Commander Gerald Carr, pilot William Pogue, and scientist Edward Gibson lifted off aboard the final crewed mission to Skylab, America's first space station. Over 84 days they conducted extensive solar observations, including detailed studies of a massive coronal mass ejection, and orbited Earth over 1,200 times. Their mission, though marred early on by a brief crew strike over an overloaded schedule, ultimately set an American endurance record that stood for years.
Skylab 4 was the last and longest of three crewed missions to the jury-rigged space station that NASA had cobbled together from a leftover Saturn rocket stage. Carr, Pogue, and Gibson, all space rookies, launched on November 16, 1973, on a mission that would stretch nearly three months, far longer than any previous American flight.
The mission became famous within NASA for an unusual labor dispute: exhausted by an overpacked schedule of scientific experiments, the crew staged what amounted to a one-day strike in late December, switching off radio communication with Houston to get uninterrupted rest and reassess their workload. Ground controllers, initially alarmed, ultimately renegotiated a more humane pace, and the incident became a case study in astronaut psychology and mission planning.
Scientifically, the flight was a triumph. Gibson, a solar physicist, captured extraordinary observations of a coronal mass ejection, while the crew logged over 300 hours of solar observation time. When they splashed down in February 1974, they had spent 84 days in space, a record that stood as America's longest spaceflight until the Space Shuttle and Mir missions of the 1990s.
Key people: Gerald Carr, William Pogue, Edward Gibson