David S.F. Portree for Wired:

On 10 June 1977, former Skylab Deputy Director John Disher, NASA’s Director of Advanced Programs, directed NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, to conduct an in-house study of the feasibility of reusing Skylab in the Space Shuttle program. On 16 November 1977, MSFC engineers J. Murphy, B. Chubb, and H. Gierow presented results of the study to NASA Associate Administrator for Space Flight John Yardley. Before coming to NASA in 1974, Yardley had managed Skylab assembly at McDonnell Douglas, the Orbital Workshop’s prime contractor.

A fascinating look inside a NASA program to fix America’s first space station and use it as a way station for the Space Shuttle. The projected costs were fairly modest, and would have kept Skylab operational through the 1980s.

Skylab is a footnote to the history of America’s space exploration. Skylab was crippled from the start because of damage incurred at liftoff, and only hosted three crews.

Delays associated with the Space Shuttle program doomed any chance of the Skylab reuse effort coming to fruition. It re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in 1979, breaking up into pieces and crashing into the ocean near Perth, Australia.