Apollo 17 returned to Earth to splash down in the Pacific at 1:24 pm spacecraft time on 19 December. The crew of Apollo 17 were welcomed back with a big party on the carrier USS
Skylab in deep trouble
Skylab 1 was the last Saturn V launched in the twentieth century. With the regular stunning successes of the Apollo launches, it was expected to be another copybook mission. It was – until just after launch. On a nice warm spring day, right on time, the SIC first stage thundered into life on Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center and lifted smoothly into the air. It looked another perfect launch, then 63 seconds later the flight engineers were startled to see their telemetry giving strange indications from the micrometeoroid shield and part of the solar array – it looked as though they had initiated deployment early. Atmospheric drag had torn the shield loose and a portion had jammed one of the workshop solar wings, and severely damaged the other solar wing. The staging rocket’s blast then tore the wing from its hinges and flung it into space to be lost.
Just over ten minutes after launch Skylab entered a nearly circular orbit above the Earth, and manoeuvred around until its centreline pointed to the centre of the Earth. Unlike Apollo, which rolled around on its way to the Moon to keep the temperatures evenly spread around, Skylab remained in one attitude throughout the orbit, the heat and cold being controlled by a micrometeorid shield using black, white and aluminium paints painted in a carefully tailored pattern to control heat losses and gains. This shield was lost, so the surface of the workshop was left exposed to the Sun, and the temperatures rose 93°C above the designed limits.