The 100-ton Skylab was America's first experimental space station, and the only one the United States deployed in the first three decades of human spaceflight. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced the Skylab project on July 22, 1969, as Apollo 11 was returning to Earth from the first landing on the Moon. The Skylab assembly was not a single structure, but a cluster of four units, three of them habitable. The main body, the Orbital Workshop (OWS), was a cylinder 14.6 meters (48 feet) long and 6.7 meters (22 feet) across, with a volume of 270.4 cubic meters (9,550 cubic feet), roughly the size of a small house. The OWS was created from the remodeled shell of the propellant tank from the Saturn 5 rocket's third stage. The upper part of the OWS was equipped with food lockers, refrigerators, water tanks, and space suit lockers; the lower story contained crew quarters and an experiment station.

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