The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

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

The Soviet Union gave up trying to go to the moon in 1971, after which their efforts consisted of a series of orbiting space stations. The official reason was research for a mission to Mars, but the real reason was observation of US missiles and launches. General Yuri Glaskov flew on a Soviet space station during the 1970s. He explained: “It’s very easy to see your missiles, the way they’re installed we could look right down on them.”

From 1971 to 1982 the Soviets sent up seven manned space stations, the Salyut stations. Salyut means “Salute” in honour of the heroes of the Soviet space program such as Gagarin and Korolev. It was traditional for cosmonauts to visit their memorials before launching. The main Soviet space effort was concentrated on long-stay scientific missions.

In June 1985 cosmonauts revived the Salyut 7 space station after TsUP had decided to abandon it, but reversed its decision. Bryan Burrough personally interviewed the two cosmonauts who arrived at the space station and translated the Russian language transcripts. Burrough:

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

On 28 January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launching from Kennedy Space Center. After the explosion, the crew module separated intact from the fireball before going into a two-minute free fall from 50,000 feet and plunging into the sea. A gas leak in the right booster rocket was blamed for the explosion.