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The Skylab 4 Mutiny, 1973 (2012) (libcom.org)
184 points by ingve on Dec 28, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 53 comments



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


I think we should judge the event on what happened, and not on how the astronauts tried to paint it when they came back. It's understandable that US. astronauts in the 70´s would distance themselves as much as possible from any connections to the labor movement. But while they might not have thought of it as a labor action when they were up there, they -did- negotiate better working terms.

What they called their actions is not important. The important thing is the lesson that the ones doing work should have a say in the organisation of their work, both for their sake and the sake of the quality of their efforts.


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


Work stoppage followed by collective bargaining. They were literally the only three persons who could do the work. Ground control had to negotiate.

OTOH, it could have been the commander's sole decision, which means it wasn't a strike. He may have decided that as the commander he needed a fit crew and this was the only way to attain that.


Even if the commander called the strike, if the crew agreed or acted in accord, then that would still be a strike, no?


They have to follow the commander's legal orders. Whether they agreed or not should be immaterial.


A strike isn't an order, so I'm not sure how that thought progresses things.


Commander tends to retain... command authority. The crew doesnt agree, they execute orders.

Hence the phrase 'burden of command'


In some situations, disagreement early in the decision making process could be beneficial to all participants. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disagree_and_commit for context (a principle used at Intel and Amazon).


Yes - which is why there is a concept of good and bad leadership.

Commanders shouls consider all forms of feedback on a decision


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.


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.


"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.


Like a foreman on a construction site?


A foreman on a union construction site is generally a union member. The job superintendant (employed by the general contractor) would be a better analog, they're non-union management on a construction site.

edit: I work in commercial construction management.


I like this. It sounds like their reality didn’t match the theory.


Oversimplification is unhelpful. There are multiple levels of hierarchy. On a space ship, the commander is also a laborer and also accountable to mission control on Earth.


What makes Wikipedia an authoritative source here?


And a book written by two of the Skylab 4 astronauts flat out denies that a strike happened at all:

http://this-space-available.blogspot.com/2016/01/space-myths...


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).


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

It pulls from these blog posts: 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.


That blog is fantastic, thanks for the link.


NTRS would be the best place to start I think.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/

This query should give you articles that NASA themselves have tagged as related to skylab:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?Ntx=mode%20matchall&Ntk=Sub...


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.


> "NASA became vindictive, and ensured that none of the crew flew again."

I don't think that's correct. The crew were scheduled as normal for a future Apollo flight (that was then eventually budged canceled.) They then retired out during the wait for the space shuttle.


Wikipedia points out that there was only one manned space flight in the decade following Skylab 4. I’m betting there were many astronauts who never flew again around that time period.


Yes.

The US no longer has a manned spaceflight capability, but stlll has about 40 astronauts.


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


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.


I agree that we sometimes need to (voluntatily) commit to extreme conditions to get big things done, but I don't think selecting for commitment can fix another problem: no plan is perfect, and they tend to get worse as the planner is separated in time and space from the action.

On Earth, we make sure command structures are hierarchically self similar and afford some tactical autonomy to people in the field, even when we are asking them to put themselves in a lot of danger. Sounds like NASA was (is?) still working out what the level of autonomy and negotiation should be.


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?


> 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.


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.


If you can’t satisfy all of your criteria, then you have to compromise on some of the criteria. But if you can, then you don’t.


Surely the goal is to maximise output not effort?


People tend to confuse the two…


No they have changed things quite a bit. They still work pretty long full days but scheduling is careful to provide enough time for each activity instead of jamming everything in back to back to back like they did that lead up to the Skylab 4 protest.

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-typical-daily-schedule-in-th...


Sure you can. We're still ethical reasoning humans at the end of the day.


Why not also select for astronauts who don't need expenditure bulky spacesuits, or astronauts who can get to space without burning so much fuel?


They should send flat racing jockeys They'd be able to launch 50% more people.



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

They have a mixed record. If you read Bryan Burrough's Dragonfly, which includes some first-hand accounts, you can see that the NASA astronauts who visited Mir had varied results in this regard but the overall pattern was that of a lax, highly understaffed effort towards scheduling and training on those missions.

> Seems they have with ISS unless I’m wrong?

That program has a better reputation for sure. I'd love book recommendations if anyone has anything.


It wasn't the first time a mutiny happened and the astronauts paid the cost. See Wally Schirra and the Apollo 7 crew.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_7


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.


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 )

His comments ( 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.


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.


There is a story in the Jobs biography where Jobs refused to give any stock options to one of the techs that had worked with them at the start. Wozniak then made up for it from his own stock. That together with the fact that Jobs lied to Wozniak about the amount of money they made from a contract shows to me that Jobs was always a greedy bastard. Wozniak on the other hand was extremely egalitarian.


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


> We were not producing commodities for the sake of profit.

Definitely. Apple for sure is a non-profitable charity.


Note the past tense - the comment is about what the company did in the early 1980s, not about what Apple is today.


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.


Apollo 7 -- the first crewed Apollo mission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_7#Crew_honors


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




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