Skylab 3

Key facts

Mission & specifications

Mission

Skylab 3 took the young art of living in space and doubled it. Alan Bean, Owen Garriott and Jack Lousma launched on 28 July 1973 to the station the first crew had saved, and stayed for 59 days — more than twice the record Skylab 2 had just set. Space-sickness and a leaking thruster on their Apollo ferry craft made a tense start, and NASA quietly readied a rescue vehicle that in the end was never needed. Then the crew found their rhythm: tens of thousands of images of the Sun from the station's solar observatory, Earth-resources surveys, and a long series of medical experiments tracking how their bodies adapted across two months of weightlessness. Two spiders carried up as an experiment, Arabella and Anita, learned to spin near-normal webs in orbit. By the time they splashed down on 25 September, Skylab 3 had shown that a crew could work hard and stay healthy through months in space — the middle step from Soyuz 9's weeks to Skylab 4's quarter-year.

1. 1973Skylab 3 launchesLaunch

   Bean, Garriott and Lousma fly up for a planned two-month stay aboard Skylab.

2. 1973Past the previous recordMilestone

   After a shaky start — space-sickness and a leaking ferry thruster that put a rescue flight on standby — the crew pass Skylab 2's 28-day mark.

3. 197359 days — the record doubledMission end

   The crew splash down after 59 days, more than doubling the previous record and proving months-long missions were sustainable.

Images

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