Skylab crash lands

I liked the remark of the man at the Houston Space Center who was in charge of bringing down Skylab. When the first word came in that the crash landing was over and that most of it had fallen in the ocean and the rest in the Australian desert, he was asked by a reporter if he was satisfied. He was plainly much relieved, even by this first report but he said, 'When it's all over and we hear that the people of Australia had a fine firework display and that nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged, then I'll be satisfied.'

That's a simple sentence but I offer you as a parlour game this evening a sort of New Statesman competition. Make up single sentences that might have voiced the reaction of various public figures if they'd been in charge of rolling Skylab over and bringing her down. What would Jimmy Carter have said? Mrs Thatcher? Kojak? Evel Knievel? Mr Whitelaw? John McEnroe? Woody Allen? Groucho Marx? I'm pretty sure Groucho was watching it from up there and probably addressing it as it went by, 'How much would you charge to run into an open manhole?' How about Dan Maskell? 'Oh! I say!!' 

Woody Allen I think would be the most memorable, if not the most practical. He doesn't think aloud much in public but when he's prodded he can come through with axioms as wise and lunatic as anything ever said by Mark Twain. 

I remember the time, many of you will remember – it must have been as much as ten years ago, when there was a big solemn question being bandied between philosophers, theologians and simple headline writers. Time – the magazine, not the father – had a whole cover story about it and put the grave question in red capitals, 'IS GOD DEAD?'. And there was a television panel about it in New York and they brought in some of the heaviest thinkers of our time, people like André Malraux and Reinhold Niebuhr and Albert Schweitzer. Albert Schweitzer was dead by then but you'll get the feel of the symposium if I tell you that he was there in spirit. 

Well, by some howling error of miscasting, Woody Allen had also been invited, not to provide light relief, somebody'd simply made a mistake. And he sat on the edge of the group looking like a displaced person, an owl who'd defected and was clearly as uncomfortable as the audience seeing him there. He took no part in the weighty discussion of reincarnation, predestination, immortality, atheism, the decay of institutional religion and other allied subjects. 

But towards the end, the MC, the Dick Cavett or Robin Day or whoever was in charge, spotted him there, licking his lips and crossing his legs on the edge of this profound dialogue and he turned to him with a brave air of including him in and yet not seeming to condescend. 'Mr Allen,' he said breezily, 'we haven't heard from you. Would you like to tell us, is God dead?' Woody Allen uncrossed his legs, touched his spectacles and said, 'Not only is God dead, but you can't get a dentist at the weekend.' I'm sorry to tell you it was the only memorable line to come out of a two-hour clash between all those big brains. 

I shall remember the director of the Houston Space Center though because his reaction was direct, decent and sensible – a note that not one politician in a hundred can strike spontaneously, not because they mean to be devious, but they have always in the back of their minds considerations that have nothing to do with the matter in hand. They have to imagine how what they say will sound later, or look like in print, what their party leaders will think of it, their constituents, whether it's the sort of remark that will be remembered later and quoted in election campaigns as a typical example of a man trying to put a firm foot forward and stepping into a... into... well, an open manhole. It amazes me how rarely a smart and pleasant politician trusts his immediate instincts when he's on a spot. 

The only immortal mayor of New York City, the late Fiorello LaGuardia, had no trouble whatever with his public statements whether written or off the cuff. He attributed most of the troubles of New York City – crime, high sales taxes, housing shortages – not to his office but to the other party, the Democratic politicians whom he regularly called 'punks and tinhorns.' But when he committed some howler, he simply said, 'I don't often make mistakes but when I do make one, it's a beaut!' 

Just think what you would have said, waiting there at Houston, not sure whether you were going to have to explain tons of metal crashing down on a big city with hundreds, perhaps thousands of people killed and homes smashed and then the word comes in 'mostly in the sea and the rest, we think, safely over Perth and into the desert'. But not yet absolutely sure. So, 'When it's all over and we hear that the people of Australia had a fine firework display and that nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged, then I'll be satisfied.' 

It would be nice to say that that was the end of it but I suppose there'd have been a grouch from the people of any country it landed in. The great hope at Houston was that they could somehow contrive to bring it down in the sea but I don't think any of us laymen, in fact I doubt there are more than a few hundred people alive, who can even imagine the enormous complexity of controlling it. When I, for instance, an interested layman but I hope no dummy, when I heard about the ability of Houston to trigger the moment when it should fall out of orbit, I immediately thought of the control Houston exerted over John Glenn's first craft and how, in all the subsequent Apollo missions, they were able to have a destroyer in sight of the actual spot in the Pacific or the Caribbean or wherever the astronaut would, and did, splash down. But this was as different as a problem in astrophysics from a sum in simple arithmetic. 

Just think! Skylab made a complete orbit of the earth every 90 minutes, going at 17,000 miles an hour. It had been whizzing around since 1973. Once it started its re-entry, its temperature would go up to about 2100 degrees Fahrenheit. The computers at Houston, fed by tracking stations all around the world, are capable of pinpointing a movement of this monster going at 17,000 miles an hour within less than a hundredth of a second. But it's not enough if you take out a map, pick a likely point of impact. Even assuming that Skylab would fall and whiz at a calculated speed, you can see why, until the last day, nobody, but nobody, could say for certain whether it would fall on Penzance or New England or the Indian Ocean or southern Spain. 

They'd refined it by Wednesday morning but even the last guess, any guess, had to be based on the fundamental fact that, at best, the debris would scatter over a path about 4,000 miles long. That's about the only statistic which, to me, anyway, gives a bewildering hint of the speed of an object they were trying to pinpoint on a map. The marvel is that before it was down they were able to say it would 'probably' be in the Indian Ocean and over south-western Australia. 

The first American headline I read on Friday morning was, 'Australians Chiding the United States Hunt Skylab Debris'. A lady called a Perth newspaper to say, 'I think it stinks that they delayed the descent so it missed them and hit us' – which is about as wild a misjudgement of the powers of the boys in Houston as can be imagined. And then, unfortunately, the mischievous words 'alleged' and 'reported' took over. Thus, many Australians were upset over a reported remark by a space official in Washington that Australia was a good place for the space station to come down because, quote, 'there are only kangaroos there'. I would take a whopping bet that no space official, no congressman, no American who was worth reporting could have dreamed up any such absurdity. 

But NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had to reply. Obviously a true, scientific answer would have been incomprehensible to newspaper readers and writers. All they could say in one weary word was that they had not, and were not, able to 'aim' the craft at Australia or for that matter at any other chosen country. 

I can only hope if that lady in Perth and any other indignant citizens are listening, they'll believe me when I say a one-hour visit to the Space Control Center in Houston would rid them forever of the Hollywood B-film delusion that these wizards would pick out any land area, except they did have a better chance, obviously, with the great extent of the deserts than they had with even picking the sea close to highly populated countries. The atmosphere in the Houston Center is one of almost eerie silence, except for the chattering of the machines and the punctuation of sound impulses. They are totally dedicated to their concentrated best beyond anything I've seen in, say, the control tower of an airport. 

Yet the Sydney Daily Mirror is quoted in our papers as finding 'a fatal flaw in the American technological genius, a determination to push ahead with new technology whatever the cost'. That, I think, is probably debatable. But the inquest at the American end contains the rueful admission that the next push ahead in space technology is to try and do what the Russians have already done – to be able to boost a space station in a decaying orbit up to a higher and stable orbit. The Russians have one such station, the only one, now in orbit, Salyut 6. Its orbit will start to decay some time next month and if the Russians were no more advanced than the Americans, we'd have another scare on our hands, our oceans, our deserts, our towns. But it won't happen. It will simply be pushed into a higher orbit and stay there. 

The Americans have no more Skylabs in orbit and won't have till probably next year they put to work what is called a re-usable space shuttle. The Americans know and the Russians know and the Australians may take heart from the knowledge that the first American space shuttle will be better built, more responsive, superior in quality to anything that the Russians now have. This, er... 'I can do anything better than you can' – a game that the two superpowers have been playing since the late Forties – has been glaringly emphasised by the Skylab episode. And I'm pretty sure that it will make the Senate take a shrewder, more sceptical look in the coming debate over ratifying SALT II.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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