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America's first space station, the 75 ton Skylab was launched May 14, 1973 by a two-stage version of the Saturn V booster (the SL-1 mission). Severe damage was sustained during launch, including the loss of the station's micrometeoroid shield/sun shade and one of its main solar panels. Debris from the lost micrometeroid shield further complicated matters by pinning the remaining solar panel to the side of the station, preventing its deployment and thus leaving the station with a huge power deficit. The station underwent a extensive repair by the first crew launched on May 25, 1973 (the SL-2 mission) atop a Saturn 1B. Two additional missions followed on July 28, 1973 (SL-3) and November 16, 1973 (SL-4) with stay times of 28, 59, and 84 days, respectively. The last Skylab crew returned to Earth on February 8, 1974.

Skylab was actually the refitted S-IVB third stage of a Saturn V booster, a leftover from the Apollo program originally intended for one of the canceled moon landing missions (Apollos 18-20). A product of the Apollo Applications program (a program tasked with finding long-term uses for Apollo program hardware), Skylab was originally planned as a minimially-altered S-IVB to be launched on a Saturn IB rocket. The small size of the IB would have required Skylab to double as a rocket stage during launch, only being retrofitted as a space station once on-orbit. With the cancellation of Apollo missions 18-20 a Saturn V was made available and thus the "Wet Workshop" concept, as it was called, was put aside and Skylab was launched dry and fully outfitted. Skylab's grid flooring system is a highly visable legacy of the wet workshop concept.

Following the last mission the Station was positioned in a parking orbit expected to last at least 8 years. Increased solar activity heating the outer layers of the earth's atmosphere and thereby increasing drag on the Station led to an early reentry on July 11, 1979. Skylab disintegrated over Western Australia and the Indian Ocean, casting large pieces of debris in populated areas (without injury). The reentry prevented any further use by the then unfinished Space Shuttle as was envisioned by some at NASA.

Two flight-quality Skylabs were built, the second, a backup, is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

Space Shuttle Atlantis
Space Shuttle Atlantis Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis (NASA Designation: OV-104) In its most recent flight, Atlantis and her six-person crew completed an eleven-day mission in October 2002 to the International Space Station that involved three space walks. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Flights 2 Related articles 3

1998 in science
1999 in science and the list of years in science Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Astronomy and space exploration 2 Biology 3 Computer science 4 Geology 5 Mathematics 6 Medicine 7 Technology 8 Awards 9 Births 10 Deaths Astronomy and space exploration January 6 - The Lunar Prospector spacecraft is launched into orbit around the Moon and later found evidence for frozen water on the moon's surface. January 8 - Cosmologists announce that the expansion rate of the universe is increasing. March 2 - Data sent from the Galileo spaceprobe indicates that Jupiter's moon Europa has a liquid ocean under a thick crust of ice. March 5 - NASA announced that that the Clementine probe orbiting the Moon had found enough water in polar craters to support a human colony and

With a baseline project now gelling, NASA started to work though the process of obtaining stable funding for the five years the project would take to develop. Here too they found themselves increasingly backed into a corner.

Shuttles
4 The Shuttle decision
5 Shuttle development
6 The Shuttle in retrospect
7 Shuttle description
8 Shuttle accidents
9 Previous Programs
10 External links

Components

The Space Shuttle consists of four main components:

The answer within those groups dedicated to the shuttle was to show that as long as you have enough launches, the development cost of the system would be overwhelmed by the cost of the rockets you would otherwise throw away. One factor that needs to be considered is inflation though, and in the 1970s this was high enough that the payback from the development had to happen very quickly or that money would never pay for itself. In other words you needed a very high launch rate to make the system work.

Jean Michel Jarre
displays and fireworks. One of his albums, Musique pour supermarchés had a print run on only a single copy, which was auctioned to raise money for French artists. In 1986 he worked with NASA; astronaut Ronald McNair was to play the saxophone part of Jarre's piece Rendez-Vous VI while in orbit on board the Space Shuttle Challenger. It was to have been the first piece of music recorded in space, for the album Rendez-Vous. After the Challenger disaster of January 28, 1986, the piece was recorded with a different saxophonist, retitled Ron's piece and the album dedicated to the seven Challenger astronauts. He was married to actress and photographer Charlotte Rampling. He is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. Discography Oxygene (1976) Equinoxe (1978) Magnetic fields (Les Chants Magnétiques) (1981) Concerts in China