February 2, 2009 - Twelve Weeks Without Weight

Published in cooperation with The Planetary Society

Spend the year in space, one week at a time

Recent Weeks

May 14, 2012 - Monkey Nebula

May 7, 2012 - Getting a Grip on INTELSAT

April 30, 2012 - Dust in the Wind

April 23, 2012 - Celebrate Astronomy Day

April 16, 2012 - Rover Rides Again

April 9, 2012 - Mercury’s Marvelous Morphology

April 2, 2012 - A Matter of Truss

March 26, 2012 - Hubble Bubble

March 19, 2012 - Rocket Pioneer Centennial

March 12, 2012 - Southern Lights on Saturn

March 5, 2012 - A New Star in Town

February 27, 2012 - Hubble Upgrade

February 20, 2012 - Sideways Supernova

February 13, 2012 - Auroras Gone Wild

February 6, 2012 - Hubble Telescope Tune-Up

January 30, 2012 - Lunar Orbiter Liftoff

January 23, 2012 - Magellan Turns up the Stereo

January 16, 2012 - Southern Sibling Sees Stars

January 9, 2012 - Hitching a Ride Home

January 2, 2012 - Transforming the Space Frontier

December 26, 2011 - These Laws Can't Be Broken

December 19, 2011 - Long and Winding Road

December 12, 2011 - Blast from the Past

December 5, 2011 - It’s Just Like Folding a Map

November 28, 2011 - A Warmer, Wetter Mars

November 21, 2011 - Spy in the Sky

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The Week in Space

February 2-8, 2009

Twelve Weeks Without Weight After orbiting Earth 1,214 times, the crew of the last Skylab mission returned to Earth thirty-five years ago this week. Astronauts Gerald Carr, William Pogue, and Edward Gibson lived in a weightless environment on the orbiting space station for twelve weeks, longer than either of the previous two Skylab crews, but they came back in better health because they exercised significantly more than the other crews. The trio conducted thousands of experiments and took four spacewalks, including one to observe Comet Kohoutek. The cumulative effect of atmospheric drag caused the vacant space station to lose altitude. Ambitious plans to boost it to a higher orbit using a remotely-piloted rocket engine were never realized, and Skylab burned up in the atmosphere in 1979.

Image credit: NASA