scale mock-up of Skylab, and its potty, can be seen on display at the Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL.
Thanks for bringing back some good memories. :D
Ben
Lol, I don't blame her, he put a toilet on the kitchen table.
I think it's awesome that the brilliant engineer who invented the high tech zero gravity toilet calls it a "space potty" lol. I mean, he invented it so he can call it whatever he wants!
It should also be noted that Skylab featured the largest open space ever to achieve orbit. Unlike everything else before or since, Skylab's main workspace was quite roomy. The ISS and Mir are bigger, but they're also more cramped.
True... the S-IVB the workshop was constructed from had a 260 inch diameter, which meant the inside of the station walls were about 21.6 feet apart. Can you imagine how HUGE the S-II stage workshop would have been?? It was 360 inches or 33 feet in diameter! The Skylab workshop was even longer than it was around, though they divided it into two "stories" with a triangular metal-grid "floor". The astronauts were issued special shoes that had a triangular locking lug attached to the bottom of the shoes so they could put their foot against the grate, push the lug through the triangular holes, and turn their foot slightly to lock themselves to the floor, so they wouldn't drift away from their work. Not sure how much they actually used them though, as most of the time you can see them in sock feet. The station was originally equipped with a pole running the length of the station's main living area down the middle, because some people worried that an astronaut might accidentally "drift" to the middle of the station, where he couldn't touch anything, and be "stuck" there-- with nothing to push off of to send him to the nearest wall or anything, he'd be just essentially "drifting" along with the station in microgravity, flailing helplessly (since air doesn't give enough resistance to "swim" to the nearest wall. The crew reported that this "problem" didn't really exist, and it was decided they could remove the pole and stow it, which they did, since it basically got in the way of their movement around the station. Like the Salyuts and later Mir and ISS, it was soon discovered that basically anything "floating free" or "lost" inside the station would, sooner or later, end up stuck to the air conditioning system intake screen-- air flow throughout the station from the air scrubbers would create currents that would simply gently but inexorably pull things along with the air back to the inlet filter, where it would simply drift up against the filter screen and rest there, like leaves washed up against a storm sewer grate after a rain.
There was a "multiple docking adapter" (MDA) with an equipment section and airlock welded onto the front end of the workshop (the converted S-IVB stage's former hydrogen fuel tank) which housed most of the station's electrical equipment and the controls for the Apollo Telescope Mount, which was the large four-winged "windmill" structure atop a foldable metal gantry attached to the front of the space station. It was actually pivoted to the side once in orbit-- for launch it was actually inline above the MDA under the disposable nose cone during flight through the atmosphere. There was a Gemini capsule door installed in one side of the MDA to act as an airlock door, to allow the astronauts to depressurize this smaller area and perform spacewalks outside to service the telescope and retrieve samples exposed to space, among other things. The two docking ports for the Apollo spacecraft were on the front end of the MDA, and to the opposite side 90 degrees from the end, which was the contingency docking port in the event a rescue Apollo had to be sent up to the station.
At the opposite end of the main workshop, opposite the MDA welded to the top of the stage, and directly below the "floor" at the bottom of the station, was the curved common bulkhead separating the former hydrogen tank from the top of the oxygen tank. The oxygen tank was unpressurized, open to the vacuum of space, and had a "waste airlock" welded into the center of the top of the common bulkhead, in the middle of the lower level triangular grate "floor" installed in the former hydrogen tank when it was converted into the workshop. This allowed the hydrogen tank to remain pressurized with breathable air for the astronauts, while allowing them access to the tank for waste disposal. Basically when everything was thrown away, like dirty clothes, empty food containers, used medical supplies or experiment packaging or any other waste you can think of, it was placed into the waste airlock like a trash can, and the top lid closed. The bottom of the waste airlock was another hatch, which would be remotely operated and opened into the interior of the oxygen tank, and the waste materials would drift out of the airlock (helped along somehow, possibly with a jet of air to "flush" it out of the waste airlock) into the interior of the former oxygen tank, which acted basically as a septic tank/trash dumpster for the station. Air entering the tank could escape through vents into space, but the trash was trapped inside the tank, just floating around in there. This was fine for an 'expendable" space station, which wasn't intended for "indefinite use" or a "long lifetime" but it wasn't suitable for a long-term space station, because eventually the "trash dumpster" would fill up and then you're left with a big problem-- how to get rid of waste. Clothes aren't washed in space (not yet anyway) and so basically everything the astronauts wear is thrown away when it gets dirty. So are dishes and food packaging and most everything else they use when its been used. That's a lot of waste material over time! The Soviets solved this issue when they adapted their Soyuz spacecraft into an unmanned freighter/tanker resupply spacecraft, the Progress. Progress would launch unmanned with tons of food, supplies, clothes, and experiments for the cosmonauts to use aboard the station, in a pressurized front section, atop a set of propellant tanks and plumbing to automatically attach to the Salyut station's propulsion system when it docked to the aft end of the station, to refuel the reboost propulsion system on the station. The cosmonauts would unpack all the supplies, and then pack the Progress with their trash, and use it as a "dumpster" until it was pretty well full, at which point it would be commanded to undock and reenter the atmosphere and burn up, disposing of their garbage. Progress could automatically rendezvous and dock with the Salyut stations, a capability the Soviets developed basically back in the 60's. The US wouldn't create a resupply vehicle until the Commercial Cargo program developed them for ISS, and didn't develop automated docking capability until Spacex's Crew Dragon spacecraft. The US has only experimented with orbital refueling. Basically anything "supplemental" the crew would need on Skylab that wasn't packed aboard it beforehand, was brought up in the crew's Apollo spacecraft itself, along with anything they took back to Earth (like samples, experiments, etc). Skylab would have needed some sort of resupply/dumpster vehicle if it were ever going to be a long-term space station.
Later! OL J R :)
If you haven't already, you gotta do a megaprojects on Mir too that thing is wild
You meant *was?
Yup, back in the 90's there was something in IT called "Mir Syndrome" - which meant you pc broke on average every 3 minutes :D, and yet it prevailed...
Absolutely, definitely do one on Mir for balance. Especially the fire that almost destroyed it and the occasional crash . Now I think, why not do one on the Soyuz? It's almost 70 years old and still used as an escape capsule on the ISS? Some of that old soviet cold war tech was pretty good even if the government wasn't
YES
@@ploppyboothanger4648 Absolutely, Soyuz is an awesome spacecraft and the rocket it launches on can be directly traced back to the R-7 that put Yuri Gagarin in space.
My Uncle Joe was on Skylab 2, as the first medical doc in space, to repair Skylab and study spaces effect on the human body. He was also the capcom on Apollo 13. Incredible stories. Thanks for a great summation of the life of one of the first livable places in space.
Nice! His stories must be great.
That’s gotta be the legend that was Joe Kerwin. Astronaut Group 4. He was on capcom when CMP Jack Swigert uttered “ok Joe”, as first voice confirmation that Apollo 13 got thru re entry.
Legend
@BillInTheBox No, that was Lousma.
When Skylab was predicted to crash to the earth my coworker had a Skylab re-entry party. To encourage it to Crash in Minster Ohio they made a "Female Skylab". The main body was made of galvanized garbage cans and the solar panels were old screen doors. I told my coworker that it was too ugly to attract the Skylab. His response was that Skylab had been alone for a LONG time and they predicted that they would have the only female Skylab around. It didn't work, but it was nice try
XDDD
My uncle was a NASA engineer who worked on Skylab. He has a patent for a vapor-liquid separator used on the Saturn V.
That's it??? ... EXPLAIN! (more)
here is the patent patents.google.com/patent/US3397512A/en
@Suq Madiq it was designed to separate cryogenic liquids (liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel) and vapors in zero-G, to vent the vapors so the tanks don't explode.
he also wrote a paper on the "Thermal Control of the Orbital Workshop" www.jstor.org/stable/44644202
I love to hear his stories, especially one about how when Wernher von Braun got really angry, he would start cursing in German!
Skylab was HUGE on the inside. Compare it to the ISS modules and it's far larger in diameter. Really a shame that they didn't use it more.
Too bad they can't launch something else as large now.
A worthy megaproject that affects us all today: GPS, Global Positioning System
And then we can get a quick laymans explanation on General Relativity and why it's proven and in active use today!
Yea, both GPS and GLONASS. Everyone loves a good USA v USSR competition
Thought gps stood for ground positioning system.
Good idea dude
GPS was originally developed and used by the US military alone. But after the Soviets accidentally shot down a civilian aircraft due to a navigation error, US president Ronald Reagan decided GPS could prevent future mishaps and made it available to the public. Other countries then used said technology and developed their own GPS systems.
But never forget, the US gave up it's military trump card for the safety of everyone as GPS greatly helped Aviation (among plenty of other uses) navigation across the globe.
So no matter who or where you are, if you've ever used GPS, you can thank the US for making it available in the first place. You're welcome. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸
Mega Project: Venice Italy. Keeping that city afloat is a massive project.
Good idea.
Everything about venice is a megaproject :D
Insert boat pun here
That's cute.
Yes, the MOSE Project would be a good one. Simon loves his science mixed with corruption. 😅😅
No other space station was ever nearly as roomy as Skylab. It's a shame, that it came down, before it could be rescued by boosting it's orbit, as it could have been added to, updated, and been the heart of a really mega space station.
RIP Michael Lonsdale
Bigelow Aerospace is looking to beat that. They've got some massive plans.
@@mgabrysSF Bigelow _had_ plans. They are now defunct. In March, Bigelow furloughed all its employees, citing shutdowns imposed by the pandemic.
@@tomamberg5361 (looking at articles) yup - they were deemed non-essential by the Nevada gov (technically true but short sighted). They are still in business holding the patents and fabrication if SpaceX wants to make an acquisition. The LOPG uses the concept as well. They're on hiatus but technically not 'defunct' - more like on-hold (although they really need a contract to be viable).
@@mgabrysSF If you read the "Glassdoor . com" employee reviews of the company, it sounds like it had major problems before the current situation. It looks like Sierra Nevada Corporation - which is executing a lot of active manned and cargo contracts - has an inflatable project as well.
www.americaspace.com/2020/08/13/sierra-nevada-makes-progress-on-life-inflatable-habitat-for-lunar-mars-missions/
The $400 fine made my day. I needed that laugh.
This was brilliant, made my day too
It was never paid though as the ticket was issued in fun only in front of the press.
The most Aussie response possible.
@@Simonsvids Yes it was made in fun but to add to the fun a U.S. radio station actually paid the fine for NASA lol
@@yt.personal.identification the fine was for not having a deorbit loiscence.
Skylab fell on me (when 9 years old, living in Esperance, in Western Australia 1979). I was in grade 4, and the next day kids were all bringing in bit's of ash stuff (from their roofs) for 'show and tell' in primary school. I believe the Esperance Shire council made NASA pay a $400 littering fee Lol. My mum got outta bed at midnight and saw it explode - most debris fell in the ocean/bay (and still there).
Get the debrie and make a new space station!!!!
Highly recommend doing a biographic video about Wernher Von Braun 😎
The man who aimed for the moon but hit London first(as a German comic says)
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
@@CosRacecar Well, that doesn't suprise me. He was a Nazi. Even worse: He was a member of the SS.
But when the Americans found him and brought him to the US, they shredded all his SS-documents, to 'forget' that he was ever a member of these bastards....😡😡😡
I remember being a school child in a small Australian country town when Skylab was falling.. we had Skylab drills.. no joke.. like hiding under an old wooden desk was actually going to save me from a giant piece of space junk 😆
Is that any more silly than the way us American kids would drill for nuclear bombing raids by ducking under our own desks?
I pestered Simon for months for a Saturn V video, and here he's basically given me Saturn V Part II.
You legend. Like button smashed.
"what do you watch all day?"
...apparently i watch Simon Whistler narrate various new videos all day.
😹
This!
"OH GOD. THERES BEEN A DISASTER ON SKYLAB"
"ARE THE FECAL SAMPLES SAFE?"
Ah nasa
Well if astronauts would lose their shit, then mission would be major disaster for even more reasons then is usual.
@@belisarian6429 lol, lose their shit, i see what you did there
GIMME YOUR DOOKIE!!!
Gives the phrase "Sh*t going down" a whole new meaning....:))))))
"YES, BUT YOU OWE AN AUSTRALIAN LITERERING FEE."
So in case of dire emergency the astronauts first had to get their shit together. Makes sense.
Thank you Simon for insisting that you get paid to learn, lol This was a great video as all of yours are.
May I suggest for a Megaprojects episode, either the construction of the Areceibo Observatory and/or the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array Radio Observatory.
Yes!!! Both of these!!!
Simon/Olly things in low earth orbit loose altitude not because of gravity, but because of drag. Even at that height there is a tiny amount of drag so items in orbit actually loose speed which reduces their orbit
Uneven density of the Earth can alter orbits which could have increased the overall amount of drag experienced. This is what makes orbiting the moon result in decaying orbits.
@@WNxJohnDoe correct but what Luke said has a greater effect. And Skylab deorbited sooner than expected due to a solar storm swelling the atmosphere and increasing the drag temporarily. Once Skylab had slowed just a little, it was enough to deorbit it much sooner than expected.
A shuttle mission that was going to be launched to re boost the station was therefore not going to be ready in time.
My dad was a NASA physicist and work on a portion of the Skylab development. Thanks for covering this one!
Can we get a video on the Hubble Space Telescope 🔭
This, the 30th anniversary was recent.
I wish I could like this comment twice
The 30th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope was on April 24th of this year.
If Mega Projects means Mega Cost Overruns and Project Delays, I'd propose HST and the James Webb Telescope!
@@richardhighsmith $20 says that the James Webb space telescope gets out to L2, and then doesn't open properly.
Were the Australian authorities ever able to recover the stool sample?
good question
I believe most of the spacecraft was returned to NASA. For the record though, they did actually pay that littering fine!
@@Musikur It could have landed in China.. that would have been a real int'Nat'l incident.
The Outback fudge attack.
No, but there were plenty of local replacement samples 😁
You should do one on the raising of Chicago in the 1850's
and reversing the flow of the Chicago river...
and the meat packing industry
Honestly I was really hoping Simon would say "Skylab was shaken during launch, but not stirred"
I have seen and touched pieces of that lab.some of it was barely damaged,and large,its held in museum in west Australia.
NASA: "Let's call this space station Skylab"
Me: "But it's in space"
NASA: "Shhhhhhhh"
You didn't mention the mutiny! THE MUTINY, SIMON!
There wasn't really a mutiny, that was overhyped yellow propaganda. They were over scheduled and working as normal but the idiots at NASA kept trying to give them more work than hours in the day, and one day they forgot to turn on the com system for a few hours while they were working. Nasa engineers on the ground freaked out when they couldn't talk to them and when the Astronauts said they had been busy working on projects and got pissy, so the Astronauts told them off.
This story got repeated and turned in to the mutiny story which isn't true, they were doing their ****ing jobs which is impossible to do when someone gives you 25 hours worth of work to do in a day not to mention interrupting you every five minutes.
@@Steven_Edwards I stand corrected, thank you very much!
@@Steven_Edwards Didn't that lead to NASA reducing their workload with the end result that they actually got more work done when they weren't overburdened?
@@romanklaeger5397 You're welcome.
It is an often repeated story, I think because the ground crew was upset at the airing of grievances session/come to Jesus moment that happened after communication was re-established which was really only one orbit or 90 minutes they were out of contact. I get why ground control would be pissy, I am sure the engineers and flight director on the ground were freaking out, but I am also sure they had other monitoring of the crew vital signs and telemetry so they knew everyone was still alive/breathing and whatnot.
What happened was they took turns listening to ground control given it was months long mission and one day they were so busy, they simply mixed up who's turn it was supposed to be listening.
When they realized their mistake, NASA went Apeshit, so they told them off politely, which of course made things worse and the story became hyped up to sell newsprint and other dead trees.
In reality Skylab 4 (or 3 if you follow NASA's renumbering since they only counted man missions) was the most successful mission achieving like 150% of the goals/objectives that were originally set out because they loaded them up with so much extra stuff.
@@CosRacecar right, they actually has the most productive Skylab mission, as both they and the mission planners learned how to optimize and get the most amount of work out of a fixed amount of time.
A lot of people say that they were grounded after that and that NASA wouldn't let them fly again, however you have to keep in mind that there was a long window of time between the end of Apollo and the beginning of the shuttle program and so there were many astronauts that didn't fly again after the Apollo era.
It’s great to see blazed Simon coming to his other channels lmao!!!
He hopes himself together well except thst one video talking about something weed stones and he giggled hard
xD Simon adding a bit of the Blaze humor is what a lot of his channels needed. Not comical and informational but have a bit of humor added in here and there to keep the viewers attention
On Business Blaze, Simon is your Boy with the Blaze
On Megaprojects, he's the Man with the Plans.
On Geographics, he's the Face at the Place
@@Partstim He's the chap with the map.
7:33 that’s a photo of an ISS control moment gyroscope being manufactured in the Space Station Processing Facility in 2004
I always thought Skylab was so cool because it had such a large open space inside so the astronauts could fly around inside and do all kinds of stunts. They always looked like they were having a good time flying around like super man. I also thought it was such a waist hardly being used, being it had so much more life left in her.
Skylab always seems to be overlooked. Have you thought about doing the interstate system in the US, it was a huge project.
I remember when that happened. They called it the Chicken Little effect........."The Skylab is falling"!
I remember the time, and news talk of Sky Lab, but it crashed on my 7th birthday. So nope, no memory of the event. :) Come on I was 7, that is an epic birthday!
I was 8 at the time and I have very vague memories of the talk and the news.
Compared to the ISS internal volume, Skylab was HUGE considering it was a single module.
Skylab's internal volume was about a third of the ISS.
We need a mega projects video on Danny Salter's script writing mill
I bet there is both a whipping machine for whenever his fingers are off the keys and a donut on a string whenever he finishes a paragraph.
@@disbeafakename167 that white powder on that donut isn't confectioners sugar btw
You should do a megaproject on the smallest thing ever built by humans.
Molecules?
thank you sooo much for doing this video i absolutely loved it. its wonderful that you do video requests from the comments , most only do patreon requests, any thing space related automatically is a great topic
I remember watching Skylab shortly after it was launched, cross the evening sky with my Mom and Grandma. Those were the days.
Me: living in WA and knowing exactly how empty rural areas are.
Also me: 😱 how dare you-
Simon, I thought at first you made a mistake not calling this channel megastructures, but the word "project" opens you up to pretty much anything large scale. You da man.
Nice job. I grew up (born 1958) with the space program and truly appreciate these great videos...what an exciting time...so much happening in a few years...
Absolutely love all of the space Megaprojects that you have done so far! Please keep them up!
I'd love to see a video on the V bomber program
YES!
The last time I was this early, Simon only had a dozen channels with which to Blaze.
Excellent topic choice, really enjoyed this clip. Thanks very much, please keep em coming.
Brilliant, loved it. Keep these amazing videos coming you absolute legend.
I love the fact that NASA was fined for littering in Australia, must have really been a cheap cleanup if that's all they got... :P
Environmental protection laws were not nearly as bad back then.
Don't forget the $10k reward they got from the newspaper!
Remember it was in 1979. With inflation it's about $1500
Donald Deloria That’s still not very much.
Nice story, but the 'fine' was issued for fun during a news conference when a NASA official visited.
Aral sea. Soviet irrigation project that dried up the Aral sea would be a good video
Already did that on his Geographics channel
You might like this. It’s from one of his other channels. 🙂
ua-cam.com/video/xEIt4OojA3Y/v-deo.html
Thank you Simon.
Excellent video and enjoyed it thoroughly. Definitely a project worth remembering.
Simon, I appreciate that you did a video on this subject. I always enjoy learning things on your channels.
NASA still hasn't paid their littering fine.
It was however paid by a California radio station many years later
@@ianmorris7485 that it was, also the fine was only issued as a joke by the local council, the remnants of the station can be seen at the Esperance Municipal Museum, visited it when I was a kid and got to see it up close which helped begin my interest into all things space.
The Hubble space telescope!
There is an Auto Electrician in Kalgoorlie WA with pieces of skylab in his reception. Photos also on the wall with him collecting it with his 4x4.
President Obama did in 2015.
I remember standing in the yard with my family looking for the fireball as Skylab fell (no luck! but still remember it)
Once again another great show. Thank you for the constant cool content!!
Great video! Brought back a lot of old memories and learned some new facts. I was a total Apollo and Space geek in the 70's . The night Skylab crashed back to earth, I stayed up till 2am (US CDT) listening to the radio on where it crashed. At that time, they were guessing the India Ocean or western Australia but no one was sure. The next morning I got up and looked out the window to see a huge piece of twisted metal in our backyard. Thinking it was part of Skylab, I ran into the yard to see. It was a home turbine ventilator from our roof. A bad storm over the night had blown it off. :) For a moment, it was awesome to find part of a NASA vehicle. Only to find out it was something so common. I had to bent this thing back into working condition and put it back in place... this time with screws. :D
Simon: What videos do you want me to do.
Internet: Yes
Also, I like how he said the ISS video didnt do well and yet this video is doing better than any other he posted today from his other channels lol.
I kinda feel like we all know the iss fairly well being so recent
I can still remember when my father brought home that encyclopedia with color pictures. It was called: Airplanes, rockets and ... something else, I can't remember. This book has become my absolute favorite. It was in it that I first saw the stages of the shuttle launch, the skylab, the stages of the flight to the moon. It's funny that Skylab seemed to me then a big windmill, and the Apollo lander - a buoy. For a child, it was a whole sea of entertaining information. And there were also experiments with an inflatable ball as a rocket, an airplane made of a straw, etc. Oh, childhood.
My grandfather purchased an old 50k sq ft hanger for his air conditioning company to house from. Corpus Christi, TX .. right next to the old Cabaniss field. As kids, we loved sneaking thru the fence into the retired airfield (back in the '80s) and checking out the larger retired hangers. On the top floor of one, I remember we found a LOT of old teletype printouts from Skylab dated '78 ... just left behind all over the floor. Tons of yellow paper printouts describing day to day useless communications. I guess it was a backup communication post. But was a sweet find as kids.
Today Cabaniss field is a park hosting a go-kart track, about a dozen soccer fields, and a scale RC plane airport even! And some old hangers are still intact, but restricted from visiting due to age and neglect.
Love your presentation...love the mix of comedy and information...watch all your videos and love 90% of them...(10% stuff I don’t find interesting personally but still presented very well) 👍...don’t stop...to much on UA-cam that doesn’t teach or aim to grow brains!...well done fellow simon
SPACE STUFF! SPACE STUFF! SPACE STUFF!
The Square Kilometer Array being built in SA and Australia
Mammuchan That’d be cool. I’d like to hear of Australian Megaprojects. We don’t have too many.
Have they done the snowy River scheme?
Sasinc1102 no he hasn’t but I would love it if he did. It wasn’t just awesome engineering but also changed a lot socially in Australia
I believe NASA did toy once more with the Wet Workshop concept during the Shuttle era, as it would only take a minor adjustment in the shuttle's launch trajectory to put the tank into orbit too. I think they were even talking about docking multiple tanks to make a huge space station! Of course the idea never got off the drawing board, but still a neat idea to think about.
I love hearing about skylab! I don't think kids today even know it existed.
8:30 you could have gone for "shaken, not stirred".
I was thinking the same thing
Mega projects idea. The Eisenhower interstate system with the Eisenhower and Johnson tunnels.
The Eisenhower Tunnel should have been named "The Tunnel of Love" after Governor Love of Colorado.
Great stuff! Keep em coming!
I was 8 yrs old when Skylab launched, so I vaguely remember it, however as a space mad school kid, I definitely remember it coming back home!
Thanks for the memories and another great informative video.
"Need that sweet watched time" quote of the year for UA-cam creators
can suggest the original world trade center that was destroyed on september 11th 2001
My father Arthur Steinmetz worked on the skylab program. Thank you for this great video that brought me back to when I was a child listening to my dad tell me about how interesting and amazing this project was.
Love your space themed videos!!!
As a boy of 10 growing up in a small town called Crystal River which is due west of the Cape, my mother took my sister and I out to the end of our street to watch Apollo 15 lift off. In the early 80's, I drove across the state to watch the shuttle lift off and in 76 my father took us to the cape for a tour. We were even allowed in the assembly building since they were retrofitting it for the shuttle, that place is HUGE!!! Being a Florida boy, we all followed the space program quite closely and even felt somewhat connected to it :-)
"The emptiness of Western Australia might be the best place for it"
About all that Western Australia is good for. That, and profitable dirt. Source: I've been to Perth.
Shit ain’t it? Spent the last year in WA, mainly between TOM PRICE and port headland
Being as isolated as we are in WA is pretty shit. Ya know, until something like a global pandemic hits
Currently the main good thing about WA is it’s lack of COVID. But yeah, valuable dirt is kind of it.
@@--enyo-- I was gonna reply with something about our stunning beaches, but I realised that beautiful white sand beaches are basically still just valuable dirt 😂
@@ONEDVSDVIT Calling a place shit based upon Port Hedland and Tom Price is hardly fair. Two of the most shittiest places in the world, let alone in Western Australia :)
I would really love to see a mega projects on the Sears Tower in Chicago
I knew a Civil Engineer/Project Manager and liaison with the unions on The Twin Towers and Sears Tower.
@@tomtheplummer7322
That is awesome, maybe you could help our "boi" with some info if he decides to do an episode on the greatest skyscraper ever built.
Did love the topic! Thank You!
I have had the privilege of knowing four of the Skylab astronauts (Lousma, Carr, Gibson and Pogue) and had the opportunity to learn firsthand of the highs and lows of living onboard Skylab. The workload was incredibly heavy, especially after the second crew had accomplished 150% of their stated mission objectives (mission commander Alan Bean was constantly asking Mission Control to send up more work), Subsequently, the third crew was saddled with an unrealistic workload and finally had to inform Mission Control that they needed a break. In spite of all of this, the knowledge gained was fantastic. The first crew performed the first repair spacewalk in history and saved the multi-million dollar program (the repair EVAs of Skylab 2 and 3 would make a fascinating video).
The actor who played the bad guy in Moonraker just died. Weird coincidence.
FIY Richard Kiel died september 2014....
@@mllermod3970 and Michael Lonsdale, who played Hugo Drax, the primary antagonist, died yesterday...
@@rickgubala830 oooh that guy.... yes true. and a sad day
3 most memorable things about Skylab: launch, re-entry, and the mutiny.
It wasn't a mutiny. That's a wildly overblown rumor started by bored journalists looking for a story. What happened was NASA was overworking the astronauts, handing them far more work than they could ever get done in 24 hours, let alone with the calls every 90 minutes and 8 hours mandated sleep. So what the three astronauts did was they took turns listening to their morning briefing on their next 25 hours of work to do that day so that the other two could try and get more work done to accommodate NASA as best they could. What happened that day was a simple mix-up of whose turn it was to listen to NASA that morning :)
The ground crew freaked out, and CAPCOM "read them the riot act" about it, at which point the astronauts read NASA the riot act about overworking them. The two groups sat down and rebalanced the work load so that the crew weren't working ludicrous hours just to meet NASA's schedule. All three of them were promoted into management positions in NASA in later years.
@@efulmer8675 Yes, I know. But the fact is the story persists, thus making it memorable in the minds of many.
Fantastic - thanks for this reminder of an important manned project, and its ground (earth?Solar system?) breaking solar observations. Much appreciated! More, please!
Instant like! This is such an under appreciated project!
The "negotiations" about working time and conditions are still relavent to work done in space today. The (insanely) heavy schedule of experiments and work burned out the crew and they famously took and extended "unscheduled break" to recover moral. Since then missions no longer try to cram every waking hour with activities.
It wasn't "unscheduled". The "actual mutiny" was caused by the astronaut who was supposed to listen to NASA's morning 25-more-hours-of-work speech forgetting it was his turn. NASA freaked out, and when they came back around CAPCOM "read them the riot act" about it, at which point the astronauts read *NASA* the riot act about overscheduling them, and NASA agreed to give them the next day off while they figured out how to rebalance the work schedule.
Also, thank you for being aware that it wasn't an actual mutiny. There are a ton of other comments asking about that.
I mean, you can't really blame the Americans for wanting to involve the Australians in the Skylab project, now can you? ;)
'I want to fly to the moon, but all my rockets land in London' -
Wernher von Braun
😲 too soon?
@@bfnfedboy2 no, it's a good joke..
This is by far my favorite channel of yours. Although your other channels are very good this one is the best imo
Really liked the video. Thanks for the info!
Hey, this is around my 20th try for the SR-71.
It's a massive project that really deserves and episode
Already done
He kinda already did. check out the one on the SR71 and the A12
Don't care for the title: "The First Attempt at a Space Station". Attempt? No. We had Skylab up there for many years. It was successful. It just got old and had to be burned up in the atmosphere. Should just leave out the "attempt" part.
Well it was still an attempt, just a successful one
Skylab had an unstable low Earth orbit, and , eventually this lead to it's demise.
Skylab was great!( I always remember New Math during this era.)😎
As a kid at the time that Skylab was orbiting, I had written to NASA for as much information about it that they could give me. They sent me several press kits over time and I shared them with my classes at school. One item was a huge (3'x4') plastic coated double-sided poster that I hung on the wall of my bedroom. I tried to find plastic model kits of it at the hobby shop, but never found any... same thing with the Viking Mars landers.
I remember before the Shuttle kids were asked to submit experiments to Skylab and a few were carried out. This continued later on the Space Shuttle.
Ah moonraker. One of 15 movies Simon's seen and luckily it's relevant to this subject!
First :)
Barely beat me!!! I got your “like” covered though!
@@olegvelichko1659 Nice one, I liked the video too!
LEGO Robotics CAS Club Yes! You get the cash prizes! 🙂
You utter basteL
Western Australian here, this video reminded me that I have seen parts of skylab that were/are on display in a small musem here! It was mostly sheet metal and insulation from memory...
Thank you for this video. Skylab was such an important stepping stone in space exploration that it deserves to be discussed and recognized for its merits.
My granddad worked for MD on Skylab. He used to go over the blueprints and operations manual with me and describe why they made different design decisions. Thanks or the video!
awesome story
really glad i found this channel!
I find these videos more intriguing than most of the others even though you dont make as much its appreciated that you scratch my intellectual itch every now and then with space stuff
I'm from the USA but worked in Dampier Australia a few months after SkyLab de-orbited and some if it landed in North West Australia. There were a few pieces displayed in town. I remember a ripped and distorted piece of what appeared to be a small metal tank (under a meter). It was attached to a stone pedistal with a plaque and displayed at the entrance to a bank. Also there were souvineeres for sale, mostly consisting of a few strands of insulation in engraved plastic cubes. I bought one, ($10-15 Australian dollars?). I wish I could find it now and if it ever surfaces, I'd send it to Amy Shira Teitel, Vintage Space.
I was able to see and touch some of the fuel cells from SkyLab that landed in western Australia, when I did a training course at the Australian Counter Disaster Collage at Mt Macedon in Victoria Australia, just a bit north of Melbourne, thanks for the reminders it was a great time for space and learning..
My main memory of Skylab is the (still made) 'Swing Away' can opener designed for use on the station, and advertised as such. It really is a great product, as can openers go.
Just another comment to compliment you, but thank you Simon for your videos and in-depth descriptions of amazing creations in/that in existed the world. The team of researchers about as amazing at their work as you are at your skill to use language to draw in all humans across the planet.
Another show dude, damn. I love TopTenz, Biographics, and Geographics 🤘
Like button smashed. Interesting coverage. Thanks.