[texas booster]

Skylab as it appeared to the final crew upon its departure.

I still think of THIS as a real space station.

You may continue feeding me my pudding.

[telescope115]

I wasn’t into astronomy or sky-watching at the time, it would be interesting to know if anyone saw it travel across the sky, like we observe the ISS.

[GingisK]

In 1974 I was employed by Sperry Rand Space Support Services in Huntsville. I wrote a FORTRAN program to strip laboratory data from master down-link tapes, and raised the data recovery rate from 20% to 95%. That earned a nice letter from "on the Hill". I hung out with a cute chick whose brother was a senior mathematician in Von Braun's office. From time to time she would wrangle lock codes out of him, giving us opportunity to visit interesting places on our lunch break. One of those visits was with Skylab's sister ship, which was on standby but never flown. It was surprisingly spacious inside, but was divided into sections with a magnesium-aluminum alloy grating as flooring. Instrumentation was everywhere.

Sadly, I did not have a camera with me since that was forbidden over the entire MSFC.

All those guys who worked on the Saturn V and Skylab were enthusiastic and eager to share stories of Saturn's development. They were heartbroken when Von Braun left.

One rite of passage was being made to walk in close proximity to an un-shrouded, spun-up Skylab torquing gyro. That was terrifying.