Jul 10 1979
From The Space Library
July 10-15: Amid disaster predictions, Skylab deorbited over the Indian Ocean with pieces falling on Australia: impact at 1637 GMT (about 11:37 a.m. EDT, or 37 minutes after midnight local time) July 11 sent debris across the Australian outback, with no reports of damage or injury. Australian officials had only an 8-minute notice of Skylab's approach: "'We nearly had a heart attack" when told that it would cross the coast, said one. (NORAD had lost contact at 12:02 a.m. local time and assumed splashdown into the Indian Ocean, with debris coming no closer to Australia than a few hundred miles.)
The PRC news service told of the difficulties encountered by Skylab and the U.S. government's offers of assistance and compensation in case of damage or injury, noting that some airlines had suspended flights during the critical period. Tass said that western Australia authorities had "warned the population that some parts of Skylab might be radioactive and urged ... caution in approaching them." At a NASA press conference a few days earlier, a reporter asked how NASA could tell if someone brought in a piece of debris claiming falsely that it was part of Skylab. Richard G. Smith, deputy associate administrator, Space Transportation Systems, who had been "actively in charge of Skylab activities for NASA," replied that "it is very easy to identify an object that's been in space. The high-energy particles that penetrate it in orbit give an extremely low-level but characteristic radiation background-no radiation for anybody to be worried about ... But it's very easy to determine that." United Press International (UPI) reported July 13 that the Kalgoorlie town hall had squeezed into its lobby the biggest fragment recovered so far, a 6.5-foot by 3.25-foot cylindrical piece of metal bearing a stamped number 102: "very good for the tourist industry," said Mayor Ray Finlayson. (NASA press conf July 6/79; coord ctr bltns July 9, 10, 11/79; NASA Dly Actv Rept July 12/79; W Star, July 12/79, A-1; UPI, July 14/79, A-7; FBIS, Xinhua in Chinese, July 12/79; Tass in English, July 13/79; Av Wk, July 16179, 22)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
