December 28, 1973 - The Skylab 4 "Mutiny"

Forty-five years ago on December 28, 1973, the three-man crew of the Skylab 4 space station made history by effectively taking an unscheduled day off. Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson and William Pogue switched off radio communications with NASA, refused communications from mission control and spent time relaxing and admiring Earth.

The Skylab controversy was triggered by a number of factors. Skylab 4’s 84-day mission was the longest yet undertaken by American astronauts, and the three crewmembers had never spent any time in space. Skylab 3’s crew had finished their assigned work on their 60-day spaceflight and asked NASA for more work, possibly leading the organization to have elevated expectations for the Skylab 4 crew. Skylab 4’s crew had gradually fallen behind on work for the first six weeks of the mission, and had become stressed trying to catch up.

Skylab 4 crew inside the space station. Source: NASA

Pogue’s New York Times obituary quoted him as writing: “We had been overscheduled. We were just hustling the whole day. The work could be tiresome and tedious, though the view was spectacular.”

Skylab 4’s mission continued without incident following the “strike,” and NASA worked carefully with the astronauts to reduce their workloads and control stress. Despite only lasting one day, the outage was an expensive one: estimates value a single day’s work on any Skylab mission at around $6 million per crewmember in 2017 dollars.

Skylab 4’s long duration and rookie crew were uncharted territory for NASA, and the organization learned important lessons about the psychological effects of long-term spaceflights. An astronaut lacks the freedom to act as he or she wants, and spur-of-the-moment thinking generally vanishes while in space. Astronauts often become frustrated by communication delays with mission control. Sunrises and sunsets every 45 minutes can interfere with sleep-wake cycles, quickly causing fatigue. Yet among astronaut testimonials, most relate that the biggest stressors are social and cultural deprivation as well as boredom during downtime.

Skylab’s teaching moments resonated throughout the subsequent history of American space programs. NASA implemented longer training protocols and more careful astronaut selection in subsequent space station programs. Psychological compatibility of crewmembers also became a greater concern.

Astronaut psychology is still a prime concern as NASA eyes spaceflights to Mars. For the past five years, the organization has studied crewmembers stress management, morale and problem-solving at Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS), an analog habitat meant to replicate the Martian surface. Most HI-SEAS missions last around 8 months, significantly shorter than a two- to three-year expeditionary mission to Mars, which could be possible as early as 2021.

The Skylab 4 “mutiny” and the subsequent Shuttle-Mir missions of the 1990s provoked necessary organizational changes at NASA, focused less on individual crewmembers and more on crew dynamics and their isolation from family and friends for long periods.