Customer Reviews

A house in space

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I hope this book returns to print sometime. It is a history of the Skylab space station
program. It discusses in detail the experiences of the astronauts who called Skylab home
for months at a time, and the experiments they performed. I hope that the people who
designed the International Space Station read this book, because it talks a lot about how
different types of people (scientists versus pilots) reacted to different aspect of
living in a gravity-free environment and how people coped with the various problems
associated with space station life.

These days Skylab seems to have dropped out of the public mind. Personally, having been a space-kid when it was up, I hardly gave it an afterthought over the years. There were only 3 missions and it was a cobble of left over Apollo stuff. even when it was up it didn't have the sheen of the then-recent-memory Moon missions. But in doing a wide scan for cheap stuff to read on the train I figured the pennies for a copy was a fair gamble.

And I'm glad that I did. And I think you will be too.

Three missions, yep. Cobbled tech, yup.

But unlike all of what I'd remembered of the Official NASA spin stories, this book tells the story gleaned from the "B Channel" tapes of real people really trying to live for the very first time way up there. Like, *way*, as Shaggy would say because something I didn't remember was that Skylab actually was in "Space" about 100km higher than the ISS which is technically in the upper atmosphere, hugging earth close so that the anemic shuttle can get to it.

And the thing that makes this a great book is that it is NOT a NASA publication, so you get the story with all of the real warts of what people acted like and reacted to up there. And it is an eye-opener; spaceniks all "know" about gravity and radiation and ventilation but "knowing" and hearing unfiltered stories about it is a different matter. Truly, it is.

I do wish that NASA had gone with the initial idea of spinning Skylab to test artificial gravity because it seems that they haven't had that great idea ever since and the ramifications of this are still the biggest scare tactics that they use to keep "their men" on the flight lists. But what I didn't know until this book was that the reason that it was not done was the choice of the Skylab Astronauts, not the agency... and also that to almost a man upon returning every astronaut regretted that choice.

It is a book full of neat stuff, little stuff but important stuff that sinks in. Stuff that I plum didn't think would be interesting. Well worth a try at the used prices.

Try it.