NASA officially revised its re-entry bulletin to: “Skylab re-entered the atmosphere at altitude of 10 kilometres at 2:37 a.m. (Eastern Australian time) at 31.80 S and 124.40 E – just above the tiny Nullarbor Plain town of Balladonia.” Burning pieces of Skylab were scattered over an area 64 kilometres wide by 3,860 kilometres along the flight path.
Salyut 7 is revived
Frozen and empty, the station had drifted without power for eight months when two cosmonauts, Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh, approached in their Soyuz and managed a difficult manual docking with the station, which was in free drift. The temperature inside the station was well below zero when the two men, wearing fur-lined jumpsuits and oxygen masks, clambered inside with flashlights. Every surface was coated with frost and icicles. Working with ventilation to clear their carbon dioxide, the men grew cold and sleepy, repeatedly retreating to their Soyuz to rest and regain strength. As they worked to resuscitate the station over the next several days, patching burst pipes and thawing water supplies, headaches plagued them. Eventually they managed to revive several of the station’s dead batteries and from there gradually switched on all the station’s major systems. It took weeks to slowly resurrect Salyut 7 but by the time Dzhanibekov and Savinykh finished, they had shown that the Russians could almost literally bring a space station back from the dead.
Report on the Challenger accident