Skylab Information Center was set up in Washington by NASA in response to the "Chicken Little" piece that WaPo syndicated.
Irresponsibility was the keystone of early NASA plans to ignore the Skylab re-entry. Then it turned out that spinning the satellite made it possible to accelerate the final burn, putting the 79-tons of metal and a nuclear oven down away from cities.
NASA had a political appointee who countermanded the engineers and even screwed up that. But the engineering was sound. Pols can screw up anything.
Here's the "Chicken Little" editorial. Not bad for an example of how to move a Federal agency ASAP :::
"Coming Home" by Chicken Little from the WaPo syndicate, 1979
Skylab is coming home to earth - all 79 tons of it - sometime around July 13. As has been reported steadily over the past six months, when it does come down it will spray debris along a track 200 miles wide and up to 4,000 miles long, somewhere between 50 degrees North and 50 degrees South - a belt that excludes the north of Canada, most of the Soviet Union, and, oddly, the British Isles. Fully 90 percent of the world's population will be threatened by Skylab's descent, and that descent isn't far away. It is time, now, to decide what kind of warning we will give to people who will be in jeopardy during its final hours.
Much of Skylab's debris can be expected to burn up on reentry, and there is a reasonable chance that the surviving pieces will fall into the broad reaches of the world's Ocean. Still, a substantial possibility remains that some of the pieces of Skylab will fall on populated land.
This is the first satellite reentry to drop pieces that could cause a heavy loss of life. Following basic aerodynamic data, solid forged-metal remnants weighing above 1,000 kilograms can be expected to hit at more than the speed of sound. A metal piece the size of Chicken Little's acorn would have about the effect of a construction rivet dropped from the top of the World Trade Center. Those larger chunks could also create sonic booms. Anyone who has questioned the Concorde flights can sympathize with the people caught in such a cacophony.
Furthermore, one of the large objects, traveling at such speed, might collide with an immovable object - like a building foundation - and generate terrific heat and an explosion. The devastation would cover a wider area than just the point of impact. The larger parts of Skylab are, in effect, capable of producing damage as great as non-nuclear weapons.
NASA has estimated, based on mathematical models and experience with descending communications satellites, that Skylab will break up into not more than 500 pieces of significant size - that is, weighing a pound or more. This may be so. The data are incomplete. But pieces weighing under a pound can also be lethal. Competent analysts guess that there will be upwards of 5,000 such pieces of debris, and possibly as many as 30,000 total items at earth impact.
NASA has said that there is only one chance in four that Skylab will come down over land, since three-quarters of its orbital path is over the ocean. This sounds reassuring, but what about that fourth chance - for example, a "footprint" of descending debris crossing through Chicago and Charleston, or Vienna and Tehran, or striking New Delhi or Peking? Based on the official 500-piece estimate, NASA has projected that the odds of hitting at least one person are 1 in 150. All things considered, that is not reassuring.
In the face of this inexorable oncoming event, there isn't much left to be done. All of NASA's heroic efforts in 1977 and 1978 to maintain Skylab aloft in its orbit - until the Space Shuttle could be brought along - are now of no avail. The shuttle's first engine blew itself to bits in April, during the first effort to get in a 500-second "firing" test.
But will it be possible this month to give advance warnings in areas where Skylab could fall, and to give those warnings in ample time - for example 36 hours - for orderly cautionary measures to be taken.
Unfortunately, at present, NASA's official plan is to relay only timing and orbital path data, as projected with successively increasing accuracy by NORAD's Space Defense Center in Colorado Springs. These figures will be delivered within the United States to the Federal Preparedness Agency, FAA and the news media. Foreign governments and other institutions will depend on a second relay by our Department of State.
This focus carries two problems. First, the technical issue of projecting exactly where Skylab hits should be less important than the goal of minimizing the chances of killing someone. By releasing information is such a way as to emphasize the final impact projection -- effectively a two-hour warning - the opportunity for everyone to get in a thorough response would be cut, in comparison with issuing full warning schedules beginning at the 36-hour mark.
Also, the two-hour warning has provoked professional psychiatric objections that such an announcement might trigger an urban panic - certainly a result that would overshadow the statistical danger from Skylab.
The second problem is with the raw data itself. Skylab's descent will be accompanied by a slowing down, as the space station hurtles into the atmosphere. Its velocity will be reduced from 17,650 mph to less than 1,500 mph. As a result, the pieces will not be able to maintain their track along the normal orbital path; they will fall off far to the west. Few, if any, of the receiving organizations being served by NASA and State have the computational programs on hand to convert the orbital path figures to actual risk patterns. Considering errors, the area at risk is 500 miles wide.
To reach people effectively, a broader warning system must be put into operation. At the 36-hour point, timings for the beginning of reentry (the start of Skylab's slowdown) can be narrowed to a 12-hour period. The satellite's position and direction can be plotted continuously for this whole period of risk. Then, mathematical functions can be included, together with adjustments for engineering uncertainties.
The overall result from the 36-hour mark would be risk pattern schedules for everyone who might be hit. If that 4,000-mile long "footprint" could fall on a country, or a city, its inhabitants would be told - to within an hour, at most - when any lethal debris could be expected to fall. For the case where the satellite missed - by falling earlier or later on, further down the risk patter - than the worst will have been for someone to have stayed indoors unnecessarily.
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NASA had concealed to this point that they could "steer" the satellite re-entry path by spinning it. Spinning greatly slowed Skylab. If done competently, this would have been the optimal engineering solution, allowing a mid-ocean splashdown. Non-technical managers got their fingers into that process, too. Nobody got killed.
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On the other hand, this is summer for most of the people under Skylab's orbit - we are outdoors a lot and more than usually vulnerable. Perhaps that warning to those in the threat zone to stay indoors, if they judge the odds harsh enough, would save a life. Surely, foreign airlines warrant this special attention. There's not much we can do about people's property.
That piece identified a key moral responsibility:
"It is time, now, to decide what kind of warning we will give to people who will be in jeopardy during its final hours."Plus, when we learned that spinning a satellite enables useful steering for picking a re-entry orbital cycle, it should also be NASA's responsibility to do what they can to keep from hitting a city.
Looks to be that both were forgotten.
Apparently NASA got lucky again with UARS. They still didn't quite get the right answer for the information choices. Also, the 2005 "orbital lowering" maneuver apparently ignored the need to save up some fuel so they could spin the satellite at the end to guide re-entry to avoid cities.1979. 2005. 2011. The lessons learned in 1979 seem to have been forgotten.
So what is NASA doing now ? What happens with other large satellites and risky re-entries ?
I have no idea. Seems like there is no policy in place. No engineering solution for SOP.
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