Spacecraft CRASHES to Earth!? #shorts #history

Pete would like to help me tell you guys the story of the time Skyab crashed Earth. The final Skyab crew of Jerry Carr, Ed Gibson, and Bill Pogue launched on November 16th of 1973. They left the station on February 8th of 1974, but not before bumping it up into an orbit that was 269 mi by 283 mi. As a point of comparison, the space station orbits at about 250 mi. After the crew was back on Earth, NASA remotely put the station into a gravity gradient attitude, which is a fancy way to say they put the heavier part down. Then they vented out the atmosphere and shut it off. Based on its orbit, its attitude, and predicted solar weather, NASA imagined that it would be able to stay up until about March of 1983, by which point the space shuttle should be flying, and they could then use it to boost it into a higher orbit to then bring it back online and use it for some early shuttle missions. But solar activity was higher than anticipated and in 1977 it was very clear that the orbit was going to decay by about 1979. And that meant they had to figure out how to bring it down safely because the station was massive. It was an S4B stage of a Saturn 5. That thing was not going to entirely burn up in the atmosphere and fall harmlessly to Earth. They were going to have to somehow make sure it didn't land on a populated area. controllers successfully remotely brought it back online and planned to use the attitude control system to prolong its life. They maintained it as long as they could and planned to nudge it into a high drag attitude when it was safe to de-orbit. That orbit came on orbit number 34,981. They planned to bring it down harmlessly east of South Africa where there was a whole expanse of ocean well away from any populated areas, but it went a little long and some parts of the station ultimately ended up landing in Western Australia. A local radio station fined NASA for littering and a pretty large chunk of the station ended up making a very odd appearance at the Miss Universe pageant that year which was held in Perth in Western Australia.