When thinking back about the early days of NASA’s crewed space exploration we too often jump from the Apollo program to the Space Shuttle, skipping a very important mission: Skylab. Skylab was the first American space station, an orbiting workshop, and over the 6 months it was occupied, it vastly expanded human understanding of space exploration, from what space does to the human body to carrying out incredible scientific observations from orbit.
The pivotal mission featured in the 2019 documentary,
Searching for Skylab, and included interviews with some of the surviving astronauts of the three crews that inhabited the orbiting space station between May 1973 and February 1974, Skylab 2, 3, and 4. Among them was astronaut Ed Gibson, the last person to leave Skylab, closing its hatch forever as he and fellow astronauts Gerald Carr and William Pogue came back down to Earth.
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