The eight telescopes studied the Sun's spectrum from X-ray almost down to infrared, all with very high quality resolution. Skylab was coordinated with ground-based astronomers as well. Whenever ground observers detected active solar prominences, flares, or mass ejections, they would notify the astronauts, who would then point their telescopes to record the event. Skylab space station orbiting Earth in 1973. The problem in developing this type of technology today, says Weisskopf, is two-fold.
Money is the most immediate impediment.
It would cost several billion dollars just to create a high quality combined optical and X-ray telescope. More difficult to tackle is the social mind-set of scientists. Facilities and instruments are built to study only portions of the spectrum, rather than phenomena as a whole. There are no instruments designed to just study globular clusters, for instance. Phillips agrees that wavelength specialization is prevalent in the scientific community, but he believes this attitude is changing.