NASA Seeks to PEP Up Shuttle/Spacelab (1981)

Denied a space station, in the early 1970s NASA asked Europe to build Spacelab, a pressurized module that would ride in the Space Shuttle payload bay. Spacelab relied on Shuttle electrical power, which limited what researchers could achieve on board. Beyond Apollo blogger David S. F. Portree describes a proposed auxiliary solar power array for Shuttle/Spacelab - a simple system which some in NASA hoped might lead to giant Solar Power Satellites for beaming energy to Earth.

Image: NASA
On 29 November 1972, NASA Administrator James Fletcher abolished the Space Station Task Force formed in early 1969 by his predecessor, Thomas Paine, and formed the Sortie Lab Task Force. Fletcher’s move acknowledged that the Space Shuttle, conceived originally as a vehicle for transporting crews and cargoes between Earth and an Earth-orbiting space station at low cost, would need to become a space station – or, at least, an interim space laboratory that could demonstrate that a space station would be desirable.
Strapped for funds and encouraged by President Richard Nixon to use spaceflight as a vehicle for international cooperation, NASA asked the European Space Research Organization (ESRO), a precursor to today’s European Space Agency, to build a “sortie lab” that ...