Shangai Tower Today we’re talking about elevators. This is the Shanghai tower- the second tallest building in the world behind the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Now, building tall buildings is a bit of a…uhh… rooster measuring contest and nowhere likes flaunting their flightless birds more than China and the UAE. The Shanghai Tower, which cost $2.5 billion to build, stretches to over 2,000 feet or 600 meters and has 127 stories. As a point of comparison, if you put eight 747’s on top of each other, the Shanghai Tower would still be taller mostly because, according to my engineering degree, that’s not a structurally sound building. Also Read: What is the fastest object ever made? Now, part of the difficulty in having buildings this tall is that people, who mostly come from the ground, need to get to the top of the building quickly. If people can’t get to the top of the building easily and quickly, they won’t want to buy property in the building, which I’m told is a pretty imp...
There are a lot of frontiers out there—Canada,Kansas—but space is the final frontier… that I’m mentioning. The United States, of course, was the first to the moon in 1969. The US is no stranger to winning, no country has won more Super Bowls, but after the moon landings the country wanted to continue being the best in space.
Mainly, they wanted to prove that humans could live for extended periods in space without dying in preparation for the imminent mission to mars taking off in 1989… taking off in 1995… taking off whenever Elon Musk stops tweeting about mason jars.
Also Read: Why Hudson Bay Has Less Gravity?
NASA launched Skylab into space on a Saturn V rocket in 1973. The station was essentially a scientific lab in the sky built to house those who would break the record for the longest time spent in space and it was pretty plush. With about 1,600 square feet of living space for three people, Skylab was quite literally larger than the average New York City apartment.
I guess you can say Manhattan real estate prices really are astronomica… oh come on writer that’s just pathetic! Skylab was built to carry out experiments in space, but on another level, the mission as a whole was an experiment on long-term living in orbit.
There were subtle design choices made to make Skylab feel more homely—each astronaut had their own bedroom, they would eat together around a communal table, and in keeping the American governmental tradition as making things as complicated and confusing as possible, they named the first mission to the station Skylab 2.
Those astronauts launched on May 25th, 1973 and stayed in orbit for 28 days and then, soon after, on July 28th, Skylab 3, the second mission, launched which lasted a longer 59 days.
Then came Skylab 4, the third Skylab Mission. This would be the last and longest of the three missions. It launched on November 16th, 1973 and before the astronauts even arrived at the station, their schedules were packed with all the experiments NASA wanted to complete before Skylab was closed for good.
Each day on the station was worth about $70 million or as an American would call it, the cost of an average hospital visit so the crew was scheduled not down to the hour or half hour or even minute. They were scheduled down to increments of 30 seconds. Each second of each astronaut's day was worth $270. Each toilet break was worth thousands of dollars.
These were some expensive shifts—work shifts. Skylab 4 was planned to be in orbit for 84 days and, despite the longer mission length, their days were as packed as those on the shorter Skylab 2 and 3 missions. For the first 40 days of the mission, the crew went without a single rest day to keep up with the busy schedule.
All the different scientists at NASA were pressuring mission control to make sure their experiments would get completed before Skylab closed and so mission control was pressuring the crew to work more and more hours.
They were also tasked with completing spacewalks but the astronauts reported that there was no pressure during these. Nonetheless, the astronauts had had enough. They just couldn’t take it anymore. It wasn’t that they needed space, they had plenty of that, they just needed some time to rest.
Despite mission control having a busy day planned for the astronauts, on December 28th, 1973, the Skylab crew turned off their radios and relaxed during the first ever strike in space. The most fascinating part of it all, though, was that they weren’t even French.
This day on strike actually generated important data for the real experiment going on in Skylab—on how long humans could live in space. As it turned out, the strike actually improved productivity.
Despite being days behind schedule at the beginning of the mission, the crew finished every single scheduled experiment by the end even with the longer rest periods they negotiated during the strike.
NASA used what they learned to improve crew scheduling for future missions and today enforces mandatory rest periods on the International Space Station.
Looking back, it’s a bit unclear how purposeful this mutiny was. The astronauts certainly did get in trouble once they landed back on earth and none of them flew again, but NASA has been sparse on details of this rather embarrassing moment in their history.
While the crew definitely did go on strike for a day, some say that the loss of radio contact was just due to the astronauts failing to properly schedule their radio manning duties. Others, including much of the press at the time, said this was a purposeful action done to spite the mission controllers.
Now, for all legal purposes space follows maritime law and, according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,piracy is defined as, “any illegal acts of violence or detention,” on a ship which is what these astronauts purportedly did—they illegally detained the ship which made them the first ever space pirates.
Obviously they’re out of jobs now, and 1/3rd’s dead, but if they do need new careers they can lay claim to the best band name ever—Space Pirates!