Stephen Bowen remembers seeing Skylab fly overhead.
At eight years old, Bowen’s experience watching the US’ first space station cross the night sky fueled his interest in spaceflight. Little did he know then, it could also play a giant a part of his future.
“I do keep in mind that it was Skylab,” Bowen said in an interview with collectSPACE.com. “My dad took us outside and we actually watched it fly over our house one night.”
“I feel that was the primary object I saw in space, , as in a manmade object seen from Earth,” he said.
Today (May 14), on the fiftieth anniversary of Skylab’s launch, it’s Bowen who’s in Earth orbit. Today (May 14), on the fiftieth anniversary of Skylab’s launch, it’s Bowen who’s in Earth orbit. At 59, he’s the one crew member currently on the International Space Station (ISS) who’s sufficiently old to recollect the orbital workshop’s start and the next crewed expeditions.
“I do have very specific memories of those missions,” said Bowen in January, a month before he and three crewmates lifted off on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft (opens in recent tab) for a six-month stay on the ISS.
Fortunately, Bowen’s launch was lots less dramatic than when Skylab left Earth.
Unlike the International Space Station, which took 10 years and greater than 30 missions to assemble, Skylab was lifted into orbit by a single Saturn V. The last of the Apollo moon boosters to fly, the space station was built from and took the place of the rocket’s third stage.
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Along with the orbital workshop, the S-IVB stage was outfitted with a solar observatory called the Apollo Telescope Mount, a multiple docking adapter, an airlock module and solar arrays.
The Skylab 1 (or SL-1) mission lifted off at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT) from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. For the primary minute of flight every little thing went to plan, but then the station’s micrometeoroid shield and sun shade, in addition to one among its solar arrays, fell victim to the supersonic environment and were torn off. Those components, which were critical to Skylab’s operation, were lost and debris from the shield became entangled with the remaining solar array, stopping its full deployment.
Skylab made it into orbit, but with a big power deficiency and without the power to regulate the temperature contained in the workshop from exceeding livable conditions. The launch of its first three-person crew, which had been scheduled for the following day, was as a substitute delayed until May 25, as engineers worked to quickly devise how the astronauts would save the station.
Ultimately, the Skylab 2 and Skylab 3 crews were in a position to free the stuck array and install alternative sunglasses, such that they and a 3rd mission lived on the workshop for increasing durations, from slightly below a month to 84 days long (opens in recent tab). The research and experience gained on those three flights set the foundation for the U.S.-led operations (opens in recent tab) on the International Space Station and a continuous presence of humans in space for now 23 years.
“It’s really exciting to kind of carry on that legacy of living on an area station,” said Bowen.
