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America’s First Space Station Proved Humans Could Live and Work in Orbit for Months. Now, the Public Can See What It Looked Like in Person for the First Time in Eight Years
A backup version of Skylab was displayed when the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum opened 50 years ago. After renovation of the building, the artifact is once more on view in a new gallery
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In just ten days, the very first crew of NASA’s earliest space station had to make an emergency adjustment to their mission.
Their destination, a space-based science laboratory made from a recycled rocket, was badly damaged when it launched on May 14, 1973. A shield meant to protect the lab from micrometeoroids and heat had torn off just moments into the flight. One of the lab’s two solar panel arrays was also lost, and the other, entangled by debris from the shield, could not be deployed. This left the space station, called Skylab, operating with only a fraction of its full power—and it was dangerously overheating.
NASA engineers delayed the launch of the Skylab 2 crew—Charles “Pete” Conrad, Paul J. Weitz and Joseph P. Kerwin—by ten days to come up with a repair plan. When the men reached the station on May 25, they first set about trying to dislodge the material that was holding down the solar array.
As they worked, they experienced a planned communications blackout with teams on the ground. When they got reconnected, things were going poorly.
“The astronauts were venting their frustration with four-letter words, while Houston repeatedly tried to remind them that communication had resumed,” wrote NASA historians Charles Dunlap Benson and William David Compton.
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Despite the initial difficulty, in the following days, the crew successfully repaired the solar array and deployed a makeshift sunshield to lower the station’s temperature. Their work secured the future of the station, which subsequent crews inhabited in 1973 and 1974.
NASA manufactured a second Skylab, too, but that version never went to space. Instead, in 1975, the Marshall Space Flight Center transferred the backup to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. A year later, when the museum opened to the public, that Skylab was on display—with only one of its solar arrays extended, to mirror the damaged laboratory that was in orbit.
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Today, as the museum opens five newly renovated galleries, the backup Skylab becomes accessible to the public for the first time since construction began in 2018. Artifacts inside the cylindrical laboratory reveal the conditions of early spaceflight and how scientists learned about the way microgravity affects the body.
When the museum’s first visitors walked through its doors 50 years ago today, Skylab was recent history. They might have recalled the space station’s launch or the grainy videos of its astronauts at work—and if they looked up at the right time, they would have been able to spot the uncrewed-but-still-orbiting laboratory with the naked eye.
“We could take for granted that our visitors had personal memories of the space program, the space race, the moon landing and Skylab,” says Cathleen Lewis, curator of international space programs and spacesuits at the museum. “Now, our visitors don’t have that firsthand memory.”
At its 50th anniversary, the museum has reassessed how it presents space history to the public. The new displays feature more context, include activities for hands-on learners and emphasize how the space age has changed the world, from communications satellites that aired World Cup broadcasts to iridium phones that saved lives after natural disasters. And with humans now taking on a return to the moon, the galleries feature advancements such as spacesuit innovation.
“We’re no longer only telling the story of Skylab, but we’re telling the story of how we—as a people, as a nation, but also as humanity—have learned to make human spaceflight safe,” Lewis says.
Did you know? 50 years of air and space
When the National Air and Space Museum opened on July 1, 1976, its ribbon-cutting was done by a replica of the Viking 1 spacecraft’s mechanical arm. The arm moved when it received a signal from the real Viking 1 spacecraft in Mars orbit.
During the construction on the museum, the renovated galleries reopened in phases. The first batch of eight exhibitions opened in October 2022, and the second set opened in July 2025. Throughout the process, Skylab was one of just two artifacts that remained in its place, inside a protective box, as crews completed the work around it; the other was the museum’s mockup of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Now, both Skylab and Hubble can be seen in the new gallery “RTX Living in the Space Age Hall,” which demonstrates how space exploration and space-based technologies have powerful impacts on human lives. The “TEXTRON How Things Fly” exhibition offers interactive experiences to illustrate the physics principles that underlie flight, including lift, weight, drag and thrust. Visitors can examine military aviation in the “Jay I. Kislak World War II in the Air” gallery, which features some never-before-displayed artifacts such as a rare Soviet Union Ilyushin Il-2 attack aircraft. In the Flight and the Arts Center, artistic interpretations of spaceflight and the space race capture how humans’ drive to explore beyond Earth has inspired creatives for generations.
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Another new exhibition, “U.S. National Science Foundation Discovering Our Universe,” traces the history of how astronomers have peered out into the cosmos to learn about space. With telescopes and cameras, scientists have picked up different kinds of light, including radio waves and X-rays, to paint a picture of the cosmos.
But light isn’t the only thing that holds information about the universe. Astronomers today also use gravitational waves, cosmic rays and neutrinos to learn about conditions in space. “It’s like having more senses, more ways to observe the universe,” says Samantha Thompson, an astronomy curator for the museum. “We use the analogy of popcorn—you can hear popcorn, you can smell it, you can taste it, you can get an oily feeling from your finger.”
The gallery also spotlights many of the people who moved astronomical research forward over the past few centuries, from Henrietta Swan Leavitt, whose research on variable stars helped calculate distances across the universe, to Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, who discovered crucial evidence of the Big Bang after mistakenly thinking pigeon droppings had thrown off their calculations.
“We wanted people to see that science is done by human beings, that this is a human activity,” Thompson says.
Nine humans, in three crews of three, conducted research in Skylab over its history. The station’s Apollo Telescope Mount was the most advanced solar observatory in Earth orbit at its time. Skylab was also built for Earth observation, studying our home planet from an “incomparable vantage” above.
These humans also had the assignment of figuring out how people could live in space. The longest stint on the station, completed by the Skylab 4 astronauts, was 84 days, which earned them a record for human spaceflight duration at the time.
To allow the crews to comfortably dwell in microgravity for so long, NASA tried to make the station more like a home away from home. Skylab’s kitchen could electrically heat food, offering more advanced food preparation abilities than any previous spaceflight did. The station also had the first space toilet, which operated with a fan and vacuum to collect all water and waste—“things that you don’t want flying around in your living space,” Lewis says.
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When it came to bathing, astronauts on the earlier Gemini and Apollo missions cleaned themselves with towels, soap and a little water. Upon their return to Earth, their body odor was so strong, “it was a slap in the face to those who greeted them,” curator Jennifer Levasseur told the museum’s Caleb Wong in 2017.
By contrast, Skylab introduced a space shower that involved a push-button showerhead, soap, water and a collapsible, cylindrical wall that the astronauts pulled up from the floor. As they washed, every droplet of water had to be vacuumed up, because even a single sphere of floating liquid in microgravity can be a hazard to electronics. The full shower procedure took more than two hours on average, and in the end, astronauts decided it was more trouble than it was worth. International Space Station astronauts today use the “old-fashioned” sponge bath strategy.
Skylab’s crews worked out the kinks of spaceflight, laying the groundwork for future astronauts to better conduct research and proving to NASA that humans could live and work in space for prolonged periods of time.
After its last crew returned to Earth, NASA powered Skylab down, though the agency still thought about rebooting the program. But as the lab’s orbit deteriorated, NASA decided its best choice was to manage the spacecraft’s controlled descent. In 1979, Skylab fell, aimed at a spot in the southern Pacific Ocean to minimize the risk of casualties. While no one was hurt, some pieces of debris landed in Western Australia, but the rest of the 85-ton structure either burned up in the atmosphere or sank into the water.
Now, the backup of the Skylab orbital workshop stands as a testament to the mission’s significance and the lessons it held for human spaceflight. The museum’s version of the station is the only one still accessible to the public.
At a rededication event for the museum’s 50th anniversary, director Christopher Browne said, “I dare say some of this country’s most incredible achievements are memorialized in these very halls.”