RIP Bill Pogue, Skylab 4 Astronaut

Space.com is reporting that Skylab 4 Astronaut Bill Pogue has died.  He was 84.

Pogue was part of an 84 day mission that would be Skylab's final moment in the sun until it's fiery reentry over Australia, and was considered the longest duration manned space flight of the Apollo era.

Skylab 4 was mostly known, however, for a near mutiny on the part of Pogue and his fell crew mates Gerald Carr and Edward Gibson. In reality, it just proved to be a disagreement with Mission Control over the intense schedule that caused the crew to fall behind in their flight plan.  "We didn't find out until about halfway through [our stay] that we had been overscheduled. We were having trouble," Pogue recalled in a 2000 NASA oral history. "We were just hustling the whole day."  To make a point, the crew simply took an unscheduled day off and NASA got the message. The result was a compromised revision of the flight plan that made things much smoother.

Pogue also mentioned in his biography that he was in the mix to go to the moon on Apollo 19, but unfortunately the mission was cancelled early on. "But for the Grace of God," Pogue wrote in his autobiography, "instead, I was very fortunate to fly on the final visit to Skylab and spent 84 days in space studying the Sun, the Earth below, and ourselves."

Godspeed, Bill Pogue.  And Ad Astra.