Noel Pearson

For more than six years, it hurtled through the stratosphere, a 77-tonne assemblage of micrometeoroid shielding, solar panels, coolant loops and booster rockets. But after 34,980 orbits of the Earth, Skylab was finally coming apart at the seams. The fuel tanks were almost empty and the gyroscope was cactus. The funds to haul it to a higher orbit hadn't materialised and a surge in solar activity was playing hell with the drag. There was only one place left for America's first space station to go.

Skylab - conceived by Wernher von Braun, commissioned by...