Skylab B and Advanced Skylab for the Shuttle.

[carmelo]

Advanced Skylab.
A great occasion lost. :'(
A large space station for the Shuttle, straightway.

 

[Byeman]

A large space station for the Shuttle, straightway.

Not really. It would have been in space too long for the shuttle.

 

[carmelo]

Too long?
From 1979.

 

[blackstar]

Advanced Skylab.
A great occasion lost. :'(
A large space station for the Shuttle, straightway.

This is a pretty cryptic post. You didn't explain what you had attached, or where you got it from, so I will do so.

I posted that article to the NASAspaceflight.com discussion group. It's an article written by Tom Frieling on proposals to use the Skylab B workshop that is now in the Smithsonian. Tom wrote that at my urging. Actually, more like my blackmail: I obtained the source documents and sent them to him because I knew that he was interested in the subject. Then I told him that I was going to write an article about it unless he did. So he wrote a really nice article about the subject.

 

[Archibald]

Skylab B after a working Skylab A is a red herring, since there's no interest for it now that Skylab A did its intended job (Tom Frieling explains that pretty well in the article - zero interest in Skylab replica)
No, the REAL missed opportunity with Skylab B was its possible launch had Skylab A not been repaired; had it been wrecked for good ( for example if the Skylab 2 crewmember - think it was Alan Bean ? - had failed to unstuck the solar array)
Skylab B would have theorically launched 10 month after its failed twin, which place the launch approximatively to March 15, 1974.
The interesting question in this scenario is whether Skylab B, intact and launched nearly a year later, could have waited for the shuttle.
Two interesting side effects of that scenario are
- the lack of Apollo CSM, since Skylab 2 "wasted" a ship to try and repair Skylab A. With only two Apollo launched to Skylab B (suppose the 84 day mission never happens), a lot more oxygen, food and other stuff is left, and in turn, this may increase the chance for a shuttle revisit later.
- Skylab A wreck uncontrolable re-entry sooner or later. This could be pretty bad !

I think this could make a decent alt-history.

 

[OM]

...Bah. Ignoring all the negative waves, thanks for the PDF, sir. Still good info for future reference no matter how you slice it.

 

[Archibald]

I got a weird idea... during the Skylab crisis in 1979, did they ever considered trying to shoot it down with one of the ABM system ? Safeguard or the Thor Projet 437 ? without a nuclear warhead of course...

 

[TomS]

I got a weird idea... during the Skylab crisis in 1979, did they ever considered trying to shoot it down with one of the ABM system ? Safeguard or the Thor Projet 437 ? without a nuclear warhead of course...

Safeguard had been shut down in 1977, and I seriously doubt that Spartan could hit the broad side of a barn without a nuclear warhead. Much the same for THOR, which had been totally dismantled by 1974-5.