The Skylab 4 Mutiny, 1973 (2012)
libcom.org
libcom.org
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.
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.
Hence the phrase 'burden of command'
Commanders shouls consider all forms of feedback on a decision
edit: I work in commercial construction management.
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.
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.
http://this-space-available.blogspot.com/2016/01/space-myths...
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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-typical-daily-schedule-in-th...
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.
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.
The US no longer has a manned spaceflight capability, but stlll has about 40 astronauts.
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.
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.
Definitely. Apple for sure is a non-profitable charity.