Films, bad songs and a new series: The Skylab craze just keeps giving

It weighed 77 tonnes, was the size of a three-storey house and was hurtling through space on a collision course with Earth. Where exactly would it land?

This isn’t the set-up for a sci-fi movie. It actually happened, in 1979. Skylab was the first US space station. It was launched on May 14, 1973, and there were problems from the get-go. Just moments after lift-off from the Kennedy Space Centre, the sun shield and main solar panel were ripped off, compromising its functions, its effectiveness and its mission.

But it was Skylab’s demise six years later, in July 1979, that generated headlines, especially in Australia. Its re-entry was meant to happen in the ocean east of South Africa, but NASA’s calculations were slightly off, and it travelled much further. While most of it plunged into the ocean off Western Australia, parts of it rained down on the state’s southern regions, in an area between Esperance and Rawlinna, especially in the tiny roadhouse town of Balladonia, 938 kilometres east of Perth, and with a population of nine at the time.

Last Days of the Space Age, a new drama series starring Radha Mitchell, Jesse Spencer and Deborah Mailman, follows the fictional stories of three families in a tight-knit WA community, each going through a crisis as they wait for Skylab to crash.

The Last Days of the Space Age revisits Australia in the days of Skylab fever.Credit: Disney+

The real-life story of Skylab is so filled with drama – and a fair smattering of surreal humour – that this is not the first time it has made its way to the screen. The documentary, Searching For Skylab, came out in 2019, while the 2021 sci-fi series, For All Mankind, imagined what would have happened if Skylab had survived.

A number of movies have also referenced the event – Julie Delpy’s 2011 Skylab recalls French fears about the vessel crashing in western France, while its 2021 namesake depicts nervous villagers watching the sky in a remote corner of southern India. There’s even a scene in the 1986 Australian film, Dogs in Space, in which characters make fake pieces of Skylab to try to win a radio station competition offering big money for debris.

The inner-city Melbourne captured in Richard Lowenstein’s cult film wasn’t the only part of the world going a little nuts in the days and weeks leading up to impact. One bar in the United States announced Skylab cocktails with the slogan: “Drink a couple and you won’t know what hit you.”

Saskia Post and Michael Hutchence in Dogs in Space.

Some tried to cash in by marketing jokey gimmicks – a silk-screening company sold thousands of cartoon T-shirts emblazoned with the words, “I Survived The Crash Of Skylab”, depicting a guy wearing an army surplus helmet and carrying a steel-plated umbrella as Skylab hurtled towards him; a novelty gift company advertised a Skylab Protective Helmet and took orders for almost 20,000; souvenir beanies with a bullseye embroidered on them were sold with the claim, “the US government couldn’t hit anything it aimed for”.

The most hard-fought contest in the Skylab publicity wars was between two rival US newspapers. Before Skylab crashed back to Earth, the San Francisco Chronicle announced it would pay any reader $200,000 if they or their property were hit by falling space debris. The San Francisco Examiner countered with an offer of $10,000 to anyone who could bring it a remnant of Skylab within 72 hours of it landing.

The two papers had spoken with authorities from NASA, who had assured them that the chances of Skylab making landfall were slim, so both offers seemed like a safe bet. As we now know, they were wrong. Stan Thornton, a 17-year-old from Esperance, salvaged a couple of dozen pieces of the space station that had bounced off the garden shed in his mother’s backyard.

Stan Thornton watches as a customs official examines his Skylab pieces at San Francisco International Airport.Credit: AP Laserphoto

Thornton was a quietly spoken country boy who had never left the state and didn’t have a passport. A Perth radio station took up his cause, organising a passport and air tickets. He was so green that he arrived at the airport without any spare clothes, and when he was interviewed in Melbourne en route to the US and asked how he felt, he said he was already homesick and missed his girlfriend.

Within the allotted 72 hours he had handed over a bag of charred metal bits to the editor of the Examiner; when they were verified by NASA, he was given the cheque and paraded around the media for a week.

Although NASA and the US State Department stated their aim was to safely land Skylab in the ocean, conspiracy theories emerged. Newspaper columnist John Somerville-Smith arrived in Kalgoorlie days before Skylab crashed, claiming he had been tipped off by unnamed sources that NASA always intended to bring down the space station in Australia, possibly near Pine Gap, where the US had a military base.

President Jimmy Carter did send a formal apology to prime minister Malcolm Fraser, who responded: “While receiving Skylab is an honour we would have happily forgone, it is the end of a magnificent technological achievement by the United States.”

The Miss USA and Miss Australia contestants in the 1979 Miss Universe competition with a piece of Skylab.Credit: National Archives of Australia

The space madness around Skylab lingered for a while longer. The Miss Universe pageant was held in Perth that year, and a big chunk of Skylab was trucked in to use as a publicity prop. Miss USA and Miss Australia put on brave faces while being photographed next to the charred space junk.

A cheesy disco-tinged song called The Ballad of a Balladonia Night was released to immortalise the dot on the map that was battered the hardest, featuring not-so-poetic lines such as “before the Skylab crashed into their lap, Balladonia wasn’t even on the road map”. Much like the main fuselage of Skylab itself, the song sank without a trace. If you’re feeling strong enough, you can find it on YouTube.

In a larrikin move, the Shire Of Esperance announced it was fining NASA $400 for littering. The mock fine was finally paid in 2009, when a Californian radio host raised the money from listeners and travelled to Australia to settle the debt.

As recently as 1993, a remnant of Skylab was discovered in a field near Norseman, 200 kilometres north of Esperance. The oxygen tank, the size of a small car, was the largest part of the doomed space station ever found.

And now, with Last Days of the Space Age, Skylab proves to be the gift that keeps on giving, a space project whose demise generated much more exposure than its birth.

Last Days of the Space Age is streaming on Disney+.