Courtesy National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
While NASA prepared and launched the various Apollo Moon landing missions, planning and construction of America’s first space station, Skylab, was well underway. Skylab launched from Earth on May 14, 1973, atop the same type of rocket, the Saturn V, that carried the Apollo Missions into space.
Between May 25, 1973, and February 8, 1974, three different three-man crews stayed and worked aboard Skylab. Skylab contained almost three hundred different scientific instruments and experiments. The Skylab manned missions proved that astronauts could live and work in space for extended periods of time; the third and final Skylab crew lived aboard the station for eighty-four days.
