Skylab: NASA’s Best-Kept Secret| We Fix Anything | 2
American Innovations
Audible
4.6 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2019
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Skylab was NASA’s underdog — a cobbled-together program that lived in the shadow of the Apollo moon landings. But with the last of those moon landings completed in December of 1972, it was finally Skylab’s time to shine.
That is, until launch. Now the eighty-ton space station is in orbit, but it’s badly damaged — possibly uninhabitable. And the timing couldn’t be worse. With America in the midst of a recession, politicians’ patience for NASA’s huge budgets is wearing thin. If Skylab turns out to be a two billion dollar boondoggle, it could set the entire American space program back decades.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to American innovations |
| 0:03.6 | and free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:05.6 | Download the app today. |
| 0:07.6 | It's May 14, 1973. |
| 0:16.6 | A warm afternoon in Cape Canaveral, Florida. |
| 0:19.6 | Skylab America's first space station |
| 0:22.6 | sits atop a 30-story Saturn V rocket ready for launch. |
| 0:27.6 | Puffs of white vapor from its liquid oxygen fuel tanks |
| 0:31.5 | below down the rocket's sides. |
| 0:34.0 | Three miles away on the roof of the manned space flight operations |
| 0:37.7 | building, the group of Skylab astronauts anxiously watch |
| 0:41.3 | and wait for liftoff. |
| 0:42.9 | Two of them, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, |
| 0:45.7 | playfully fight over a pair of binoculars. |
| 0:48.6 | Let me see, Vino. |
| 0:49.8 | It's just sitting there, you act like you've never seen |
| 0:51.9 | a Saturn V before. |
| 0:53.3 | I'm just excited. |
| 0:54.6 | Wouldn't you be? |
| 0:55.7 | Conrad wears a surgical mask, a requirement for all astronauts |
| 0:59.6 | in the days leading up to a mission. |
| 1:01.4 | Once you're in space, even a common head cold |
... |
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