Space exploration has come with successes, errors, and complete failures. One success was the American space station, Skylab. It was launched on May 14, 1973, and it was the world’s first successful space station. The first manned Skylab mission took place two years after the Soviet Union sent Salyut 1, which was the world’s first space station, into orbit around Earth. Unlike the troubled Salyut, which faced plagued with problem after problem, Skylab was a major success, providing safe housing for three separate crews of three astronauts for extended stays.
Once the spent third stage of a Saturn 5 moon rocket, it was repurposed to form the cylindrical space station. It stood 118 feet tall, weighed 77 tons, and housed the most diverse collection of experimental equipment ever placed on a single spacecraft at the time. Skylab crews spent over 700 hours studying the sun, bringing back more than 175,000 solar images, and delivered key insights into the biological effects of extended space living. Operations included an orbital workshop, a solar observatory, Earth observation, and hundreds of experiments.
For the last two manned Skylab missions, NASA prepared a backup Apollo CSM/Saturn IB for potential in-orbit rescue missions, though it was never used. During launch, Skylab was damaged when its micrometeoroid shield tore away, taking one main solar panel array and jamming the other. This left the station without most of its electrical power and exposed it to intense solar heating, threatening its usability. The first crew managed to deploy a replacement heat shield and free the jammed solar panel, successfully saving Skylab. It was the first major space repair of its kind.
Five years after the final Skylab mission, the space station’s orbit began to decay. It was earlier than expected, and the cause was apparently due to unusually high sunspot activity. Skylab finally lost its battle to stay in orbit, and on July 11, 1979, Skylab made its dramatic return to Earth. As it came in, it began breaking apart in the atmosphere and scattering fiery debris over the Indian Ocean and Australia. Fortunately, no one was injured as it came raining down.
Unlike Skylab, the International Space Station was launched on November 20, 1998, or at least that was when 
the first part of it went into space. That space station is still in orbit today. I’m not sure if we have learned something about keeping these things in orbit, or because there were just different circumstances that combined to keep it in orbit. Whatever the case may be, it has been in orbit for 27 years, and it’s still going strong. Nevertheless, in its day, Skylab was state of the art.
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