Spacelab

[Auguste_Fivaz]

Although American industry so far has been lukewarm to the idea of space manufacturing, the Europeans, especially the West Germans, are intrigued by the prospect of using the microgravity of space to make materials that cannot be made on earth. These include pure crystals for electronics, unheard of metal alloys and better medicines. Thus, among its equipment, Spacelab will have furnaces for materials processing and incubators for biological experiments. Says Kraft*: "When we can give the good application scientist and engineer the capability to do experiments in space easily, all those ideas on new ways of doing things and learning things and making things are just going to pop out."

The above snippet is from an April 16, 1981 Santa Rosa Press Democrat AP article on the new Space Shuttle and one of its components, Spacelab. While I was reading this article "Next: The space telescope" (By HOWARD BENEDICT AP Aerospace Writer) I surely recall the Shuttle but I was blanking on Spacelab.
So I dove into the Wikipedia article on Spacelab and was pleasantly surprised, a whole lot of that program I either paid little attention to or completely forgot.

I believe this is a bit of space/NASA history that others, much younger than I, or my peers who could also have forgotten, may want to read up on.


*Christopher C. Kraft Jr., director of the Johnson Space Center

 

[Fingolfin]

A graduate of Virginia Tech. Go Hokies

 

[spacespektr]

The Shuttle gets harshed on a lot among the space commentariat but NASA did a lot of cool things with it. My favorite was the Long Duration Exposure Facility - just good old fashioned engineering research.

 

[Auguste_Fivaz]

The LDEF would make a nice center point for a novel - what went wrong when they opened it up back on earth?