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Comment by chc4 | Hacker News Reader

There's also the "Skylab Controversy" - when a group of astronauts aboard the Skylab went on strike and turned off their radios to protest too long of working hours.

I assume that since most astronauts are Air Force personal, they committed insubordination, although were never tried for anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab_controversy

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Note that one of the astronauts has claimed that the incident was completely accidental and presumably a side effect of drastic sleep deprivation. (At that point all three of the crew were getting less than four hours of sleep a day, on top of the physiological effects of being first-time astronauts.)

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/did-skylab-4s-astronau...

> in David Hitt’s 2008 book Homesteading Space, Gibson says that the three men simply failed to synchronize their radio response shifts, and that as a result, “one day we made a mistake and for a whole orbit we all had our radios off!” The press, he says, misconstrued this as a purposeful action. “There was no ‘strike in space’ by any stretch of the imagination,” Gibson says in the book. “What could we threaten to do, go live on the moon?” He says the same in his oral history, calling it a “myth.”

Interesting take and I agree. I always thought of it as a labor-relations issue rather than a crime. However, the article states, "a single day on Skylab was worth about $22.4 million in 2017 dollars, and thus any work stoppage was considered inappropriate due to the expense". Makes the Apollo 15 scandal seem like peanuts.

It's interesting to consider how the balance of power tilts between strikers and management in a situation like that. On one hand, the astronauts cost NASA much more money and opportunity cost from lost experiment time than perhaps an ordinary strike. On the other hand, the astronauts only have limited supplies and the strike will eventually break itself.

On the other hand, NASA has been known to put astronauts on a "never flies into space again" list for even the smallest indiscretion or misstep. Engaging in something the equivalent of a very brief labor stoppage can be a literal career ender. Not that any of the astronauts on Skylab couldn't walk out the door of NASA and into a new job in the aerospace industry at probably 175%+ of their former government salary.

> Not that any of the astronauts on Skylab couldn't walk out the door of NASA and into a new job in the aerospace industry at probably 175%+ of their former government salary.

Curious, what are the job opportunities of ex-astronauts? I assume they're not the kind of openings to be found on linkedin.

I don’t know about modern astronauts, but bear in mind that at the point when the Skylab missions happened there were only about 50 astronauts total in the US. Only about half of those had actually flown in space. I have a feeling that being one of the ~25 people in the country with space flight experience was enough to open doors at basically every aerospace company, most large defense contractors, etc.

The astronauts finished all the experiments ahead of schedule, even with the "strike". It seems like taking a break (accidental or not) increased their productivity afterwards

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