Skylab cost roughly $2.2 billion, hosted nine astronauts across three missions and remained in orbit for just over six years — before breaking apart over Western Australia, where its remains became museum exhibits, Lucite-encased souvenirs and, according to local accounts, even a cattle trough.

Skylab cost roughly $2.2 billion, hosted nine astronauts across three missions and remained in orbit for just over six years — before breaking apart over Western Australia, where its remains became museum exhibits, Lucite-encased souvenirs and, according to local accounts, even a cattle trough.

Skylab began as one of the most ambitious machines the United States had ever placed in orbit and ended as a trail of metal scattered across Western Australia. Between those two moments, America’s first space station hosted nine astronauts, established three successive endurance records and showed that people could live and conduct serious science in orbit for months at a time. It then spent more than five years empty, circling Earth as engineer…