‘Tally-Ho the Skylab’: The Mission to Save America’s Space Station, 45 Years On - AmericaSpace
Four decades have now passed since one of the most dramatic reversals in fortune in American space history: the salvation of Skylab. On 14 May 1973, America’s first space station was launched into orbit atop the final Saturn V booster, but an unfortunate sequence of events led to the premature...
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The above clearly shows how hard it was for Conrad and Kerwin to unstuck the solar array.
Whatif they had failed ?
Skylab A would remain a derelict, 150 000 pounds and $2.5 billion wreck.
Of course Skylab B could be launched: 10 months after May 1973, with some more margin to avoid another fiasco.
To simplify things let's say it launches exactly a year after Skylab A.
And then... shit hits the fan. As Skylab A; its S-II; and another S-II (from Skylab B !) now will all reenter. OTL nobody cared about Skylab A's S-II in January 1975. And Skylab A itself was manned and reboosted... yet we all know how it ended in July 1979.
So ITTL the situation is kind of thrice as worse: the derelict Skylab A trigger attention over it's S-II... and it's sister S-II.
And NASA takes a lot of heat in Congress and public opinion.