When you’re working at the cutting edge, sometimes not everything goes according to plan. Take the United States’ first and to date only wholly-owned space station, Skylab. After years of meticulous planning, things started to go wrong just 63 seconds into launch. Airflow ripped a meteoroid shield clean off, taking one of the spacecraft’s two solar panels with it and jamming the other one.
Fortunately, the first of three manned expeditions managed to carry out the necessary repairs, and between May 1973 and February 1974 almost 300 scientific and technical experiments were completed in the space station’s workshop and solar laboratory.
What goes up, as we know, must come down and Skylab’s return to earth proved just as eventful as its launch. In the run-up to re-entry, NASA had set a trajectory designed to minimise the chances of debris landing in populated areas, but Skylab didn’t burn up as quickly as expected. Instead of disintegrating south southeast of Cape Town, South Africa, debris was strewn over Western Australia, landing NASA with a A$400 fine for littering from Esperance, one of the provinces worse affected. A drop in the ocean compared to Skylab’s overall project cost (though it would have been better if it had dropped in the ocean).
* All costs calculated in 2017 $US
