Skylab Medical Experiment Altitude Test?
could have called it:
Skylab Medical Experiment Altitude Research
and then they'd have to conduct SMEAR tests.
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Searching for Skylab: Even the most casual astro-nerd will revel in this respectful elegy to unsung space history
As NASA gears up to celebrate to 50 years since the first Moon landing, another anniversary is rolling around. It is 45 years since the last crew left Skylab and 40 since the station spread itself over a chunk of Australia. Though Armstrong & co's lunar antics garnered the headlines, three missions, of increasing duration, to …
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Monday 1st April 2019 14:03 GMT MyffyW
Smear Test
For those blessed with XX chromosomes popping one's legs in the stirups for such a test is hardly the most dignified of pursuits but can save your life. Pester your significant other to have one when you go home.
I am of course talking about having your cervix examined, not going up to a 1970s space station.
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Friday 29th March 2019 12:19 GMT big_D
Terrified...
"I went to bed terrified that our house, and our house alone would be the one it hit. I woke up the next morning very relieved that it wasn't."
I'm glad for him, that his house wasn't alone in being hit. Oh, wait... :-D
Glad it left such an impression on his life (as opposed to him), that he has made the film.
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Friday 29th March 2019 12:33 GMT Muscleguy
I remember
I was in the last year of secondary school in Auckland, NZ. The final year people were wandering around with loo paper roll binoculars and hard hats claiming to protect us from it. Not all of it hit Oz, some of it hit the bits of ocean around NZ but missed NZ (long and thin has it’s advantages).
Still, Australia is eroding away, the dust from the big dust storms can fall on eastern NZ so it needed the extra mass contribution. Didn’t knock much sense into the Ockers though. Heads are too hard for that.
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Friday 29th March 2019 13:05 GMT Alan J. Wylie
Obligatory Tom Lehrer / Von Braun "things coming down" reference
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Friday 29th March 2019 17:23 GMT Borg.King
Wak inside Skylab
For those visiting Washington DC, I can highly recommend the Smithsonian National Air and Space museum, as it has a Skylab workshop exhibit (backup flight unit) that you can walk through.
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/orbital-workshop-skylab-backup-flight-unit
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Friday 29th March 2019 20:11 GMT TimeMaster T
NASA could have saved it.
NASA had a booster module in development that would have raised Skylabs orbit and kept it there for years. It was supposed to be launched on a Titan II launch body, it would have attached to Skylab's docking ring and not have needed anyone to actually be there to install it. But the atmospheric drag on the station increased faster than expected, the booster module got stalled by the funding committee for various political reasons so nothing got done and the first real space station ever put in orbit was lost.
I still remember going out one night a few weeks before the station burned up and watching it pass over head, a faint point of light moving slowly across the sky. Looking back on that night and knowing what I know now about why the station was allowed to fall and the way the station has been ignored and forgotten* I get a little ticked off, it was such a wasted opportunity for the space program.
* seen several timeline of the events and milestones of Human spaceflight, they mentioned everything but Skylab. Given how extensive they were I find it hard to believe the omissions were an accident.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
