Skylab Was Cooking Itself in Orbit. NASA Saved It With an Umbrella.

Sixty-three seconds after launch in May 1973, America's first space station lost the shield that kept it cool and one of its two big solar wings. Inside, it climbed to around 130 degrees, and nobody could get to it for eleven days. This is how it was saved: thousands of people working the problem at once, a sunshade whose first prototype was made from fishing rods and parachute silk, an 8-inch hole in the wall, and two astronauts who had to stand up under a rope and pull a jammed wing open by hand. All photos and film are from NASA and in the public domain, including the 1973 NASA films "Skylab: The First 40 Days" and "Skylab: The Second Manned Mission." Quotes come from NASA's official history of Skylab, the NASA oral histories of the people involved, and the 1973 investigation board report. Narration uses an AI voice. The animations are illustrations and reconstructions made for this video. CHAPTERS 0:00 The umbrella 1:01 A house built from a rocket 2:24 63 seconds 3:44 Cooking in orbit 5:45 Scores of ideas 7:00 The engineer nobody asked 9:03 The water tank 11:18 Launch day 11:56 The first look 12:50 Eight tries to dock 13:36 Inside the heat 14:04 Opening the parasol 15:24 The jammed wing 16:21 June 7 18:02 "We can fix anything" 19:34 What went wrong 20:14 Skylab falls