Skylab 4: 50th anniversary of the first 'strike' aboard a spacecraft

The history of space exploration records at least two cases of mutiny by an astronaut crew. The first occurred in 1968, when the commander of Apollo 7, Wally Schirra, constipated, feverish and irritable, with his nose plugged by snot, disobeyed the re-entry protocol by dispensing with the helmet for fear of suffering a ruptured eardrum due to the change in pressure. But the so-called first space strike, which is now half a century old, was during the Skylab 4 mission, on the third and final visit by astronauts to the space laboratory launched by NASA, from late 1973 to early 1974.

By then, the Soviet Union had already been a couple of years ahead of the curve with Salyut 1 (which had a tragic end, with the death of its three crew members during the return to Earth) and had just put the second into orbit. Skylab was built using an empty third stage of the Saturn 5 moon rocket: a shell that offered plenty of space, and NASA engineers had installed equipment inside to conduct dozens of experiments. The aim was to investigate everything from the behaviour of the organism in microgravity conditions to new techniques for processing materials. It also had a solar telescope on board and elements to make the stay of three astronauts more pleasant: single bedrooms, a small kitchen and even a shower.

The lab's launch didn't go well: A gust of wind ripped off its insulating shield and meteorite defense and one of its two solar panels. The other, though unharmed, had been stuck in a closed position. Much of the first crew's efforts would be concentrated on installing a new protective sunshade and restoring the battered station to more or less regular operation.

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The second crew continued the repairs, but was able to develop an extensive program of experiments, including the study of how spiders formed their webs in weightlessness. They were in space for 59 days, more than twice as long as the previous mission.

This is how the three crew members of Skylab 4, from left, Edward G. Gibson, Gerald P. Carr and William R. Pogue, were photographed at Kennedy Space Center, Florida on November 8, 1973.

The next flight in the program was entrusted to a team of rookie astronauts, Gerald Carr, William Pogue, and Edward Gibson: none of them had ever been to space, an important aspect of this story. The goal was to reach a stay of almost three months. In the case of the last Skylab mission, the work schedule was very dense and, to make matters worse, the Sun, which should be going through a period of relative calm, showed so much activity that it was necessary to multiply the observations with telescopes.

There was so much to do that the astronauts were ordered to get to work almost immediately, without giving them enough time to get used to the feeling of weightlessness, new to all three. They were suffering from dizziness and vomiting for hours, but decided to hide it from the flight directors. When it was discovered by a conversation between them captured by the microphone, Alan Shepard, the mythical head of the astronaut office, gave them an official reprimand, the first that a crew had received during a space trip.

The mission, then, was off to a bad start. Perhaps affected by the anger, the astronauts began to make trivial mistakes and fall further and further behind in their experiment program. It also didn't help that Houston was trying to micromanage, minute by minute, even the smallest details, to the indignation of the three men.

Typically, designing an experiment required a couple of years of preparation. To take advantage of that last flight, NASA had opened the door and received hundreds of proposals just a couple of months in advance. It's no wonder there were so many loose ends that researchers needed to give continuous instructions to the overwhelmed astronauts.

An aerial view of the Skylab orbiting workshop in Earth orbit in 1973.NASA

Every day at Skylab, about 40 instruction sheets were received, from where to point the telescope at when to water a bean crop. As soon as they woke up, Carr, Pogue and Gibson were waiting for them two meters of paper spat out by the teletypewriter, full of guidelines, formulas and procedures to be executed in the next 24 hours.

Pogue later recalled that because some of the experiments focused on astrophysics, the timing was especially demanding: "You'd be given a certain time and certain angles, etc., and you'd get that certain star. Well, if you don't do it on time, angles and everything are useless. They become obsolete."

Unbearable discomfort

The first two crews had more or less enjoyed their experience; the third, no. In addition, some small discomforts became exasperating: the cans of food did not fit in the heater and its contents were always warm; toiletries looked like they were made of aluminum wool; The drinking water carried bubbles of dissolved gas that caused continuous windiness. And the low atmospheric pressure forced them to communicate loudly, even when they were only five meters away. The astronauts suffered from congestion caused by a lack of gravity that favored the accumulation of mucus in the sinuses. As a result, almost all the food was tasteless.

But the most annoying thing was that few things seemed to be in place. Perhaps because the previous two crews had not been very careful to maintain order. In theory, cataloguing of stocks was sacred. The Skylab carried some 40,000 items spread over a hundred cupboards; in Houston, six people and a computer were in charge of knowing the location of everything at all times. But in practice, a certain chaos had ensued on the space station.

And to top it all off, inside the drawers there was no lighting, only the light points on the ceiling. Finding anything from a camera to a tube of toothpaste required scanning its interior with a handheld flashlight.

Under these conditions, work was delayed and rest periods dwindled. They didn't usually sleep more than 6 hours with 16-hour activity shifts. In many cases, a single experiment — for example, photographing solar activity or the newly arrived comet Kohoutek — lasted three or four hours.

Pogue, left, and Carr place bags in the trash airlock. Fish trap

On Christmas Day, Skylab's trajectory kept it out of range of tracking stations for an entire orbit. That silence gave rise to the legend that the astronauts had turned off the radio. Actually, on that same date, Carr and Pogue went on a grueling seven hours of spacewalk. Half-jokingly, Houston suggested that they could take a day off, which they did, to which the commander replied that they would "turn on the answering machine."

Unanswered call

Carr recalled: "One of the things we did was neglect our radios and forgot to set them up for one of our passes, so when we got signal, people on the ground called us and we didn't answer them." Media reported that the crew had refused to speak to the base.

The crew and mission control eventually had a teleconference to voice their objections and reached a consensus on the way forward, which included prioritizing key research and putting routine tasks on a "shopping list" to be completed at any time of the day.

"That lightened the schedule, took all the pressure off us. We were no longer racing against the clock to get things done. That really solved the problem," Carr explained. "The flexibility of the schedule allowed us to do the most important experiments, and the rest of the things were done when we could, rather than on a very tight schedule. It worked like a charm," the astronaut later celebrated.

Repeatedly, the astronauts had discussed with controllers the need to rethink their work schedule. Sometimes, in an atmosphere of tension. Eventually, they got their demands and many months later, one of the flight directors acknowledged that the three crew members had indeed been under too much pressure. The specialists drew many conclusions from this experience, such as the importance of psychology in these missions and the need to always have someone experienced on the ship.

In August 1976, Henry Cooper, a respected specialist in the space program, published an article in the New Yorker magazine suggesting that the stressed-out astronauts had staged a kind of day-long activity strike. Later, in his book A House in Space, Cooper himself used the word "rebellion." Reality was much less compromising. They had simply taken advantage of their day off. But the legend was too colorful to die out entirely, and the episode of the three mutineers persisted for years.

Recently, NASA's history division released the official account of the episode, referring to the recorded conversations and the enormous amount of work that went into the Skylab 4 crew. At 87 years old, Ed Gibson is the team's only survivor. He continues to lament that the story of the mutiny remains what the public remembers most about his 84 days in space: In the end, the crew completed all scheduled experiments and a few additional.

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