NASA's First Space Station Broke at Launch. Then It Fell on Australia.

In May 1973 NASA launched America's first space station, and it broke on the way up. Six years later its last orbit ran long, and pieces of it came down around Esperance, Western Australia. NASA had aimed it at the open ocean. This is what the record says happened in between. About 63 seconds after liftoff on 14 May 1973, Skylab's meteoroid shield tore away; almost ten minutes in, one solar wing was torn off. The station baked in the sun with too little power. Jack Kinzler of NASA Houston came up with a parasol on telescoping fishing rods. On 7 June Pete Conrad and Joe Kerwin cut the strap jamming the last wing and pulled it free, out of radio contact. Three crews then lived on board for 28, 59 and 84 days. The third crew became a legend for a strike; NASA's 2020 review of the transcripts concluded "it is clear that no strike or mutiny took place during the Skylab 4 mission." In 1979 a busier sun brought the empty station down early. NASA later found it had misjudged the drag on the tumbling station by about four per cent, and the debris fell hundreds of kilometres further east, over Western Australia, on 12 July 1979 local time. NASA waited for news of anyone hurt, or of damage. None came. Told through NASA's own recordings, films, photographs, transcripts, oral histories and reports, and The Canberra Times of July 1979. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open: "Gone completely off the bird" 1:29 Chapter 1: Sixty-three seconds 4:02 Chapter 2: "Whatever you need" 6:29 Chapter 3: "Gone completely off the bird" 9:18 Chapter 4: The parasol and the wing 13:40 Chapter 5: Sparklers 15:52 Chapter 6: Overscheduled 18:06 Chapter 7: The strike that wasn't 23:24 Chapter 8: Alone 25:44 Chapter 9: The last command 27:47 Chapter 10: Skylab country SOURCES AND ARCHIVE NASA mission audio: Skylab 2, 3 and 4 air-to-ground and Mission Control recordings, NASA Johnson Space Center, via the Internet Archive. NASA films: Skylab: Space Station I (JSC 651), produced for NASA by A-V Corporation; Skylab: The Second Manned Mission, A Scientific Harvest (JSC 627); Spaceship Skylab: Wings of Discovery (JSC 637); Skylab: The First 40 Days; NASA Skylab b-roll. All via the Internet Archive. NASA photographs: NASA Image and Video Library and NASA Johnson Space Center; NASA Visible Earth Blue Marble (maps and satellite views, 2004). NASA histories and reports: W. David Compton and Charles D. Benson, Living and Working in Space: A History of Skylab, NASA SP-4208 (1983); Report of the Skylab 1 (SL-1) Investigation Board, 1973; Marshall Space Flight Center, Skylab Reactivation Mission Report, NASA TM-78267; NASA Skylab mission transcripts, 1973 to 1974; JSC Space News Roundup, 10 August 1979; John Uri, NASA Johnson Space Center, review of the Skylab 4 "strike", 16 November 2020. Oral histories: NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project (Jack Kinzler, Joseph Kerwin, Owen Garriott, Gerald Carr, William Pogue, Edward Gibson, Neil Hutchinson, Jack Lousma). Newspapers: The Canberra Times, 13, 16 and 17 July 1979, via Trove, National Library of Australia. Museums: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (the backup Skylab). Cited, not shown: Henry S. F. Cooper Jr., The New Yorker, 1976, and A House in Space (as quoted by NASA, 2020); Harvard Business School case, "Strike in Space", 1980 (as quoted by NASA, 2020); Eyewitness News, STW-9 Perth, and Seven Network, July 1979. Location photographs (CC BY 2.0: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0; CC BY-SA 4.0: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0; all cropped): Carnarvon Tracking Station antenna, about 1969, Terence Kierans, free use with credit (Wikimedia Commons) Carnarvon Tracking Station gate, 1969, wilford peloquin, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons Perth at night from the International Space Station, NASA image iss063e055126, 2020, public domain "Esperance Foreshore Reserve looking N 2", Orderinchaos, 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons "Esperance Foreshore roundabout, January 2025", DaHuzyBru, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons "Esperance Museum Skylab 1979", Orderinchaos, 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons "Esperance Museum building and skylab", Orderinchaos, 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons FAIR USE Short passages from The Canberra Times of July 1979 (via Trove) are shown with the newspaper's name and date, for criticism, commentary, news reporting and historical documentation; all rights stay with their owners. NASA material is in the US public domain. If you own material used here and have a concern, contact us through the channel's About page. ABOUT THE NARRATION The narrator's voice is synthetic, created for this channel. There are no AI-generated images or video in this film. Every picture is real NASA film, photographs and documents, newspaper pages, credited location photographs, or our own explainer graphics and maps drawn over NASA images. #Skylab #NASA #Documentary