Skylab:The trailblazing outpost In Space

Skylab:The trailblazing outpost In Space

A true pioneer (Image: NASA)

Life on the International Space Station is luxurious. Its living accommodation is spacious, with two bathrooms, two toilets and a gym. There's also Wi-Fi, DVDs, musical instruments, even fresh fruit on a good day. Some occupants even have enough leisure time to film themselves performing David Bowie tunes.

The first US space station was rather more basic. Forty years ago this month,Skylab took off aboard a Saturn V rocket from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. It was a bridging mission by NASA, intended to fill the gap between the Apollo moon landings and the Space Shuttle yet to come. With only one window, drinking water that made the astronauts fart, bland food, and an on-board excrement store (for scientific purposes), it was like a garden shed to the ISS's Taj Mahal. But, garden shed or not, Skylab was home to nine astronauts in 1973 and 1974.

Back in 1973, nobody was even sure that humans could live and work in space for an extended period. By the end of that year, the station crews had racked up more hours in space than all the world's previous missions put together, and NASA had learned a lot about how weightlessness affected human physiology.

Being in orbit, Skylab was constantly in free fall around Earth, circling at more than 25,000 kilometres an hour. The astronauts found they soon got used to the feeling, though, reporting that, bar the initial motion sickness, life was pretty normal. It was harder to adjust when coming back to terra firma. After months in space, the body's muscles waste and so the astronauts had difficulty walking.