The Night The Sky Fell: How a falling satellite brought disaster tourism to Australia in the '70s

Forty-five years ago today, the first U.S. space station, Skylab, slipped from orbit and crashed to Earth.

It had been 65 months since the last crew had departed. NASA had hopes of keeping it around longer, but those plans were delayed and finally canceled.

A Rocky Start

The first U.S. space station, Skylab was built in the shell of an unused third stage of a Saturn V rocket. And, like several other components of the Saturn V, it was mostly built in Huntington Beach, California.

When Skylab was launched into Earth’s orbit on May 13, 1973, however, a micrometeorite shield ripped off, taking one of the lab’s solar panels with it and exposing the raw side of the craft to the blistering hot sun (see the photo at the top of this page).

The first crew to visit the station installed a makeshift umbrella and managed to free the other panel, without which Skylab would have been powerless.

After that, the lab served ably as the home to three separate crews, who spent a total of 171 days in the station through February 1974.

Even after that, NASA held high hopes for Skylab. The plan was for the new space shuttle to shove Skylab into a higher orbit. However, delays pushed the first shuttle launch well into the 1980s. So nature came up with Plan B ...

Above: astronaut/ scientist Joseph Kerwin conducts a physical exam of mission commander Pete Conrad on the first crewed mission to Skylab. Below: Later, the umbrella sunscreen was replaced with a more permanent sunshade for the side of Skylab.

An Enormous Laboratory

The three Skylab crews performed zero-gravity experiments, conducted extensive photography of Earth and the sun — including solar flares — and proved what conditions it would take for U.S. astronauts to live and work in space for weeks at a time.

That knowledge, in turn, would lead to improved design of the space shuttle and the International Space Station.

Astronomers expected increased solar activity in the late 1970s, but what they didn’t know was that activity would heat the outermost layers of Earth’s atmosphere and increase drag on Skylab, slowing its orbit and hastening its demise.

In 1979, it became clear the ailing Skylab wouldn’t wait to be serviced by a shuttle. A Russian satellite had crashed in Canada in 1978, spreading radioactive material over a mostly uninhabited area. There were no radioactive materials aboard Skylab, but NASA feared negative publicity at best and setting off an international incident at worst.

The opposite happened, however: Retailers and restaurants around the world advertised Skylab sales. People held Skylab parties. The San Francisco Examiner offered a $10,000 prize for the first piece of Skylab delivered to its offices.

On July 11, 1979, Skylab re-entered the atmosphere at a spot about 800 miles southeast of Cape Town, South Africa. NASA announced shortly after that the remains of Skylab had fallen into the Indian Ocean, but that proved premature: Residents of Esperance and Balladonia, Australia, were awakened as dozens of pieces of falling Skylab remains caused sonic booms shortly after midnight.

With no real harm done, Aussies accepted the events in good spirits: The Shire of Esperance issued NASA a $400 fine for littering. It wasn’t until April 2009 that a U.S. radio host took up a collection and paid the fine.

And that newspaper prize? It was claimed by 17-year-old Stan Thornton of Esperance.