Skylab's Fiery Fall

A decade after the moon walk, a crash landing for a 77.5-ton giant

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Other questioners asked why the U.S. could not fire a nuclear missile that would blast Skylab to smithereens. The official answer: this is prohibited by international treaty. Refusing to accept that, some enthusiasts tried anti-Skylab measures of their own. Buryl Payne, director of Massachusetts' Institute for Psychic Energetics, used a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., radio station to tie in with 150 other stations and reach some 40 million listeners in seeking a mass psychic push to nudge Skylab into a higher orbit. In the broadcast, listeners were instructed to "relax, visualize yourselves as being in contact with Skylab and then visualize Skylab as moving out into space." Despite such positive thinking, Skylab kept slipping closer to earth.

More practically, the watching world would have to depend on the men who put Skylab into space to find the best means of bringing it back to earth with minimal risk to human life. The first priority was to track Skylab's decaying orbit as precisely as possible. That is the job of the North American Air Defense Command, whose joint U.S.-Canadian computers deep within a pink granite mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., continuously monitor the movements of 4,506 hunks of space garbage now orbiting the earth.

The worldwide array of NORAD'S space-tracking stations, using infra-red detection devices as well as radar, is so discerning that it can track an object even smaller than a basketball at a range of 20,000 miles. Even an astronaut's glove is being tracked. Beyond Skylab, the heaviest object aloft is now Salyut 6, the Soviets' manned spacecraft. Every month about 40 man-made objects re-enter the atmosphere, but only a fourth survive to strike the earth. There has never been a reported injury, although the fall of Cosmos 954 over northern Canada in January 1978 led to fears of radioactive contamination from its nuclear power packs (there is no radioactive material aboard Skylab).

The NORAD calculations are being transmitted by phone to a windowless room at the Johnson Space Center, where four five-member teams take turns watching monitor screens round the clock. On one wall hangs a lO-ft.-high chart detailing the altitude of the falling lab, day by day. The room, No. 314, is far plainer than the control center from which the Apollo moon missions were directed. The watch teams receive fresh telemetric data from Skylab whenever it gets within radio range of one of five NASA tracking stations (in Santiago, Chile; Bermuda; Ascension Island; Madrid; and Goldstone, Calif). On these "passes," controllers can still make small adjustments in the space vehicle's position relative to earth. This is possible for only four minutes out of every 90. Says Don McDonald, one team member: "It's 1½ hours of boredom, then four minutes of terror."

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