big snip

It's nice to see a thread about Skylab, a program dear to my heart ( I
worked on AAP and Skylab from 1966-70 at McDonnell Douglas). Skylab cost
about $10B in current dollars and ran from July 1969 through Feb 1974. And,
yes, there were flight-worthy spares for most of the hardware. There were
two Airlock Modules built by MDAC-St. Louis, two Multiple Docking Adapters
built by Martin, and two Orbital Workshops built by MDAC-Huntington Beach.
The flight unit was S-IVB-212, one of the spare 2nd stages from von Braun's
Saturn IB ELV. The backup was S-IVB-515, one of the spare 3rd stages from
the Saturn V. The backup OWS is in the NASM nowadays. There was one flight
version of the Apollo Telescope Mount built (with MSFC functioning as the
integrating agency) along with prototype hardware that was not really
flight-qualified.

I remember hearing talk in 1972-73 about NASA possibly launching the backup
hardware after the consumables were exhausted in Skylab A. And NASA and the
Soviets also discussed a number of scenarios for what eventually became the
Apollo-Soyuz Test Program (ASTP). These included rendezvous of Apollo and
Soyuz spacecraft at Skylab A, at one of the Salyut space stations, and,
possibly, at Skylab B.

Nothing came of these ideas for a number of reasons. The Soviets were dead
set against the Salyut idea since Salyut in its Almaz configuration was
being used for military reconnaissance (Almaz essentially was what the USAF
MOL was supposed to be). And there were problems with revisiting Skylab A in
mid-1975, 18 months after the third crew had departed (consumables, overall
safety of the space station, etc). But it would have been interesting if
NASA and the Soviets could have pulled this one off. Nearly 20 years would
pass before something like this was done in the shuttle-Mir missions of
1995-98. And, finally, by 1973 the shuttle was starting to eat NASA's
budgetary lunch, leaving only about $500M for the ASTP mission in July 1975.

As we near the 20th anniversary of President Reagan's January 1984
initiation of the permanent space station program and reflect on our present
situation (shuttle grounded, ISS half-completed, $30B spent so far on ISS,
runout cost of ISS estimated at ~$100B, all in current dollars), it's
interesting to recall what one could do at one time 30 years ago with a
$10B budget, ~5 years of schedule and a different type of space station
paradigm.

Later
Ray Schmitt


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