Minutes into launch, America’s first space station tore itself apart, losing a solar panel and its heat shield. It reached orbit as a sweltering, powerless metal tube baking in the sun. What happened next turned a near-disaster into proof that humans could not just survive space, but live and work in it.

This episode follows Skylab from its origins as a repurposed Saturn rocket stage built to save NASA jobs, through the first major orbital repair, record-breaking human stays, and a chaotic fall to Earth that sparked global panic and a 400-dollar littering fine.

• How budget cuts birthed the ‘dry workshop’ from leftover Apollo hardware after the explosive ‘wet workshop’ plan was scrapped
• The improvised rescue: a parasol sunshade pushed through an instrument port and astronauts freeing a jammed panel with a hammer
• The strange domestic reality of microgravity, including a two-and-a-half-hour shower most crews abandoned
• Groundbreaking science, from confirming the Sun’s coronal holes to 1,100-pound aluminum vaults shielding film from radiation
• Why a missing retro rocket and an intense sunspot cycle doomed Skylab to rain debris over Western Australia in 1979