Added 1 new A* page:I talked a week or so ago about Skylab, the space station of the 70's. Skylab, which got its name in a NASA contest, is not to be confused with Spacelab, the laboratory module, or rather series of modules, that Space Shuttles carried into orbit in their cargo bay on 22 missions between 1981 and 2000.
Many of the those trips just had "pallet" modules--platforms carrying instruments for experimentation, exposed to vacuum--but in 16 of them, the Shuttle bay played host to one of two European-built* pressurized "LM" (which I think stands for "Long Module"?) components, in which astronauts could conduct experiments without having to wear bulky space suits. This January 1, 1981 NASA concept drawing shows a Spacelab configuration with a habitable Long Module in the middle of the cargo bay, connected to the Shuttle's cockpit by a pressurized tunnel, with a pallet of equipment on its far side (five pallets could fit on a single flight, if no room was needed for a Long Module and tunnel):
image by NASA (source)
Here's a view aft into the orbiting Space Shuttle Columbia's cargo bay in 1992, with a Spacelab tunnel and LM visible:
image by NASA (source)
And here's a view into the interior of the second LM built, "LM2," on display in Bremen in 2008:
image by Kozuch (source)
At first I almost thought that was a Commodore 64 plugged in on the left side there. >_>
* Spacelab components were built by the ESA ("European Space Agency"), or even its predecessor, the ESRO ("European Space Research Organization"; in 1975, the ESRO merged with the ELDO ("European Launcher Development Organisation") to form the ESA.
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