The Skylab space station crashes over Australia - July 11th, 1979

On this day in 1979, the burning wreckage of America’s first space station crashed into the Indian Ocean and across Western Australia.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that shines a light on the ups and downs
of everyday history. I'm Gay Bluesier, and today we're talking
about the historic rise and precipitous fall of the Skylab

(00:22):
orbital outpost. The day was July eleventh, nineteen seventy nine.
The burning wreckage of America's first space station crashed into
the Indian Ocean and across western Australia. NASA's Skylab missions

(00:47):
helped bridge the gap between the agency's Apollo and Space
Shuttle programs. In fact, the Skylab space station was launched
in nineteen seventy three, just one year after the last
Loun landing mission. The station itself was a heavily modified
third stage of a Saturn five moon rocket. The cylindrical

(01:08):
spacecraft measured roughly one hundred feet in length and just
over twenty feet in diameter. It weighed more than eighty
tons and carried an assortment of scientific equipment, as well
as enough oxygen, food, and water to sustain a three
person crew for an extended period of time. NASA planned

(01:29):
for three Skylab missions. Altogether, three different crews of three
astronauts each, with the first one launching only eleven days
after Skylab itself. One of the primary goals of the
missions was to gauge the biological effects of long term
habitation in space. To that end, the first crew spent

(01:51):
twenty eight days in space, the second crew more than
double that at fifty nine days, and the final crew
spent eighty four days in orger a record that wasn't
broken by an American astronaut until two decades later. Of course,
the astronauts didn't spend all that time monitoring their own vitals.

(02:12):
The three crews logged a combined total of more than
seven hundred hours observing the Sun and brought home nearly
two hundred thousand solar pictures for further study. The first crew, however,
had to spend much of its time doing repair work,
as Skylab's solar array had been badly damaged during launch. Luckily,

(02:33):
the crew was able to install a new solar shield
to keep the station from overheating, and then performed several
spacewalks to make additional fixes. Each crew traveled to and
from Skylab in a modified Apollo Command and Service module,
which was launched into space atop a Saturn one B rocket.

(02:53):
When the third crew departed Skylab in February of nineteen
seventy four, they fully expected an their crew to come
take their place. The station still had plenty of supplies
on board, and NASA had already begun planning for a
fourth mission. However, the agency wanted to wait for its
new fleet of space shuttles to be ready so that

(03:14):
it could use one to boost Skylab into a higher
orbit while delivering a new crew of astronauts at the
same time. NASA scientists predicted that Skylab could continue circling
the planet for another nine years before atmospheric drag finally
slowed its motion enough for it to fall back to Earth.
That would have given NASA plenty of time to prep

(03:37):
the space shuttle and the next crew, but that's not
how things shook out. Instead, five years after the last
Skylab mission, the space station's orbit began to decay much
earlier than expected. A recent uptick in solar activity had
heated the outer layers of Earth's atmosphere, increasing the friction

(03:57):
between the air molecules and the surface of Skylab. This
increased the amount of drag on the station, causing it
to lose altitude at an accelerated rate, And so it
was that on July eleventh, nineteen seventy nine, Skylab re
entered Earth's atmosphere, a full four years ahead of schedule. Thankfully,

(04:19):
NASA had seen the descent coming and was able to
access the computers aboard Skylab and use them to change
the station's trajectory in order to minimize damage. The ground
crew tried to position the station so that its debris
would land in a patch of the Atlantic Ocean roughly
eight hundred miles south of Cape Town, South Africa. Once again, though,

(04:41):
things didn't go according to plan. Although Skylab plunged through
the air at about three hundred and fifty miles per hour,
the house sized station wound up staying intact a lot
longer than NASA had anticipated. As a result, it didn't
break apart until it was over the Indian Ocean, on
a direct collision course with Western Australia. The station's fiery

(05:05):
demise lit up the sky that night with what witnesses
described as a spectacular fireworks display. Huge chunks of debris
were scattered across fields and small towns, but fortunately no
injuries were reported. Skylab itself literally crashed and burned, but
the Skylab program was still successful in the long run.

(05:28):
It showed that astronauts could live and work in space
for prolonged periods of time without adverse effects, a discovery
that led directly to the International Space Station, which has
been continuously occupied by rotating crews since November of two thousand.
As for the remains of Skylab, much of its debris
is now housed in museums and private collections across Western Australia,

(05:52):
but a few pieces are supposedly still out there, waiting
to be found by some intrepid treasure hunter. Not everyone
considers space junk to be treasure. Take the small Australian
town of Esperance, for example. They were so put off
by all the wreckage that landed in their jurisdiction that
they hit the US State Department with a four hundred

(06:14):
dollars fine for littering to its eternal shame. The American
government refused to foot the bill, but in two thousand
and nine, California DJ Scott Barley finally righted this wrong
by collecting donations from his listeners and cutting the town
a check Esperance wasn't the only one to profit from

(06:34):
the fall of Skylab. The event made headlines all over
the globe, and in the lead up, many entrepreneurs were
quick to capitalize on the public's excitement and its anxiety.
Some restaurants began mixing up Skylab cocktails, claiming that if
you drank one, you wouldn't know what hit you. Others
cashed in through novelty gifts like the Skylab Protective Helmet,

(06:58):
a paper hat that promised to do absolutely no good
at all should Skylab actually fall on you. But it
was the tiny town of Balladonia, which had a population
of just nine people at the time, that benefited the
most from the whole affair. After its local hotel was
pelted with bits of Skylab, President Jimmy Carter personally called

(07:20):
up the owners to offer his apologies. The ordeal thrust
Balladonia onto the world stage, and it became a popular
tourist destination in the months and years that followed. The
Australian Christian rock group Family even wrote a song about it,
titled The Ballad of Balladonia Night. The single became that

(07:40):
year's summer anthem in Australia. So to bring this episode
in for a happy landing, here's a clip from your
new favorite song, Everybody balladon mister h Start Up. That's

(08:12):
why I L came. I'm Gay, Blues Gay, and hopefully
you now know a little more about history today than
you did yesterday. If you'd like to keep up with
the show, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and
Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have any

(08:35):
comments or suggestions, feel free to send them my way
by writing to this day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks
to Kasby Bias for producing the show, and thanks to
you for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow
for another day in History class.