The legend says American astronauts went on strike 270 miles above Earth. This episode uses declassified mission logs, psychological case studies, and crew interviews to separate myth from reality on Skylab 4, the 84-day mission flown by rookies Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson, and William Pogue starting in November 1973. It begins with the stuffed flight suits left as a prank by the previous crew, the mission patches mistakenly labeled Skylab 3, and the decision to hide Pogue's space sickness, a cover-up exposed when Mission Control listened to onboard voice recordings and Alan Shepard delivered a blistering reprimand.

The conversation follows the crushing workload scheduled on Earth-based timing, the failure of a control moment gyroscope and the thermal expansion trick engineers used to save a second one, the liquid salt and pepper squirted fr ...