Skylab II

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Skylab II: Living Beyond the Dark Side of the Moon

During the 1970s, Skylab was NASA’s first space station, built out of a fuel tank from a Saturn V rocket, one of NASA’s standard launch vehicles at the time. NASA’s advanced concepts office is now wondering if they could use the same trick again to launch the first ever outpost in deep space.

Brand Griffin, an engineer with Gray Research Inc working with NASA Marshall, certainly thinks so. Skylab II would be the first deep space station ever launched, to be parked in the Earth-Moon L2 (EML2) Lagrange point – a gravitationally stable point in space roughly 60,000 km from the dark side of the Moon, placing it a total of 440,000 km from Earth. This would truly be, to use a well known phrase, where no one has gone before.

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