The Prehistory of Skylab

The foundations that would eventually lead to the launch of Skylab in May 1973 had been laid much earlier. The idea of building a space station was noth­ing new. Not only did it predate Skylab, it predated manned spaceflight.

The first serious proposal for a manned space station was published in 1923 by German rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth in his work, The Rocket into Interplanetary Space. In that work Oberth wrote, “Such a station could serve as a basis for Earth observations, as a weather forecasting satellite, as a communications satellite, and as a refueling station for extraterrestrial vehi­cles launched from orbit.”

A few decades later the concept of the space station was familiar not only in the spaceflight community but also to the public at large. It hit the main­stream in a major way when it was explained by Wernher von Braun and others in a series of Walt Disney-produced television specials in the latter half of the 1950 s. In a series of three Tomorrowland specials, the space sta­tion was presented not only as a place where humans would live and work in Earth orbit but also as a way station to other worlds. As a special-effects – laden enactment demonstrated, an orbital space station would be a key ele­ment in sending humans to the moon. The specials were based on concepts von Braun had presented at the First Symposium on Space Flight in October 1951, selected papers from which were published in Collier’s Magazine under the title “Man Will Conquer Space Soon.” Von Braun laid out what he saw as a logical progression for space exploration, beginning with simple orbit­al missions, moving on to the construction of a space station, which in turn would be used to support missions to the moon in the year 2000.

It was not to be. Two decisions sealed the fate of the idea of the space sta­tion as a steppingstone to the moon. Even before an American had been in orbit, the nation’s space program was focused on a single goal. On 25 May 1961, less than three weeks after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, President John F. Kennedy issued the challenge to Congress that was to define the nascent human spaceflight programs of two nations for years to come: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” Billions of dollars, and more than eight years, were to go into making the dream a reality. Every spaceflight made during that time was dedicated to bringing the goal another step closer.

That decision effectively made any thoughts of a space station for its own merits a much lower priority and created a major stumbling block to the idea of using a space station to get to the moon. Von Braun’s logical progression of infrastructure development required time that was a luxury that NASA could not afford in trying to meet Kennedy’s deadline.

The second shoe dropped the next year with the decision to use the lunar – orbit rendezvous mission profile for the moon landings rather than the Earth-orbit rendezvous profile von Braun had outlined in the Disney spe­cials. Lunar-orbit rendezvous involved sending two spacecraft to the moon instead of just one. While one descended to the lunar surface, the other remained in lunar orbit with the fuel that would be necessary to return to Earth. This technique made it possible for less mass to be sent to the moon. A lander that had to carry its Earth-return fuel to the surface would require even more fuel to lift that fuel back into space. Leaving the fuel for return

to Earth on an orbiting spacecraft eliminated that need. As a result, both lunar-rendezvous spacecraft together were smaller than the one craft that would have been sent to the moon on an Earth-rendezvous mission. That meant they both could be launched on one Saturn v, unlike the larger craft that would have been launched on separate boosters and assembled in orbit. The lunar-rendezvous technique gave NASA a quick path to the moon but at the cost of a space station.

Kennedy’s decision to pursue a bold fast-tracked lunar-landing program resulted in the most ambitious period in the history of space exploration and accelerated the achievement of the first human footsteps on another world. However, Mueller believes that in the long term human spaceflight would have been better served without that deadline. While it sped up the accom­plishments of Apollo, he argues that haste was possible only by sacrificing the development of an infrastructure that would have supported continued exploration. “It’s sort of unfortunate that the decision was made to go to the moon ‘in this decade,’ because that precluded the development of a real transportation system,” Mueller said. “It never really got the sort of atten­tion that it should have gotten, because it really, in my view, was the point in time when we had the opportunity to begin a true space civilization, a space evolution. In retrospect we would have been better off if we’d concen­trated on a transportation system.”

In an ideal situation, Mueller said, a combination of lunar orbit rendez­vous and Earth orbit rendezvous would have been used for moon landing missions, creating a system in which the bulk of the spacecraft used to fly crews from the Earth to the moon and back would have remained travel­ing in a loop between the two, while smaller transfer vehicles carried astro­nauts to and from the surfaces of the two worlds. Such a system not only would have supported ongoing exploration of the moon, but it also would have helped develop techniques and infrastructure that later could have been used for human missions to Mars.

Though development of a space station had been placed on the back burn­er following the decisions of 1961 and 1962, it had not been abandoned, and several NASA centers continued to work on ideas for space stations. Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, was working on the Manned Orbit­al Research Laboratory, which would support a crew of four to six astronauts for up to a year. The Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston was developing plans for Project Olympus, a large station that would remain in orbit for five years, where twelve to twenty-four crewmembers could live. Marshall, of course, was the home of von Braun, who had been outspoken about his own ideas for a space station. “There were a lot of concepts,” Mueller said of the early space station discussions in NASA in the early-to mid-1960 s. “Everybody was working on one. I’m afraid that a lot of them were just ideas.”