From James Lileks:

As I’ve said before, nothing sums up the seventies, and the awful guttering of the national spirit, than a pop song about Skylab falling on people’s heads. “Skylab’s Falling,” a novelty hit in the summer of ’79. It tumbled down thirty years ago this month, and didn’t get much press, possibly because of the odd muted humiliation over the event. But it wasn’t end of Skylab that gave people a strange shameful dismay. It was the idea that we were done up there, and the only thing we’d done since the Moon trips did an ignominious Icarus instead of staying up for decades. So this wasn’t the first step toward the inevitable double-wheel with a Strauss waltz soundtrack, or something more prosaic. Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to work? Moon first, then space station, then moon colonization, then Mars.

If a kid could see that, why couldn’t they?

…Robot exploration is very cool; I’d like more. As someone noted elsewhere, we should have those rovers crawling all over the Moon, at the very least. It’s just down the street. But think how much grander we would feel if we knew that our first mission to Jupiter was coming back next month. (Without the giant space-fetus.) How we would imagine our solar system, how each planet would feel like a blank page in a passport waiting for a stamp. Perhaps that’s what annoys some: the aggrandizement that would come from great exploits. Human pride in something that isn’t specifically related to fixing the Great Problems we face now, or apologizing for the Bad Things we did before. Spending money to go to Mars before we’ve stopped climate turbulence would be like taking a trip to Europe while the house is on fire.

I had forgotten that Skylab fell a decade after the first landing. What a metaphorical fall, in only ten brief years (though they seemed longer at the time, I being much younger).

Oh, and the astronaut punching the guy in the face thing? As long-time blog readers know, it was a hoax. Never happened.