An Astronaut On NASA’s Doomed Skylab Revealed Why The Crew Refused To Talk With Mission Control

It’s December 27, 1973, and NASA finds itself embroiled in a major crisis. The agency has sent a crew up to the Skylab space station, but now it can’t seem to contact them. Tensions have been fraught between those on Earth and the men in orbit. But now it seems like the astronauts have had enough! They’ve gone totally quiet up there –raising the possibility of an outright mutiny.

The Skylab mission had actually been fraught with issues right from the very beginning. The craft picked up some pretty nasty damage when it was fired into space attached to a Saturn V launch vehicle. And this was just a sign of things to come, as the mission would continuously run into severe obstacles.

Yet it was almost inevitable that Skylab would run into big trouble. According to History.com, its ability to function properly was undermined by a lack of investment. The craft was built to stay in orbit around the Earth for roughly nine years, but NASA allegedly had no mechanism for safely bringing Skylab back after that time had elapsed. Apparently, the agency’s administrator Robert Frosch had claimed that it would’ve been too expensive to do so.

This failure to adequately prepare for the future essentially doomed the Skylab space station. Without any means of controlling its return to Earth, the craft posed a lethal threat for anyone who might be caught below. Though this wasn’t the only disaster to arise during Skylab’s patchy history.

NASA’s ability to keep morale high on the space station was extremely questionable, with the third and final team of astronauts left especially disgruntled by the mission’s organizers. So, it looked like a strike was on when this crew went dark and refused to communicate with ground control a couple of days after Christmas in 1973. But is that the full truth?