Fifty Years of Skylab

Fifty years ago today, my life changed, though I wouldn't know it for 30 years, and wouldn't even be born for two.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Skylab. There are lots of articles today about how Skylab changed spaceflight. And it's true – I've given many many talks over the years about how Skylab was the reboot, to use today's parlance, of American spaceflight, a new start after Apollo that shifted the focus from racing *through space* to the Moon, to living and working *in space* for the first time, laying the foundation for everything that's come since.

But that's big and academic-sounding and the sort of importance about which history books are written. More visceral and more powerful are the stories not about how it changed spaceflight, but how it changed people.

That was the biggest joy of writing Homesteading Space, was talking to those people, from astronauts to engineers to educators and more, and hearing their voices as they talked about how this giant can of metal in the sky had changed their lives, how it had touched them.

It's surreal to me that I get to be one of those people, to tell stories of friends that it's still weird that I even got to know, of adventures I'm incredibly blessed to have had, and of the stories I get to steward for the rest of my life.

And I love the idea that, when my son is a few years older than I am, someone might ask him about his name, and he can talk about his dad's friend, and about a rocket that launched an entire century earlier, and paved the way for space stories I today can't even imagine.