Skylab
4 July 2009 | beeblePete
Houston, we have a party! It was extra opening hours for Independence Day at Johnson Space Center when my sister Amy and I visited the NASA facility. I was intrigued most of all by their full-size, cutaway Skylab exhibit.
There was no distinct up or down direction in the space station, so the walls round the doorways doubled as floors. Triangular cleats in the boots of an astronaut are shown below, matched to triangular recesses in the 'floors' which allowed personnel to anchor themselves in their almost gravity-free environment. As ingenious as the Skylab walls were I had in fact seen them before, in episodes of Doctor Who...
Skylab was orbiting in 1972 when Doctor Who and the Mutants was made for BBC television. That serial's Skybase space station is shown below, with the shimmering life form Ky flying past and knocking the bad guys to the floor with his amazing alien energy. I'd seen the episodes before and on reflection, I noticed TV designer Jeremy Bear interpreted the hexagonal Skylab pattern a bit larger for the Skybase scenery flats.
The Skylab exhibit had as much suspended above as placed level with the pedestrian flow. NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral Florida is larger by several degrees and I'd been there in the late 1970's. But perhaps because I was older, I found this famous site of shuttle landings as fascinating as the base for blast-offs.
And what's Houston without a Mission Control to talk to? It was a treat to see up close the consoles where so much space programme drama was experienced. Inspecting the famously-used but long since retired control desks, I mused that the Space Control set in 1976's Doctor Who and the Android Invasion did a pretty good job of re-creating the real thing.
Having lived in the United States when I was younger, I admit to some pride that my taxes paid for at least a little bit of the wonderful, international space exploration projects of NASA...
... and here's a souvenir from the amazing time Amy and I had in Houston 😎
Epilogue
The vacu-form shapes made for Doctor Who later became stock for hire. At the premiere for the Doctor Who spinoff Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, I met the film's designer Phil Newman and was delighted to discover he'd used the Skybase moulds for his spaceport set, shown below.
As mentioned, the 'Skylab walls' were used a few times in Doctor Who but they also turned up in many other TV programmes, which are still being spotted. Fellow fan Paul Arthur has been cataloguing this strange, hexagonal design odyssey on his blog, Doctor Who Prop Hunt.