
The Skylab 4 Mutiny, 1973 (2012) - ingve
https://libcom.org/history/1973-skylab-4-mutiny
======
sjcsjc
The wikipedia article has a slightly different perspective:

 _in the years following the mission the mistakes and disagreements received
added scrutiny. Several writers embellished the more dramatic aspects that led
to the radio conference, introducing both “strike” and “mutiny” to the
interpretation of events. These and other controversial terms continue to be
used, even if inaccurately, to describe the hours leading up to the conference
between astronauts and mission control._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab_4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab_4)

~~~
tw1010
Even if "strike" sounds dramatic, isn't it technically correct?

~~~
garmaine
No, the commander of the space station _is_ management. He's the one who has
ultimate authority to decide what his crew does, and is directed to act in the
interest of their safety (which means mental as well as physical health) in
order to ensure mission success. This is an inheritance of the role of a
captain on a ship. If the commander/captain decides it is in the best interest
of the crew to stop work, it is neither a mutiny nor a strike.

~~~
Spooky23
The commander is responsible for delivery, not the scope of that delivery.

A military NCO or junior officer are leaders, but not management, but is more
of an agent of management. If you look at paramilitary uniformed services with
unionization like the police or fire service, usually the civil service ranks,
up to Captain, are union members who collectively bargain. Once you leave that
Captain level (a Police or Fire Captain is usually aligned with an
organization similar in scope to an Army Company), you are management.

The reality is that the people in space didn't do exactly what the people on
the ground wanted, and suffered for it on the ground as a result. Whatever it
is, it walks and quacks like a strike-like incident that was handled by the
management as one would expect.

~~~
garmaine
"Captain" in the Army/Police/Fire and the Navy are very different in terms of
the allowed independent authority. The space agency inherited the naval model.

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realo
Slightly off-topic... but here is a question that keeps popping in my head
whenever I see a Space story...

Those astronauts (and cosmonauts and taikonauts) spend literally tens of
thousands man hours performing scientific experiments. This is beyond cool...
but... is there a place where we can see the actual results of all that work?

It seems to me that reading about the results of all those experiments would
be FAR more interesting than reading about the day-to-day life in micro-
gravity (which, arguably, is an experiment in itself... but just not the only
one).

~~~
yashevde
I have a nifty IFTTT thing set up that sends me a weekly summary from the ISS,
most of which tends to be about their research:
[https://goo.gl/qSjme7](https://goo.gl/qSjme7)

It pulls from these blog posts:
[https://blogs.nasa.gov/stationreport/](https://blogs.nasa.gov/stationreport/)

It's so easy to forget that we (human kind) are actually up there doing solid
research all the time. The attention paid in the media to launches, landings,
and the work being done seems tragically low to me.

~~~
simonw
That blog is fantastic, thanks for the link.

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ckastner
I thoroughly enjoyed the story, and side with the astronauts.

However:

> _After they returned, NASA became vindictive, and ensured that none of the
> crew flew again._

That's not really vindictive. Mutiny is an extreme measure with normally
severe consequences (and I'm sure that the astronauts took this into
consideration before acting), and it's not like there was an astronaut
shortage at the time.

~~~
vermontdevil
My question is did NASA learn from this and improved the scheduling for future
missions? Seems they have with ISS unless I’m wrong?

~~~
ckastner
If NASA did indeed change anything, then I'd suspect it would have been the
astronaut selection process. More precise: to select astronauts who can work
16 hours a day for 85 days.

Not that _I_ side with this view, but I can empathize with it. You're spending
billions of dollars on these experiments, so given the choice of either (a)
doing less experiments or (b) finding three people who can work Gulag-hours,
I'd expect the decision to go (b).

These are extraordinary jobs in extraordinary circumstances. You can't just
apply ordinary rules.

~~~
simonh
Suppose nobody can work the schedule these guys were expected to follow? Or
nobody completely new to space travel, as they were? Or suppose other skills
vital to the mission are on a different axis from the ability to work the
extreme hours and a compromise needs to be made between them? What then?

~~~
pdonis
_> Suppose nobody can work the schedule these guys were expected to follow?_

The article says "the all-rookie astronaut crew had problems adjusting to the
same workload level as their predecessors". So apparently the previous Skylab
crews had been able to work the schedule that this crew was expected to
follow.

~~~
justin66
Wikipedia tells us that on Skylab 3 _a total of 1,084.7 astronaut-utilization
hours were tallied by the Skylab 3 crew_ and that _a total of 6,051 astronaut-
utilization hours were tallied by Skylab 4 astronauts._

So it's fair to say that either NASA completely changed the way they measured
"astronaut utilization" between these missions, or the Skylab 4 guys were
flying a very different mission. We're comparing a 60 day mission to an 80 day
mission, but still.

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danielvf
The decisions made by the astronauts were made by their mission commander - a
Marine Colonel.

Rather than a labor/capitalist take, this goes back to the old military
traditions that a captain has the final authority for the safety of his ship
and crew, and that at the end of the day, he only makes the call.

For example, the recent collision between the USS Fitzgerald, which happened
while the captain was asleep. The officer in charge of the ship, and the
officer in charge of the CiC spent that whole night leading up to the
collision making one giant mistake after another, and still the commander is
going to court martial. He's going to court martial because by naval
tradition, he was responsible for knowing that his officers had insufficient
training because of over scheduling and should have rather kept the ship in
port than sail.

It's bad either way - not sailing your ship will make a lot of people unhappy
with you, and may be career limiting, but that's what is expected.

In the end, official NASA histories admitted that ground control was indeed
wrong, and had schedule too much each day, and made poorly thought out, last
minute changes to the plan, and weren't listening to the astronaut concerns.
(And that there were lots of astronaut affecting problems with Skylab itself)

The Skylab 4 situation was also the final round in the culture clash between
mission control, who believed they had the final say, and the astronaut
commanders carrying on the naval/aviation tradition that the captain onboard
has the final say. After this mission, it was hashed out that mission control
did have the final say, however mission control would respond if the
astronauts said there was a problem.

------
StopTheWorld
This reminds me of comments made by Apple's first head of engineering, who was
also one of its self-described founders, Rod Holt. He was a communist activist
who helped Woz build the first Apple II, and then went on to run engineering
and was later involved in the Macintosh project. With the fortune he made on
Apple stock, he founded the Holt Labor Library on Geary Boulevard, among other
things. On folklore.org, how some of his communist ideas influenced the
production at early Apple are described by the Mac team, such as that
production should be from each according to ability, to each according to need
(
[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Spoiled?.txt](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Spoiled?.txt)
)

His comments ( [https://louisproyect.org/2015/08/28/steve-
jobs/](https://louisproyect.org/2015/08/28/steve-jobs/) ) were on, among other
things, how Apple really worked in the early days, putting aside business
press (or non-business press) mythologies. One of his points of how Apple
became one of the largest corporations in the world was that it did not follow
the original path of capitalism - commodities for profit, alienated labor and
such. He did not care about such things, nor did Jobs, initially, one of the
reasons he surmises Jobs was fired from Apple. Holt states this explicitly "We
were not producing commodities for the sake of profit. In many respects, even
as the company grew beyond all expectations, inertia carried this
extraordinary characteristic forward until the Scully era."

Of course, most people have no idea how changes in these precepts can affect
production, or have any idea what alienation of labor during production is,
and can disregard all this, and buy into the latecomer business press view of
how one of the world's largest corporations was created, as opposed to
listening to the view of one of the five leading people who were there from
the beginning, whose ideas influenced (and which were to some extent
intuitively parallel to Jobs's and Wozniak's ideas of) production at Apple,
and who had a thoughtful account of how such a company came to become a leader
in world production.

~~~
hopler
Jobs career was launched by a capitalistic exploitation of Woz's work --
subcontracting his work to Woz for a fraction of the pay. He was similarly
ruthless in negotiating pay and IP ownership with his employees and colluding
with competitors to suppress employee opportunities and wages. Apple is not a
Communist love story.

~~~
StopTheWorld
Apparently Jobs was not ruthless enough - in 1985 he found himself exiled from
his own company, by his hand-picked CEO.

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maxxxxx
I don't remember details but there was also an Apollo flight where the crew
was so cranky that none of them was allowed to ever fly again.

~~~
rst
Apollo 7 -- the first crewed Apollo mission.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_7#Crew_honors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_7#Crew_honors)

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julienfr112
Maybe the one doing the scheduling of the astronauts was not allowed to do
that again also.

