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If the Skylab debris strikes a populated area, the U.S. Government will hear about it in a hurry. The State Department last month designated one member in each of its overseas missions as a Skylab officer to brief foreign governments on the facts of the spacecraft's fall and what the U.S. was prepared to do in case of serious damage. In India, the U.S. specialist, Thomas Vrebalovich, went to unusual lengths to pacify critics of the American space venture. He told journalists that if NASA faced the choice of steering Skylab toward either India or America, it would most certainly select the spacecraft's homeland. India's 83-year-old Prime Minister Morarji Desai joined in trying to calm his people's fears. Said he: "Don't get nervous and worried before it happens. It's no use dying before death comes."
The U.S. has assembled "go teams" consisting of NASA experts, Defense Department engineers, Red Cross aides, State Department diplomats and Justice Department lawyers—all on alert to be flown by the Air Force to any nation seeking help. China has already agreed to receive such a team if Skylab wreaks havoc there. The Russians, on the other hand, have rejected the offer. "We are responsible at law; there is no question about that," concedes one NASA lawyer.
Here too the American capacity for joking about Skylab flourished. Columnist Russell Baker proposed a series of letters for NASA to send, depending on where Skylab fell. Example: "Dear Greece: It's a crying shame about the Parthenon, but as American daddies used to tell their sons back in the days when the Model T finally broke down, nothing man makes will last forever."
In case of a serious Skylab crash in the U.S., Washington expects local fire, police and medical authorities to provide any needed emergency service. A team from NASA would go to the area to give technical advice and help document claims, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency would coordinate aid on a regional basis. Actually, few localities, if any, have made advance plans for such an unpredictable accident.
People seeking advice from NASA on how to minimize their own risks from Skylab got little help. The agency suggested that one might be a shade safer underground than on the surface, but it warned that the very act of, say, taking a car to get to an underground shelter might increase the danger—because the chance of getting hurt in a car accident is greater than the risk from Skylab. As a general rule, space experts suggested, "Do nothing."
Both in the U.S. and abroad, some editorialists asked a bit testily how NASA ever got in the awkward position of permitting tons of metal fragments to endanger wholly innocent earthlings. Some of the agency's sympathizers blamed the "bean counters" in the Federal Government's budget bureaucracy during the Nixon Administration for forcing NASA to build its Skylab "on the cheap," mainly with leftover hardware from the successful Gemini and Apollo manned spacecraft programs. Astronomer Mark Chartrand III, chairman of New York City's American Museum-Hayden Planetarium, claimed Congress was at fault in its financial shortsightedness. Said he: "Hell, if I had my way, I'd target Skylab to fall on Congress while it is in session."