“On December 27, 1973, the third crew of the Skylab space station turned off the radio and refused to talk to Mission Control.”
That is how a 1980 Harvard Business School case, “Strike in Space,” began. It drew much of its material from a 1976 book by the journalist Henry Cooper, who had written that the crew “went on strike at the end of the sixth week.” Cooper cited no sources, and the case gave none for its date or for the radio. When the astronaut William Pogue died in 2014, The New York Times headline still called him the astronaut “who staged a strike in space.”
The pressure, at least, was real. Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson and Pogue launched on November 16, 1973, all three on their first spaceflight. Their mission, planned at 56 days, had been provisionally extended to 84, and the extra month came loaded: new medical experiments they had barely trained for, 50% more exercise, two added spacewalks to observe Comet Kohoutek. Partly because the previous crew had done so well, planners skipped the usual easy first weeks. The crew struggled to keep up. Their requests to lighten the timeline went unheeded for several weeks. The flight director, Neil Hutchinson, later admitted the ground had erred in how it planned that first part of the mission.
In 2020, John Uri of NASA checked the legend against the air-to-ground transcripts. On December 27, the supposed strike day, the crew logged 7.5 hours of telescope observations, ran cardiovascular tests and sent down three TV broadcasts. At the end of that day, Carr asked Mission Control for an assessment of the crew’s performance and a follow-up talk.
Uri found possible sources for the myth. On Christmas Day the station’s ground track had left it out of contact for a full orbit. That evening the capsule communicator, Richard Truly, joked that they could take the next day off (a day off was already scheduled), and Carr answered, “We’ll have our answering service up tomorrow.” On December 28 a tracking-station fault kept the ground from reaching them for one pass.
The real airing-out came at the end of December 30. Mission Control had sent up a five-page summary of the crew’s work. Then, over three ten-minute radio passes, the crew and Truly went through the schedule. Carr later called it the first sensitivity session in space, because both sides aired their grievances. Their recommendations included a protected day off every ten days, fewer tasks around sleep, time between activities to clean up and set up, and exercise in one block.
“I do appreciate all your hard work on this little session we had tonight,” Carr told Truly. “I think it did a world of good.”
“I do too, Jerry,” Truly said. “I feel real good about it.”
There were no more incidents over the timeline. On February 8, 1974, after a record 84 days, the crew splashed down in the Pacific, having done more science than planned.