Dec. 28--Blows on behalf of fair labor treatment don't always have to come from factory workers. Sometimes they're delivered by unionized professors or even multimillionaire ballplayers. On Dec. 28, 1973, or 42 years ago Monday, one was delivered by three U.S. astronauts orbiting the globe in NASA's Skylab -- a one-day sit-down strike in space.
As Erik Loomis retells the story, mission commander Jerry Carr, science pilot Ed Gibson and pilot William Pogue were in the midst of what would become a record 84-day mission, the last before the spacecraft was to be decommissioned, when they rebelled against NASA's remorseless work schedule.
They knew before going up that the pace would be punishing -- 84 days of 16 hours each without a break, filled with minute-by-minute scheduling for observations of the sun and Comet Kohoutek, medical tests, photographing of the Earth below, and four spacewalks.
Other astronauts on the ground team, including the commanders of the previous two Skylab missions, advised NASA that the plans were unreasonable. None of the three astronauts on the Skylab 4 mission had been in space before, but NASA hadn't factored in any time for them to become acclimated to conditions aloft. They were plainly overscheduled. In fact, Pogue almost immediately came down with debilitating nausea.
Relations between the crew and mission control started off on the wrong foot. The crew treated Pogue's spacesickness as a passing bug (they were right) and didn't bother to report it to Houston, which turned out to be secretly eavesdropping on their onboard conversations and upbraided them for keeping secrets.
Almost instantly the crew fell behind schedule, and with no give in the workload, couldn't catch up. After a month, Gibson was grousing that the mission resembled "a 33-day fire drill." Carr informed ground control, "We would never work 16 hours a day for 84 straight days on the ground, and we should not be expected to do it here in space."
