Treasure-hunt after bits of Skylab picked up

Press, 13 July 1979, Page 1

Treasure-hunt after bits of Skylab picked up

NZPA Perth Three men in Western. Australia’s south-east last evening claimed to have found a large part of the American Skylab space station that crashed to Earth yesterday morning. One of the discoverers, a Telecom technician, Mr Bill Norton, said they found a cylinder two metres long and about a metre in diameter just outside the tiny town of Rawlinna, about 400 km east of Kalgoorlie.

He said they would claim all the rewards he had heard about in Australia and overseas.

The cylinder was surrounded bv about three other smaller pieces of debris. The American consulate’s public relations officer in Perth, Mr C. McGinley, said it was probably part of the doomed space station’s docking mechanism. “That’s the strongest part of Skylab,” he said. Mr Norton said he had loaded the debris on to a trailer and would make the six-hour drive to Kalgoorlie immediately.

The main search zone centred on Balladonia, a small sheep station country town about 1000 km east of Perth, where the station manager, Mr John Seiler, said the American National

Aeronautics and Space Administration had offered him $98,000 for any piece of Skylab he finds. Mr Seiler, who manages Noondoonia station near Balladonia, said he considered the telephoned offer a firm one and had already made a search of the area, but found nothing.

The doomed American space station hurtled low over his house early yesterday morning in a shower of light and loud sonic booms which shook the, house.

“Big pieces of it must have hit near here. It was almost at ground level when it went over. I was afraid it would hit some of the station buildings,” he said.

Skylab debris discovery reports came from several other parts of southern Western Australia. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration put the time that the stricken 77.5-tonne space laboratory crashed at 4.37 a.m. New Zealand time yesterday. Their earlier estimate had the craft reentering Earth’s atmosphere five minutes earlier.

Previous estimates that Skylab had plunged into the ocean 1120 km south-

east of Perth were immediately contradicted by reports from Australian observers who saw Skylab disintegrate in the midnight sky over four Western Australian towns.

Space agency officials said the location of the craft’s re-entry provided by the North American Air Defence; Command, which tracked Skylab, coincided with the description given by an Australian pilot, Captain Bill Anderson, who observed Skylab’s fall from his cockpit.

Associated Press reported that Captain Anderson, a pilot for an airline in Western Australia, saw Skylab’s fall from his cockpit as he was flying toward Perth.

Space officials said Captain Anderson described Skylab as a “large boxy form that became bluish white and then turned brilliant orange.” Captain Anderson said he saw five great orange balls of fire fall to the ground. The objects could have been five big oxygen tanks in the craft, officials said.

“There was this blue glow, almost like aircraft headlights,” he told

N.A.S.A. by telephone. “We almost identified it as a large aircraft close to us with the lights on. Captain Anderson said that as the debris descended “it changed from a blue to an almost orangeyred and you could see the breakup starting to occur. As the breakup continued, it finished up into five very bright orange balls in the front and the remainder of the debris behind giving off sparks.”

He said it had “a very long tail, perhaps 100 miles long.”

N.A.S.A. officials said other observers reported seeing hundreds of pieces of bright red and pink burning debris streaking inland towards the central Australian desert. About 20 to 50 pieces were sighted above Kalgoorlie. Though there was no initial report of injury or damage, President Carter quickly offered the Australian Government assistance.

The “New York Times’* reported that in making its 34,9815 t, and last, orbit of the Earth, the final minutes of Skylab provided somr anxious moments for space officials who had sought to steer it away from populous areas.