In its glory days, the aluminum-and-steel hulk that sits outside the Alabama space museum was a training ground for astronauts who flew in the United States’s first space station.
Today, the full-size training mock-up of Skylab is slowly rotting away after spending years on display at the US Space and Rocket Centre near Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Centre. Now resting in the parking lot, it has flecks of grey paint from a wall dotting its mesh floor, and a bird’s nest resting in an equipment compartment.
An engineering group has begun a restoration project, but more help is needed. All the work is being done by volunteers using off-the shelf materials such as mildew remover from a discount store.
Tom Hancock, a board member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, is the leader of the project. He said he is working on the restoration for people like his 18-year-old daughter.
”It’s history. It’s a chance for people my daughter’s age to kick back and see what it was like when I was young,” says Hancock.
Made primarily from spare parts left over from the Apollo programme, Skylab orbited the Earth for six years beginning in 1973. It helped pave the way for science projects aboard the space shuttle and the International Space Station currently in orbit.
Astronauts learning to live in space trained in Skylab mock-ups at Marshall and the Johnson Space Centre in Houston. Three crews of three astronauts each spent a total of 171 days in Skylab, which re-entered the atmosphere in a fiery blaze in 1979.
”We called it a part-task trainer,” said Garriott. ”You might bring a few experiments at a time to work on them.”
The Skylab mock-up was displayed for years inside the Space and Rocket Centre. But exhibits change, and it was eventually moved outside to a back lot.
The museum is owned by the state and survives mainly on admissions. Chronically underfunded, the centre couldn’t afford to do anything in the name of preservation other than take up the army on its offer to cover the mock-up in white plastic.
”They wrapped with shrink wrap. It’s so large it’s hard to put a cover over,” says museum curator Irene Willhite.
That was about six years ago; the plastic has since ripped to pieces. Partiers found the Skylab and did their thing, leaving empty drink cans and taking pieces of equipment once worth thousands of dollars.
Members of the engineering group realised the poor condition of the mock-up in July and began work to restore the first of its five huge sections, the compartment where astronauts trained for experiments they later performed in space.
Hancock had to use a broom to chase off a couple of raccoons that were nesting in the floor, and volunteers cleaned up fabric ductwork and equipment that was coated in green algae and mildew.
The restoration should take about a year. After that, officials plan to move the Skylab replica into a building that’s being built to house a full-size Saturn V moon rocket that was recently restored. — Sapa-AP