After that, the station would simply continue to orbit as a shell, like the millions of tons of floating detritus now known as space junk.įunding and other snafus delayed the shuttle project, however, so NASA had to come up with a new plan. The agency would use a new tool in development-the space shuttle-to boost Skylab into a higher orbit, thereby extending the lab’s operational life by about five years. NASA responded with a plan to rehabilitate the laboratory-in-the-sky. As word spread of the impending uncontrolled crash of the space station, Congress and the public demanded to know how NASA intended to avoid human casualties from the potential disaster. This lack of preparation presented a problem in late 1978, when NASA engineers discovered the station’s orbit was decaying rapidly. Doing so would have “cost too much,” administrator Robert Frosch said at the time. Even though Skylab was devised for just a nine-year lifespan, NASA failed to build in any control or navigation mechanisms to return the orbiter to terra firma. Unfortunately, the agency spent far less time and energy planning how to gracefully bring the space station back to Earth at the end of its mission. Because the project represented the next step toward wider space exploration, NASA threw itself into successfully putting Skylab in orbit. The space station known as Skylab was designed as an orbiting workshop for research on scientific matters, such as the effects of prolonged weightlessness on the human body. Skylab was made to go up but not to come back down.

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