Skylab's Fiery Fall

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One by one, methods of rescuing Skylab were considered by NASA and then discarded as impractical. There was talk of a joint Soviet-American mission, using the Soviet Soyuz system, but it had to be abandoned because the Russian craft's docking hardware was incompatible with Skylab's. Soyuz also lacked sufficient propellant to maneuver with the ailing U.S. vehicle and then give it a powerful boost into higher orbit. Declared NASA'S Frosch: "The obstacles involved were insurmountable, in the time remaining." Russian scientists, in effect, agree, although they note that if plans for a cooperative effort had been started two years ago, a rescue might have been possible. Roald Sagdoyev, director of the Institute of Space Research of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, told TIME: "All the operations needed to give Skylab an additional impulse could have been made within the limits of existing rocket and space technology—either American or Soviet." The U.S., he said, could have helped modify the docking locks of Soyuz so it could link up with Skylab.

The NASA engineers studied a plan to send a McDonnell Douglas F-15, America's hottest jet fighter, into a computer-guided supersonic climb to about 80,000 feet and then blast Skylab out of the sky with a non-nuclear rocket. This idea was dropped when the scientists concluded that Skylab would merely be blown into more pieces scattered over a wider area, increasing rather than reducing the danger of damage on earth.

While most Americans neither mourned nor feared Skylab's menacing death, some saw in it yet another in a series of examples of technology outracing man's means of control. A sequence of human and mechanical failures never envisioned by its builders had nearly caused the meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. The mysterious cracks emerging in engine mountings of the DC-10 jumbo jets had led to the grounding of the fleet and America's most tragic air disaster. Now a giant spacecraft, crippled at birth six years ago, is plunging toward a premature end which its creators have no way to prevent. ∎