What if you could live in a floating laboratory zooming around Earth at 17,000 miles per hour?

The Day Skylab Blasted Off Into Space!

America's first space station launched like a giant flying laboratory

America launched its first space station, Skylab, and astronauts lived in space!

On May 14, 1973, something AMAZING happened! NASA launched Skylab — America's very first space station — into orbit around Earth. Imagine a science lab the size of a small house, floating in space!

Skylab was HUGE! It was about as long as a school bus and weighed almost 170,000 pounds. That's heavier than 20 elephants! Inside, astronauts had room to float around, exercise, eat space food, and conduct incredible experiments.

But here's the crazy part — the launch didn't go perfectly! A protective shield tore off during liftoff, and one of the solar panels got stuck. The station was overheating like a car in summer with the windows rolled up! NASA scientists worked super hard to fix the problem, and brave astronauts flew up 11 days later to repair it in space. How cool is that?

Over the next year, three different crews of astronauts visited Skylab. They studied the Sun, took amazing photos of Earth, and even did experiments on how spiders spin webs in zero gravity! (Spoiler: the spiders figured it out!)

💡 Astronauts on Skylab grew 1-2 inches taller in space because without gravity, their spines stretched out like accordions!