Development innovations for Skylab student experiments

Abstract

The Skylab Student Science Program was an effort on the part of NASA and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) to provide the youth of America an opportunity to directly participate in space research. Students across the nation submitted proposed experiments which were scientifically evaluated by the NSTA. From the more than three thousand experiments submitted, twenty-five of the most innovative and novel experiments were selected for flight. Many of these required the development of flight hardware in order to perform the experiments aboard Skylab. The requirements placed on the hardware in terms of cost, development time, weight, volume, and crew training represented a unique challenge to the NASA engineers and scientists involved in the design, development, fabrication and testing of this hardware. To meet these stringent requirements required innovative changes in the classic Skylab approach to experiment development.