I previously argued that the Skylab program was cut short by mismanagement
(of a sort), one wasteful decision being to mothball Skylab B. NASA was
overconfident; it had no doubt that Skylab A would stay in orbit and
that the space shuttle would dock with it. Now a lot of other posters
have been incredulous at all of this, some even questioning that the
backup Skylab orbiter was even called Skylab B. So let me quote from
a 1998 article from the Space Online section of Florida Today,


For a few moments, let your mind wander back a quarter-century, to the
Fall of 1973, and imagine what might have been:

* A second team of Skylab astronauts busily preparing for their
mission to repair the once-crippled space station during a planned
54-day stay in orbit However, instead of just installing a new
solar shield to protect the laboratory from the effects of the sun,
the astronauts would also affix the Skylab Propulsion System to the
aft end of the space station. The SPS would re-boost Skylab to a
higher orbit, after the first three crews have completed the initial
phase of orbital operations, to prevent an uncontrolled reentry into
the atmosphere.

* Another Skylab orbiting laboratory, Skylab-B, is being prepared
for a 1975 launch, a mission that might possibly include a docking
mission with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. The plan calls for Soviet
cosmonauts to join American astronauts in conducting a series of
joint experiments, a form of orbiting detente between the world's
two superpowers.

...

Fast-forward back to October 1998 and a jarring return to reality.

Skylab was never outfitted with a cheap and simple rocket engine
to periodically re-boost its falling orbit. NASA, penny-wise and
dollar-foolish, wagered that the space station would remain in
orbit until the second space shuttle flight could dock with it and
raise its orbit. As usually happens when gambling with scared money,
NASA lost this bet. Unusual solar activity greatly increased drag on
Skylab and NASA was unable to prevent its uncontrolled reentry into
the atmosphere. It burned up in the summer of 1979 - long before the
shuttle's maiden voyage - crashing in huge chunks over uninhabited
areas of Australia. For want of a nail, the battle is lost.

Skylab B never got off the ground. It now sits, cut up into pieces,
as the one of the prime attractions in the National Air and Space
Museum in Washington where tourists walk through its passages and
peer into its plastic-protected interior. An actual unused space
station relegated to the role of a museum piece - a sobering reminder
among the grandeur of America's greatest space achievements that
are celebrated at the Smithsonian.

(http://www.floridatoday.com/space/ex...8b/100698a.htm)

I wasn't making any of this up. A phrase like "penny wise and dollar
foolish" describes *mismanagement*. They are on the same page of Roget's
Thesaurus - see http://www.bartleby.com/110/699.html.

So the question is not whether Skylab was mismanaged - it certainly was -
it's why. It's not because NASA was led by bad managers; actually they
had some very good managers on board then. Rather it's because Skylab
served no good purpose. A backup Hubble telescope or a backup GPS
satellite or a backup comsat would have been launched - certainly if
they had spare launchers waiting as Skylab B had. Saying that Skylab
B wasn't worth launching because it was too similar to Skylab A was a
tacit admission that Skylab was boring.

--
/\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis)
/ \
\ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/
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