As the spacecraft began to re-enter some 48 hours before its ultimate collision, a command was sent to alter the orbit away from North America 'to avoid risking American lives'. RetroFocus
Almost kaleidoscopic, they hurtled through the air in a green and red hue, illuminating the barren West Australian landscape below.
As fate would have it, greater-than-expected solar activity in the lead-up to 1979 had heated the Earth's atmosphere, causing Skylab to decay and de-orbit. Publicly, of course, America's space agency maintained there was only a very remote chance of Skylab crashing into a heavily-populated area.But privately, there were concerns — at least one NASA official resigned over the way the United States had handled the disintegration of its largest satellite.
"Souvenir hunters rushed into the outback by Jeep, Land Rover and even chartered aircraft," Time magazine reported in the days after. Somerville-Smith had travelled to Kalgoorlie in the days before Skylab's demise — but far from fortuitous timing, the Melbourne gossip columnist claimed he had been tipped off by the Americans."I was told on the Friday week before in Melbourne that Skylab was going to land in the Laverton area, which is about 240 miles from Kalgoorlie here," he said.
Addressing reports that Skylab was "deliberately brought down near Pine Gap so that secret military espionage equipment could be recovered from it", the cables noted any attempt to reply to the "obvious untruths in the article ... would be counterproductive".
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