On July 11, 1979, people all over Western Australia looked up to see something incredible: fiery streaks blazing across the daytime sky like a slow-motion fireworks show. The lights weren't a meteor shower - they were chunks of America's first space station, Skylab, plummeting back to Earth. After six years orbiting the planet, the 77-ton giant had run out of altitude and was breaking apart as it tore through the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean and the Australian outback.
Skylab had launched in May 1973 on top of a mighty Saturn V rocket, the same kind that took astronauts to the Moon. It was a science lab in space the size of a small house, where three different crews of astronauts spent up to 84 days at a time studying the sun, growing experiments, and exercising on a treadmill in zero gravity. The astronauts even ran races around the inside of the cylindrical station like hamsters in a wheel. After the last crew left in 1974, Skylab was supposed to be rescued by the Space Shuttle - but the shuttle wasn't ready in time, and Earth's atmosphere slowly pulled the station down.
Luckily, no one was hurt when Skylab came down. Chunks scattered across the empty outback near the town of Esperance, where local kids picked up charred metal souvenirs. Esperance cheekily fined NASA $400 for littering - a fine that wasn't paid for 30 years, until a California radio host crowdfunded it. Skylab paved the way for today's International Space Station, where astronauts live and work continuously, building on every lesson Skylab taught.
