Skylab, Our First Space Station; NASA SP-400

Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Scientific and Technical Information, 1977. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good. Quarto, viii,[4], 164 pages. Endpaper maps. Profusely illus. (most in color). Mission Summary. Editor's Note. Index, This work was prepared by the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. Leland F. Belew joined the von Braun Rocket Development Program as a Design Engineer in May 1951, working in the field of rocketry and propulsion systems. He contributed to the fast start system for large rocket propulsion engines which gave our nation the capability of placing a man on the moon. In 1958, he was appointed Manager of Engine Programs for MSFC where he was responsible for planning and directing the research, development and production of engine projects for vehicles in NASA's Apollo Manned Space Flight Program, including the Saturn V engines that took man to the moon. He was the manager of the Skylab Program at the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, a program that produced the world's first space station. Our first space station program in 1966 was the beginning. The program demanded innovation and ingenuity during its design, development, and test phase as the required flight hardware became more firmly defined, and the planned flight operations came more clearly into focus. Experience and knowledge gained from earlier space programs provided a solid foundation on which to build. The data on solar physics contains new and valuable information on the Sun's corona and the solar winds and opens up new concepts to be explored in future solar astronomy programs. In the area of technology, the data from Skylab's space processing experiments opens a completely new dimension in the field of materials processing. Crystals grown in Skylab have shown structural perfection, uniformity, and relative size not attainable on Earth, and the experiments performed with metal alloys and composites have aroused keen interest in future possibilities of materials processing under conditions of weightlessness.