Context: Skylab was American single lunch heavy space station (I don’t remember the sepcifics but the pressurized space was either 1/3 or 1/2 of that of the ISS so quite a big beast)
The station was put on the orbit on May 14th 1973 on the last Saturn V rocket ever build that was originally meant for the cancelled Apollo 18 mission
Sending and sustaining a human presence on the station was expensive af, if I remember correctly it was few hundred dollars a minute so NASA tried to use that time as efficiently as possible
Fast forward it’s November 1973 and third crewed mission just docked to the station ( Gerald P. Carr, Edward G. Gibson, William R. Pogue) and just as previous crews they were worked to the bones, their schedule was filled up to minutes
At some point there was a communication break for the period of one orbit betwen the Station and Ground Control, the break is said to be unintentional but directly lead to
1. Making their schedule less packed which directly resaulted in better efficiency in their work (I know, shocker, who would have guessed that well rest workers are better at their work)
2. Creation of the Skylab mutiny myth in which the crew supposedly cut the communication with NASA on purpose and took a long break
2012Jesusdies on
This is a myth. There was no strike, what happened was a temporary communications blackout from mistake. Hear from the astronauts themselves:
> The three astronauts decided that only one of them needed to tune into the morning briefing, and that they would take it in turn.
>”That worked really well, except that in our fatigued condition up there, one day we got our signals crossed and we didn’t have anybody listening to the ground.”
>The astronauts were out of communication for one whole orbit of the Earth – about 90 minutes.
>”The word ‘strike’ went at lightspeed throughout the control room and out into the news media, who feasted on that,” Ed says.
“On the ground they interpreted it as a strike. But it wasn’t intentional, it was our mistake. The media created this myth which has been floating around out there ever since and we’ve just had to live with it.”
2 Comments
Context: Skylab was American single lunch heavy space station (I don’t remember the sepcifics but the pressurized space was either 1/3 or 1/2 of that of the ISS so quite a big beast)
The station was put on the orbit on May 14th 1973 on the last Saturn V rocket ever build that was originally meant for the cancelled Apollo 18 mission
Sending and sustaining a human presence on the station was expensive af, if I remember correctly it was few hundred dollars a minute so NASA tried to use that time as efficiently as possible
Fast forward it’s November 1973 and third crewed mission just docked to the station ( Gerald P. Carr, Edward G. Gibson, William R. Pogue) and just as previous crews they were worked to the bones, their schedule was filled up to minutes
At some point there was a communication break for the period of one orbit betwen the Station and Ground Control, the break is said to be unintentional but directly lead to
1. Making their schedule less packed which directly resaulted in better efficiency in their work (I know, shocker, who would have guessed that well rest workers are better at their work)
2. Creation of the Skylab mutiny myth in which the crew supposedly cut the communication with NASA on purpose and took a long break
This is a myth. There was no strike, what happened was a temporary communications blackout from mistake. Hear from the astronauts themselves:
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-56346001
> The three astronauts decided that only one of them needed to tune into the morning briefing, and that they would take it in turn.
>”That worked really well, except that in our fatigued condition up there, one day we got our signals crossed and we didn’t have anybody listening to the ground.”
>The astronauts were out of communication for one whole orbit of the Earth – about 90 minutes.
>”The word ‘strike’ went at lightspeed throughout the control room and out into the news media, who feasted on that,” Ed says.
“On the ground they interpreted it as a strike. But it wasn’t intentional, it was our mistake. The media created this myth which has been floating around out there ever since and we’ve just had to live with it.”