I love the way you told the story through the media of the time without modern narration. It gave a very real feeling rather than the many steps away that a documentary would normally give you.
I was 11 years old when Skylab came back to Earth and I recall a dude who lived in the Neighborhood actually had shirts printed up and was selling them. I remember one of the catchphrases was "Skylab...Good to the last drop", pretty enterprising dude, lol!
In Australia, before it Skylab crashed, when saying "Goodbye" to a friend, one would say "I hope a piece of Skylab falls on you". The best thing was when the town of Esperance issued a $400 littering fine to NASA. It was all in jest, NASA never paid it, but a radio station eventually did. The money went towards the museum in Esperance which has some of the Skylab on display.
A water tank (reinforced and insulated with asbestos and fiberglass) fell onto my then school's principal's farm. I remember her bringing in a couple of parts that had broken off due to the physical impact with the ground, scorched from re-entry. I credit that moment with my obsession with space travel and spaceflight.
Fascinating video, I was at school in the UK at the time. I am Intrigued at the comments on the video regarding the idea that NASA had full control of its re-entry, based on the fact that they can accurately put it up there in the first place. This ignores the fact that when it was launched in to orbit, the energy required to attain the correct velocity (Delta-V) was known, the atmospheric resistance to this velocity was also known, so that accurate orbital placement could be calculated. However, unlike the Space shuttle, there are no retro rocket boosters on Skylab powerful enough to initiate a planned de-orbit burn, Its demise was due entirely to atmospheric resistance slowing the orbital velocity. All NASA could do to set Skylab to tumble, in an attempt to control, to a very small extent, its final re-entry path.
I was an eleven year old nerd in 79 so this was pretty exciting. I remember how you could buy Skylab t-shirts, key fobs, lighters etc and even special "Official" Skylab paper bags for collecting Skylab debris. My friends and I were hoping it would drop some parts in central Illinois
It's sad that people paid more attention to Skylab when it was destroyed rather than when it was used. It was the greatest space station ever built -- the only one where you could move around freely instead of crawling through cramped tunnels. Yes there are bigger space stations now, but they're all made up of small modules. None of them have the sheer internal scale of the main part of Skylab.
uh… no. you do realize this is barely a decade after Stonewall, and around 20ish after the start of the civil rights movement. the world was never simple, nor free from violence and hate. the notion that people were all so polite, respectful, and civilized back then, based on a single radio broadcast, is ludicrous. humanity is, at its core, the same as it has always been. endlessly complex.
I was an astronomy buff in the mid-70's while in High School. I remember seeing Skylab fly by in my small Tasco Telescope. It was moving very fast and I only got it tracked for a few seconds.
A big satellite in low earth orbit like that is easier to see with wide field binoculars, especially at dusk and dawn, when the satellite is in sunlight but you are in the dark on the ground. The ISS is especially bright under these conditions and hard to miss. I think NASA has a website that tells you when and where to look for it based on your location.
We don't need retro! We need advance and additional news about our diaspora throughout the Stars as a well oiled machine putting together all humankind to go ahead with science rather than the division with weapons, war and autodestruction. Is this the end? It's sad and we are getting dumber and will we die without firing a spaceship to the sky but instead firing a nuclear missile at each other???
I was a young woman working at Equifax as a Stenographer typist when this occurred. It was talked about everyday by the office staff, and making everyone nervous about it's final entry. We thought it ridiculous they allowed this to happen.
I WAS WORKING for Motorola in Pheonix, in the dept. that did quality control testing of electronic parts that were going to be used to build SKYLAB !! I used a magnifying lens to scratch my name on the a of a bunch of small circuits parts as they were ready to be shipped !and I had long hair just like the guys in video !! Im '70 now !
Really excellent video! Very professionally put together. I saw those oxygen tanks in the space museum in Huntsville Alabama not long afterward. They were just lying on the floor, not behind glass or anything. Next to it was an oil painting of the tanks crashing to earth in a field. If I remember correctly, there was a statement in the description that the tanks were owned by the three men who found them. So I hope they did well for themselves.
You're kidding they left the cartoon props out in the open, it's like you're not even trying anymore and honestly they really don't have to try at all witnessing the last two years LMBO
That was a blast from the past. What was also facinating was the male influence in the ABC at that time and how professional and well spoken the men were. Sad, the ABC doesn't employ men anymore do they ?
Anyone else as obsessed with that 15 second guitar riff at the very end with Skylab orbiting in the background? I saw this video months ago and I keep coming back to listen to that last bit on repeat. Shazam doesn't recognize it.
I was a 4 year old kid in the United States when I heard that Skylab was coming down. I stayed by the window most of the day watching the sky, hoping to see it. Unfortunately for me I was on the exact wrong side of the Earth to see the reentry. But fortunately, I lived near Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. A couple years later I went to the museum there and they had a big piece of Skylab debris on display there. In those days you could even touch it. I also happened to see one of the Skylab astronauts in the airport here one day, about ten years ago.
It's interesting to see the Skylab story from an Australian perspective. I was in college in the USA at the time and saw very little coverage of the story, even though I had an active interest in the space program.
There would have been even more interest if there were a nuclear reactor aboard. By contrast, When Apollo 13 LEM came down in the pacific , in the Tonga trench, there was a thermo-nuclear generator on board for one of the left on lunar devices and this radioactive material went down in the drink.
I was in my USA senior high school year coming up on the Skylab orbit degradation and it was all we astronomy nerds talked about before that summer break. Very disappointed there was so little coverage of it where I was.
Aww.. I love the 2nd woman witness caller's excitement in her voice when the Gentleman asked her if they stay up to witness the fiery pieces of the Skylab descend to earth. 👁🔭🛰☄ I'd be excited and probably scared at the same time to witness such a historic moment a little too close to my home. 😱😬😀🤗
I was in my final year of primary school, year 6 in 1979 when Skylab came down. It was such a big exciting event. The night it came in to the lower atmosphere I was in bed in my Sydney Australia home … it was in the early am hours and I had my shortwave radio on listening intently to reports from ham radio operators all across Australia, I was especially paying attention to those in Western Australia. There were many reports of visible debris streaking across the sky with a few reports claiming to have witnessed what looked like solid debris impacting West Australia. I didn’t sleep a wink that night …. It was so exciting.
That's cool. Some joked that it was payback for when Ausies helped at crucial time (Apollo 13 maybe?) when we couldn't otherwise communicate with our astronauts. I was at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Cali when the 1st Shuttle returned, watching it on TV and ran outside to catch the sonic boom, hearing it really makes it seem near. Same for meteors which I've had pleasure of hearing a couple times.
This space station passed over my city, León, México in the late afternoon when it was reentering the Earth and I witnessed while it was passing in a high arch leaving on its path many pieces of debris and a tail of smoke that streched all across the sky on account of its altitude. It was a very rare sight. i wish I had had my cell phone at that time in order to video it, but at that time a cell phone was in the realm of science fiction, 1979.
I was 12 when Skylab came down. I have always been a huge space enthusiast and remember crying when these reports came out it had finally returned to earth. It was like a death in the family.
Brilliant piece of retrospective reporting. All those beautifully modulated voices that I grew up with. (I grew up in Tasmania but live France now) Many thanks. I have subscribed.
Possibly saw Skylab in its near-earth orbit in about May 1979 when I was in the Rhodesian Army. We were on operations out in the bush of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) when I was lying in my sleeping bag watching something large moving across the night sky. I watched it from horizon to horizon.
The sad thing is that if you ask him he probably thinks he’s the brightest bulb on the tree. The poor fool hasn’t a clue how Earths gravitational pull and orbiting works.
Very good thank you ;) I remember seeing footage on BBC UK news in 1979 of people selling 'Sky Lab protection helmets' on the streets of New York USA before its reentry, LOL...
The speaker says that air made Skylab slow down. Actually it is more complicated. Atmospheric resistance makes the satellite do two things simultaneously: descend its orbit and... speed up. It may seem a paradox but remember that falling things generally speed up.
The effect was that solar flares from the sun had heated up the atmosphere that year which caused it to expand. Considering that an orbit is gravitational phenomenon where an object in space is technically in a "free fall" toward earth, but its forward velocity is fast enough that it keeps missing the earth/atmosphere so it remains.. well, in orbit. With that in mind, the "drag" caused its forward velocity (fv) to decrease, thus shortening (and effectively shallowing) the orbital path of Skylab, inevitably to a point where it's downward velocity inevitably became faster than its fv... in short, it's forward velocity slowed down while its downward velocity sped up.
@@johndenicola6173 Orbital mechanics does nit work thus way. Friction makes you lose altitude and potential energy but some of it is converted into kinetic energy making you increase velocity. Yes, also the horizontal component.
In October of 1966 I was still only 18 but started working at Douglas Aerospace. My first job was on a project called the MOL Project. It was an Airforce Project. In 1968 I went into the Army at 20 years old. I got a letter from a friend that was still there working at Douglas and he informed me they were having a huge layoff because the MOL project was canceled. I came home in 1970 and got my job back. My first year was spent reprinting all the blueprints and manuals and changing the name from MOL to SkyLab. Same exact stuff we had done for the Airforce but a new name for NASA.
Ernie's Taco House in North Hollywood, California introduced their enormous Skylab burrito around this time, and believe it or not, 43 years on, it's still on their menu!
I saw it coming down! Was supposed to be studying for high school, but was captivated by the news reports. Finally they said it had crashed into the ocean....so I went to kitchen to get a mandarin for a snack. We live close to Perth airport and at that time of night, you get the international flights coming in. While I was peeling the mandarin and looking out the window, I saw what I thought was the very large tail lights of a landing 747...but there were too many other lights...about 4-5 large and many smaller streaking lights...bright colours of orange and purple...no sound...lasted less than a minute and then disappeared in a southerly direction...I ran downstairs to draw what I saw...heard the radio compare give out the radio number to witnesses to call in...I remember those calls! I was too shy...but I will never forget that sight!
This podcast reminds me of just how different the world is since 1979.... My handheld phone is more sophisticated than the best computer that existed back then...🤓
Nostalgic video. Thank you so much for uploading it. I was 6 years old. I knew nothing. I was in India, southern part of India. People just expended whatever little they had thinking that this was it. Hindsight we may laugh at it, but the reality was that people thought it was end of the world for this part of this world. My only confusion till today is how could a foot ball field sized rock destroyed the dinosaur civilisation? Is it sheer velocity/speed that decides the impact and not the mass, or it is the combination of mass and speed? What if a tiny unknown particle with negligible mass hits us at a speed that is one trillion times the known speed of light, technically it should destroy our planet.
Hi sir. Nothing can travel at a speed faster than light. Although there are theoretical particles called tachyon that are supposed to travel faster than light, nothing can, due to limitations of the laws of physics, can accelerate to the speed of light. This is because as speed increases, so does the mass. At the speed of light, everything touches infinity and hence there is no possibility. The meteor that destroyed dinosaurs was travelling at a speed much much much lower than that of the speed of light, but when it hit earth, it caused huge changes in tectonic plates behaviour causing earthquakes. But it was not what killed the dinosaurs. What killled the dinosaurs was the trillions of tons of dust that was thrown in the atmosphere that made it difficult for sunlight to penetrate earths atmosphere and reach the surface for dozens of years. This caused most of the vegetation to die so did the herbivores and carnivores dinosaurs. Although, vegetation survived in multiple places the the temperatures also came down a lot and as dinosaurs were lizards with cold blood, they could not survive the temperatures as well. Only the flying ones survived and some smaller ones survived.
The destruction is a function of both mass and velocity. You're way off about the size of the asteroid, though. It wasn't a hundred meters across, it was an estimated 12 kilometers across.
I saw a video on asteroids. It said if a particle the size of a marble hit earth at the speed of light it would completely inialate earth. Total destruction.
This documentary has a rather condescending tone, don't you think? The narrator sounds like "Skylab would only stay in orbit until 1970, but I could have told you that. I knew it all along."
It's not like I thought America used to care about other countries, but as an American (and Australian) citizen, I'm mortified by America's response. First, we DGAF about raining molten debris on humans because there's a 0.75% chance it would happen -- if a pilot told me there's a 0.75% chance the plane will crash, no way I'd get on it. And second, we literally make a contest over finding the debris to make people glad that we almost killed them. And third, we structure the game to almost necessarily make people turn against each other - because who is searching for debris by themselves? We (America) really are the masters of dividing and conquering populations that we piss off. Best. Distraction. Ever. If only Australia had more racial diversity, obscuring the Australians' focus would have been even easier! 😜
My God, we literally manipulated that sweet old couple (36:57) into being outraged that the debris we rained down on their country wasn't guarded well enough, and someone took a piece. Wow... Just wow.
Absolutely loving all these retro 'blast from the past' vids. So funny to watch people's attitudes and opinions back in the day and comparing to the reality of current world! Cheer's for the quality upload!
This is what tickles me about life at least in England today - I am 58 and hear folk my age laugh at most aspects of daily life , the attitudes and styles of 30 ,40 or 50 years ago but still 70% of the music radio output for over 40s or the bands which folk my age regularly listen is from this period with the same 300 tunes on constant repeat from cheesey radio or re issues of albums by Pink Floyd or The Stranglers or Elton John or tours by Duran Duran or AC/DC etc . After all no one goes home and sits in front of 1982 tv programmes whist wearing a Shell Suit ! It baffles me given the amount of music available from streaming services by thousands of brilliant musicians producing work since say 2000 , when it comes to Music at least nothing much has changed for those my age 🙄👍
Hmm, I had just had my 11th birthday when all this happened but didn't learn of it until well after the fact. I was stuck in Hospital unable to walk and waiting for surgery's so I could walk again. Stuck in a bed with no TV in a children's hospital back in the 70's was very depressing.
All media was like that back then. The Aussie accent had a somewhat more pronounced English sound to it, compared to the heavier drawl we have now. This is from memory, which was quite a while ago now, I admit! I do prefer the Aussie accent from this back then to now, but I totally admit I am very biased coz I'm an ol' fart ;)
I watched it fall from the pool area at the CSUN University Tower Apartments... and that building needed to be torn down after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake...
" Those were the days my friend we thought it was about to end " Living in Perth at the time you could say there was some concern. Well it missed by miles but on the astronomical scale very close.
I was 6 years old 43 years ago and I remember looking up at the night sky with my mother and saying that's skylab.. I was 2 moths when it up 1973 almost 50 years ago....
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I love the way you told the story through the media of the time without modern narration. It gave a very real feeling rather than the many steps away that a documentary would normally give you.
“In New York, a restaurant has created a cocktail called Skylab, a couple of these and you won’t know what hit you.” That gave me a good laugh.
we had a nightclub in Lisbon called Skylab.
I was 11 years old when Skylab came back to Earth and I recall a dude who lived in the Neighborhood actually had shirts printed up and was selling them. I remember one of the catchphrases was "Skylab...Good to the last drop", pretty enterprising dude, lol!
In Australia, before it Skylab crashed, when saying "Goodbye" to a friend, one would say "I hope a piece of Skylab falls on you".
The best thing was when the town of Esperance issued a $400 littering fine to NASA. It was all in jest, NASA never paid it, but a radio station eventually did. The money went towards the museum in Esperance which has some of the Skylab on display.
That's pretty cool..
A water tank (reinforced and insulated with asbestos and fiberglass) fell onto my then school's principal's farm. I remember her bringing in a couple of parts that had broken off due to the physical impact with the ground, scorched from re-entry. I credit that moment with my obsession with space travel and spaceflight.
20:00 the pure excitement and class in her statement, so heartwarming!
Fascinating video, I was at school in the UK at the time. I am Intrigued at the comments on the video regarding the idea that NASA had full control of its re-entry, based on the fact that they can accurately put it up there in the first place. This ignores the fact that when it was launched in to orbit, the energy required to attain the correct velocity (Delta-V) was known, the atmospheric resistance to this velocity was also known, so that accurate orbital placement could be calculated.
However, unlike the Space shuttle, there are no retro rocket boosters on Skylab powerful enough to initiate a planned de-orbit burn, Its demise was due entirely to atmospheric resistance slowing the orbital velocity. All NASA could do to set Skylab to tumble, in an attempt to control, to a very small extent, its final re-entry path.
"Hello, Scott Manly..."
@@warefairsoda Fly safe! Lol
@@warefairsoda OK now that is HYSTERICAL!! ;)
When it flew by I yelled Do A Loop!
The tumble was to get it to heat up more from drag and burn away as much as possible. One of those "it's not a flaw, it's a feature" things
I was an eleven year old nerd in 79 so this was pretty exciting. I remember how you could buy Skylab t-shirts, key fobs, lighters etc and even special "Official" Skylab paper bags for collecting Skylab debris. My friends and I were hoping it would drop some parts in central Illinois
Same, but different state.
Same - 11, nerd, Central Illinois. One of my favorite years.
It's sad that people paid more attention to Skylab when it was destroyed rather than when it was used. It was the greatest space station ever built -- the only one where you could move around freely instead of crawling through cramped tunnels. Yes there are bigger space stations now, but they're all made up of small modules. None of them have the sheer internal scale of the main part of Skylab.
Great video, appreciated. Weren’t people so polite, respectful and civilised back then?
uh… no. you do realize this is barely a decade after Stonewall, and around 20ish after the start of the civil rights movement. the world was never simple, nor free from violence and hate. the notion that people were all so polite, respectful, and civilized back then, based on a single radio broadcast, is ludicrous. humanity is, at its core, the same as it has always been. endlessly complex.
I was an astronomy buff in the mid-70's while in High School. I remember seeing Skylab fly by in my small Tasco Telescope. It was moving very fast and I only got it tracked for a few seconds.
Ohh wow!! That's a memory for the books for sure!! How intense of a feeling to have seen it with your own eyes. 👁🔭🛰☄
@@missjddrage1111 aaq
Seconds or not, you did _see it!_ 😁👍
I was the same nerd in high school at the time. I did NOT get to see it first hand.
A big satellite in low earth orbit like that is easier to see with wide field binoculars, especially at dusk and dawn, when the satellite is in sunlight but you are in the dark on the ground. The ISS is especially bright under these conditions and hard to miss. I think NASA has a website that tells you when and where to look for it based on your location.
Who's here after reading a news that the chinese rocket debris will crash into the earth this weekend? (May 7 , 2021)
Me
me lol
Me too
This is great! We need more of these retro focus episodes!
We don't need retro! We need advance and additional news about our diaspora throughout the Stars as a well oiled machine putting together all humankind to go ahead with science rather than the division with weapons, war and autodestruction. Is this the end?
It's sad and we are getting dumber and will we die without firing a spaceship to the sky but instead firing a nuclear missile at each other???
I was a young woman working at Equifax as a Stenographer typist when this occurred. It was talked about everyday by the office staff, and making everyone nervous about it's final entry. We thought it ridiculous they allowed this to happen.
Wow ! Mam youre making me feel so curious
I was just a kid when this happened was scared that it would fall on our town or house
Allowed what to happen? You think the government tells the sun when it can or cannot be active?
Outstanding and fascinating bit of reporting here, ABC. You did a great job of building the tension with the radio report chronology.
I laughed so hard watching this, I honestly couldn't tell if it was a satire a la Monty Python or for real.
🎯
🤣
I WAS WORKING for Motorola in Pheonix, in the dept. that did quality control testing of electronic parts that were going to be used to build SKYLAB !! I used a magnifying lens to scratch my name on the a of a bunch of small circuits parts as they were ready to be shipped !and I had long hair just like the guys in video !! Im '70 now !
Cool story Tomas.
You forgot how to spell Phoenix.
@@NxDoyle but as we have yu here to korrekt us, we shouldnt even have to bother.
Wow sir
@@akhileshsingh9843 Thanks, GOD bless ,
Really excellent video! Very professionally put together. I saw those oxygen tanks in the space museum in Huntsville Alabama not long afterward. They were just lying on the floor, not behind glass or anything. Next to it was an oil painting of the tanks crashing to earth in a field. If I remember correctly, there was a statement in the description that the tanks were owned by the three men who found them. So I hope they did well for themselves.
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
You're kidding they left the cartoon props out in the open, it's like you're not even trying anymore and honestly they really don't have to try at all witnessing the last two years LMBO
@@chrisgoetz3889 Your post confirmed our suspicions.
@@chrisgoetz3889 Teaching you to read was a waste of your teacher's time.
i was 10 years old and totally remember this. that was 43 years ago
I was 6 and remember it clearly as well.
Don't forget, it was Perth that lit up all their spotlights for John Glenn on "Friendship 7".
That was a blast from the past. What was also facinating was the male influence in the ABC at that time and how professional and well spoken the men were. Sad, the ABC doesn't employ men anymore do they ?
They don't do real news anymore, only propaganda.
Anyone else as obsessed with that 15 second guitar riff at the very end with Skylab orbiting in the background? I saw this video months ago and I keep coming back to listen to that last bit on repeat. Shazam doesn't recognize it.
I was a 4 year old kid in the United States when I heard that Skylab was coming down. I stayed by the window most of the day watching the sky, hoping to see it. Unfortunately for me I was on the exact wrong side of the Earth to see the reentry. But fortunately, I lived near Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. A couple years later I went to the museum there and they had a big piece of Skylab debris on display there. In those days you could even touch it. I also happened to see one of the Skylab astronauts in the airport here one day, about ten years ago.
I remember when this happened. I was a kid growing up in Michigan. Lots of news coverage. Also, the impact on Australia was definitely a surprise.
I was a year old and obviously have no memory of it. I envy you a bit.
It's interesting to see the Skylab story from an Australian perspective. I was in college in the USA at the time and saw very little coverage of the story, even though I had an active interest in the space program.
There would have been even more interest if there were a nuclear reactor aboard. By contrast, When Apollo 13 LEM came down in the pacific , in the Tonga trench, there was a thermo-nuclear generator on board for one of the left on lunar devices and this radioactive material went down in the drink.
I was in my USA senior high school year coming up on the Skylab orbit degradation and it was all we astronomy nerds talked about before that summer break. Very disappointed there was so little coverage of it where I was.
1 in 150 are terrible odds
The modern reporter at the end vs the reporters in the 70s is quite a notable difference. I’d take the latter 100% of the time narrating anything
Yes the modern day reporters voice is very jarring
I was 12yrs old when this happened!
Thanks for posting this!!
This is like a real life version of "The Dish", I love it!!
Aww.. I love the 2nd woman witness caller's excitement in her voice when the Gentleman asked her if they stay up to witness the fiery pieces of the Skylab descend to earth. 👁🔭🛰☄
I'd be excited and probably scared at the same time to witness such a historic moment a little too close to my home. 😱😬😀🤗
Very, very well done program. I enjoyed the space theme played in between the radio reporters stories.
I was in my final year of primary school, year 6 in 1979 when Skylab came down. It was such a big exciting event. The night it came in to the lower atmosphere I was in bed in my Sydney Australia home … it was in the early am hours and I had my shortwave radio on listening intently to reports from ham radio operators all across Australia, I was especially paying attention to those in Western Australia. There were many reports of visible debris streaking across the sky with a few reports claiming to have witnessed what looked like solid debris impacting West Australia. I didn’t sleep a wink that night …. It was so exciting.
That's cool. Some joked that it was payback for when Ausies helped at crucial time (Apollo 13 maybe?) when we couldn't otherwise communicate with our astronauts. I was at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Cali when the 1st Shuttle returned, watching it on TV and ran outside to catch the sonic boom, hearing it really makes it seem near. Same for meteors which I've had pleasure of hearing a couple times.
FiIthy "Ostrayan"!
the cocktail named for it and the "have a couple and you wont know what hit you" lol that's a classic i love it.. hell a funny
The Agena, was the 3rd stage of an Atlas, Skylab was 3rd stage of a Saturn 1. They were never intended to last for long.
This is one of the coolest mashups of an event I’ve ever seen.
Old mate admitted to going to the Kalgoorlie brothel. MVP
Yes i agree we need more of these retro focus episodes!
My dad was concerned about the impact this would have on us and built a shelter “The Ark” he called it.
We went down there for many years. AMA
This space station passed over my city, León, México in the late afternoon when it was reentering the Earth and I witnessed while it was passing in a high arch leaving on its path many pieces of debris and a tail of smoke that streched all across the sky on account of its altitude. It was a very rare sight. i wish I had had my cell phone at that time in order to video it, but at that time a cell phone was in the realm of science fiction, 1979.
But You had a giant space station crashing :D so this is more science fiction than you could have asked for :D
I was 12 when Skylab came down. I have always been a huge space enthusiast and remember crying when these reports came out it had finally returned to earth. It was like a death in the family.
I grew up in Kalgoorlie. My father has a piece of Skylab
Hey, thanx for that "never knew what hit you". I needed a good laugh.
Brilliant piece of retrospective reporting. All those beautifully modulated voices that I grew up with. (I grew up in Tasmania but live France now) Many thanks. I have subscribed.
Possibly saw Skylab in its near-earth orbit in about May 1979 when I was in the Rhodesian Army. We were on operations out in the bush of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) when I was lying in my sleeping bag watching something large moving across the night sky. I watched it from horizon to horizon.
That’s awesome!
A moon or what ?
31:35 - Poor bloke doesn't understand the difference between a controlled rocket flight and a completely uncontrolled satellite
The sad thing is that if you ask him he probably thinks he’s the brightest bulb on the tree.
The poor fool hasn’t a clue how Earths gravitational pull and orbiting works.
I remember 60 minutes in Australia TV shows
This is a really nice piece. Good work ABC!
I remember seeing Skylab fly over in the skies above Eastern Iowa in the late 70s. Moving very quickly. Exciting.
Great production, I was in Perth while this was going on. If I remember right there are a few bits at the Balladonia roadhouse.
Robert Fletcher I have a piece on my bookshelf along with some stone from the original post office.
This fascinated me as a child. I was in 4th grade at the time looking at turning 10 years old. I'm now 51 🙄😬
Damn haha
I was 15 and was freaking out too that summer. Everybody was concerned in the United States.
Very good thank you ;) I remember seeing footage on BBC UK news in 1979 of people selling 'Sky Lab protection helmets' on the streets of New York USA before its reentry, LOL...
i think steve cosser has thee greatest asmr voice of all time. where can i find a 5hr tape of him talking to fall asleep to?
Remarkable, sad though the amount of space junk that's up there and thank God it did not veer off course.
“Drink a couple and you won’t know what hit you.” Lol, that is gold
The tenacity of NASA. Incredable.
The space shuttle was supposed to save Skylab. But the white elephant didn't get up there in time.
The space shuttle was first estimated to have a 1 in 100,000 chance of failure. In reality it was closer to 2%.
So if the general public wouldn’t mind, please collect as many pieces of radioactive space material as possible $$$
"Where are you going, Chicken Little?" Chicken Little: "To tell the king Skylab is falling!"
I saw Skylab fly over my house including H comet space shuttle hail bop I've been very fortunate
The speaker says that air made Skylab slow down. Actually it is more complicated. Atmospheric resistance makes the satellite do two things simultaneously: descend its orbit and... speed up. It may seem a paradox but remember that falling things generally speed up.
The effect was that solar flares from the sun had heated up the atmosphere that year which caused it to expand. Considering that an orbit is gravitational phenomenon where an object in space is technically in a "free fall" toward earth, but its forward velocity is fast enough that it keeps missing the earth/atmosphere so it remains.. well, in orbit. With that in mind, the "drag" caused its forward velocity (fv) to decrease, thus shortening (and effectively shallowing) the orbital path of Skylab, inevitably to a point where it's downward velocity inevitably became faster than its fv... in short, it's forward velocity slowed down while its downward velocity sped up.
@@johndenicola6173 Orbital mechanics does nit work thus way. Friction makes you lose altitude and potential energy but some of it is converted into kinetic energy making you increase velocity. Yes, also the horizontal component.
@@arctic_haze Thanks for the clarification! ;)
It sped up, but logically it sped tangentially, not vertically
@@akhileshsingh9843 It speeds up almost horizontally.
I saw the Space Shuttle burn up. I’ll never forget it
I was 5 years old and remember the news on television.
I was 21.
I was six and it was all over the news.
In October of 1966 I was still only 18 but started working at Douglas Aerospace. My first job was on a project called the MOL Project. It was an Airforce Project. In 1968 I went into the Army at 20 years old. I got a letter from a friend that was still there working at Douglas and he informed me they were having a huge layoff because the MOL project was canceled. I came home in 1970 and got my job back. My first year was spent reprinting all the blueprints and manuals and changing the name from MOL to SkyLab. Same exact stuff we had done for the Airforce but a new name for NASA.
Beautifully put together.
Very interesting. Thank you for posting!
Ernie's Taco House in North Hollywood, California introduced their enormous Skylab burrito around this time, and believe it or not, 43 years on, it's still on their menu!
I remember I was scared it was going to strike me but I still took my kabuki 10-speed road bike for a hot bike ride that summer !!
The thing had been abandoned for a few yrs. When it crashed
I saw it coming down! Was supposed to be studying for high school, but was captivated by the news reports. Finally they said it had crashed into the ocean....so I went to kitchen to get a mandarin for a snack. We live close to Perth airport and at that time of night, you get the international flights coming in. While I was peeling the mandarin and looking out the window, I saw what I thought was the very large tail lights of a landing 747...but there were too many other lights...about 4-5 large and many smaller streaking lights...bright colours of orange and purple...no sound...lasted less than a minute and then disappeared in a southerly direction...I ran downstairs to draw what I saw...heard the radio compare give out the radio number to witnesses to call in...I remember those calls! I was too shy...but I will never forget that sight!
20:00 "Yes We Did" LOL, she's adorable.
Thanks ABC ❤ for uploading this gem of a video
Pretty spectacular sight, with all the different colours and individual parts burning at re entry.
This podcast reminds me of just how different the world is since 1979....
My handheld phone is more sophisticated than the best computer that existed back then...🤓
Really good thank you ABC
What was it about "Rubber - Chicken Circuit" politicians of the '70's and Early '80's, and that 'Wave - Train' hairstyle?!
31:10 "if they'd wanted it, why didn't they drop it back in America?"
this is when i realized i liked this guy a lot more than i first thought
Nostalgic video. Thank you so much for uploading it. I was 6 years old. I knew nothing. I was in India, southern part of India. People just expended whatever little they had thinking that this was it. Hindsight we may laugh at it, but the reality was that people thought it was end of the world for this part of this world. My only confusion till today is how could a foot ball field sized rock destroyed the dinosaur civilisation? Is it sheer velocity/speed that decides the impact and not the mass, or it is the combination of mass and speed? What if a tiny unknown particle with negligible mass hits us at a speed that is one trillion times the known speed of light, technically it should destroy our planet.
Hi sir. Nothing can travel at a speed faster than light. Although there are theoretical particles called tachyon that are supposed to travel faster than light, nothing can, due to limitations of the laws of physics, can accelerate to the speed of light. This is because as speed increases, so does the mass. At the speed of light, everything touches infinity and hence there is no possibility. The meteor that destroyed dinosaurs was travelling at a speed much much much lower than that of the speed of light, but when it hit earth, it caused huge changes in tectonic plates behaviour causing earthquakes. But it was not what killed the dinosaurs. What killled the dinosaurs was the trillions of tons of dust that was thrown in the atmosphere that made it difficult for sunlight to penetrate earths atmosphere and reach the surface for dozens of years. This caused most of the vegetation to die so did the herbivores and carnivores dinosaurs. Although, vegetation survived in multiple places the the temperatures also came down a lot and as dinosaurs were lizards with cold blood, they could not survive the temperatures as well. Only the flying ones survived and some smaller ones survived.
🐖🎼🎶
the impact that killed the dinosaurs was far, far larger than a rock. more like well over 6 miles large in size.
The destruction is a function of both mass and velocity. You're way off about the size of the asteroid, though. It wasn't a hundred meters across, it was an estimated 12 kilometers across.
I saw a video on asteroids. It said if a particle the size of a marble hit earth at the speed of light it would completely inialate earth. Total destruction.
Fantastic video... We need more of these!
I was flying a hot air balloon when air traffic control instructed us to land because Skylab was falling over western Canada.
This documentary has a rather condescending tone, don't you think? The narrator sounds like "Skylab would only stay in orbit until 1970, but I could have told you that. I knew it all along."
It's not like I thought America used to care about other countries, but as an American (and Australian) citizen, I'm mortified by America's response.
First, we DGAF about raining molten debris on humans because there's a 0.75% chance it would happen -- if a pilot told me there's a 0.75% chance the plane will crash, no way I'd get on it.
And second, we literally make a contest over finding the debris to make people glad that we almost killed them.
And third, we structure the game to almost necessarily make people turn against each other - because who is searching for debris by themselves?
We (America) really are the masters of dividing and conquering populations that we piss off.
Best. Distraction. Ever.
If only Australia had more racial diversity, obscuring the Australians' focus would have been even easier! 😜
My God, we literally manipulated that sweet old couple (36:57) into being outraged that the debris we rained down on their country wasn't guarded well enough, and someone took a piece.
Wow... Just wow.
Absolutely loving all these retro 'blast from the past' vids. So funny to watch people's attitudes and opinions back in the day and comparing to the reality of current world! Cheer's for the quality upload!
This is what tickles me about life at least in England today - I am 58 and hear folk my age laugh at most aspects of daily life , the attitudes and styles of 30 ,40 or 50 years ago but still 70% of the music radio output for over 40s or the bands which folk my age regularly listen is from this period with the same 300 tunes on constant repeat from cheesey radio or re issues of albums by Pink Floyd or The Stranglers or Elton John or tours by Duran Duran or AC/DC etc . After all no one goes home and sits in front of 1982 tv programmes whist wearing a Shell Suit ! It baffles me given the amount of music available from streaming services by thousands of brilliant musicians producing work since say 2000 , when it comes to Music at least nothing much has changed for those my age 🙄👍
@@newforestpixie5297 Another brain fried by too much caffeine... sad
It's so strange how the Australian accent has become more pronounced over just 50 years lol! They all sound British in the recordings from 79....
The fact that we could launch something the size of a locomotive into space is crazy
I remember I was at summer camp in the mountains with clear sky’s. One of the counselors pointed Skylab out to us as it passed.
Hmm, I had just had my 11th birthday when all this happened but didn't learn of it until well after the fact. I was stuck in Hospital unable to walk and waiting for surgery's so I could walk again. Stuck in a bed with no TV in a children's hospital back in the 70's was very depressing.
Steve Cossee looks like Elfo from Disenchantment 😂😂😂
Super cool. We love James Webb stuff these days. This was their version. Just before I was born too. Love it!
Steve Cosser had the perfect voice for this.
As a PoHM, I'm surprised there was so much English "Received Pronunciation" on Australian radio at the time!
All media was like that back then. The Aussie accent had a somewhat more pronounced English sound to it, compared to the heavier drawl we have now. This is from memory, which was quite a while ago now, I admit! I do prefer the Aussie accent from this back then to now, but I totally admit I am very biased coz I'm an ol' fart ;)
I watched it fall from the pool area at the CSUN University Tower Apartments... and that building needed to be torn down after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake...
The documentary referred to at the end of the video is Searching for Skylab available on vimeo.
" Those were the days my friend we thought it was about to end "
Living in Perth at the time you could say there was some concern. Well it missed by miles but on the astronomical scale very close.
I picked up many peices of Skylab at Rawlinna
@@Peter-ob6ue I hope you still have them .
I was 5 years old in Australia remember going out for a couple nights with other people from our small rural area looking up at the night sky for it
Wow 😲😲 thank you
The chances of someone getting killed or injured by Skylab falling was 1 in 150??
Me my parents and cousin were in Europe when this happened I was 9 years old.
Great editing of this episode 👍👍👍
Cripes mate I was on the dunny when this chunk of metal came through the roof.
What's the odds of me searching this without knowledge and watching on July 11 22... Strange
I was 6 years old 43 years ago and I remember looking up at the night sky with my mother and saying that's skylab.. I was 2 moths when it up 1973 almost 50 years ago....
Skylab alert helmets: providing 1 nanosecond of warning. They actually did exist as a gag item