Skylab: The myth of the mutiny in space

It's been almost half a century since the three astronauts on board the Skylab 4 space mission famously fell out with mission control. Soon afterwards, reports began to circulate that they went on strike. But Ed Gibson, the only one of the crew still alive, says the idea that they stopped work is a myth. Bill Pogue got sick soon after the three astronauts arrived at the space station.

It came as a surprise because Bill had been nicknamed "Iron Belly" during training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He could endlessly tolerate sitting in a rapidly rotating chair while moving his head backwards and forwards and side to side, without being sick. But this was the first time the three men had been in space and evidently resistance to motion sickness back on Earth didn't mean much up there.

Commander Jerry Carr suggested Bill eat a can of tomatoes to settle his stomach. Ed Gibson was sitting between the two men, and remembers the can floating past from left to right before his eyes. "Then I remember some bad noises coming from Bill, and a barf bag floating back from right to left," he says. "We felt discouraged because we knew we had so much work to do - that's when we made our first mistake."

Ed is 84 now and the Skylab 4 mission began in November 1973 but time hasn't dulled his most vivid memories - the Earth from space, the blazing corona of the sun and the silence of a spacewalk. He's the last one of the astronauts able to share the story, because Jerry Carr and Bill Pogue have both died - Carr last summer and Pogue in 2014.

The Skylab space station was a research platform in orbit where astronauts helped scientists to study the human body's response to space flight, carried out experiments and made observations of the Sun and Earth. Skylab 4 was the final mission and as a result it had a long list of tasks to fulfil. The 84-day mission - the longest ever at that point - was on a tight schedule. Nasa was very concerned about someone getting sick, which would have meant losing precious time.

Nasa accepts that mission planners had not given the crew the typical period of adjustment to acclimatise to working weightlessly in orbit and had packed their schedules with large amounts of work. The number of spacewalks was also doubled, to four, to observe a newly discovered comet, Kohoutek.

So the astronauts were already under pressure when they made their first bad decision. "We wanted to get organised before starting a big flurry with the ground so we decided to delay telling them about Bill being sick," says Ed.

But they had forgotten that everything they said on board was being recorded, and that mission control was listening in. It wasn't long before the voice of Astronaut Office chief Alan Shepard came crackling over the radio from down in mission control, an exchange also broadcast to the public.