The Skylab space station was launched unmanned on May 14, 1973, serving as the last payload ferried into space aboard a Saturn V rocket. That mission was called Skylab 1.
The next, Skylab 2, carried the first crew to the space station, where they famously spent 28 days repairing severe damage the station had suffered on its way to orbit.
As part of Skylab 3, the next crew stayed aboard the station for 59 days, carrying out scientific work and experiments. This mission, commanded by Apollo 12 moonwalker Alan Bean, along with crewmates Owen Garriot and Jack Lousma, was famously productive. So much so that the crew essentially competed all of their tasks and work with plenty of time to spare. They ended up requesting more to do before returning to Earth.
Skylab 4, the final mission aboard Skylab, was crewed by Commander Gerald Carr, Science Pilot Edward Gibson, and Pilot William Pogue. This flight — which ultimately stretched into a then-record-breaking 84 days in continuous orbit — is when the so-called “mutiny” in space took place.
Tensions mount during Skylab 4
When the Skylab 4 crew blasted off to the space station on November 16, 1973, NASA expected them to get up to speed quickly and work just as efficiently as previous crews. The space agency had plans to account for every minute of the astronauts’ 24-hour workday, including making the astronauts eat their meals while working and limiting their sleep breaks. The crews’ schedules were so regimented, if fact, that it was hard for them to even find time to go to the bathroom.
In retrospect, NASA simply had unrealistic expectations. This is especially true considering all three crewmembers of Skylab 4 were rookies. And as a cherry on top, Pogue had developed Space Adaptation Syndrome shortly after reaching orbit, significantly compromising his effectiveness at the start of the mission.
“The schedule caught up with us,” Carr recalled in Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, which covers the dramatic tale of the space station. “We [the Skylab 4 crew] found that we had allowed ourselves to be scheduled on a daily schedule that was extremely dense. If you missed something, if you made a mistake and had to go back and do it again, or if you were slow in doing something, you’d end up racing the clock and making more mistakes, screwing up more on an experiment, and in general just digging a deeper hole for yourself.”
Eventually the Skylab 4 crew learned that their schedule, from the start, assumed nearly the same rate of productivity and efficiency the more veteran Skylab 3 crew had by the end of their mission. As you could expect, this led to some frustration from the inexperienced Skylab 4 crew.
“Finally, we began to get a little bit testy,” Carr said. An “us versus them” mentality began to set it, with ground controllers and astronauts becoming more and more aggravated with each other. As Lead Flight Director Neal Hutchinson said in the same book, “Of course as we continued to press [the astronauts], more mistakes began to be made, more than we had seen with the other crews.”
However, Hutchinson conceded “it was clearly a case of the control center not recognizing that people need some zero-G adjustment time before they can really be productive.”
In space, no one can hear you strike
Growing ever more irritated, each member of the Skylab 4 crew took turns keeping in constant contact with the ground. However, per Gibson in Homestead, one day they got their signals crossed, and the crew had zero contact with the ground for a full 90 minutes.
“When we came up to AOS (acquisition of signal) over one of the sites, the ground called us and we didn’t answer them for a whole orbit,” Gibson said. “Regrettably, that caused a lot of concern down on the ground. And of course, the press just thought that was wonderful.”
A simple mistake, it appears, is at the heart of the story of the mutiny. “There was no ‘strike in space’ by any stretch of the imagination,” Gibson said.