On Jul 12, 10:59 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
Joseph Nebus wrote:
In the midst of a discussion over on rec.arts.sf.written I ran
across a point about Skylab that I hadn't noticed before. Following
the end of the third and most confusingly numbered astronaut mission:

After the crew had returned to earth and the
end-of-mission engineering tests were finished, flight
controllers vented the atmosphere from the workshop, oriented
the cluster in a gravity-gradient-stabilized attitude with the
docking adapter pointed away from the earth, and shut down most
of its systems.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4208/ch19.htm

OK, but why vent the atmosphere?

So that a meteor hit wouldn't cause it to start venting air and make it
start spinning?


So it wouldn't smell like a locker room if they came back?