Bidspirit auction | Astronaut Bill Pogue signed NASA

Astronaut Bill Pogue signed NASA Atlantis STS-27 FDC. DEC 1988. In April 1966, Pogue was one of 19 astronauts selected by NASA in Group 5 of the Apollo program. He served as a member of the support crews for the Apollo 7, Apollo 11, 13 Apollo 14 missions. He replaced Ed Givens, who died in a car accident, as Capsule Communicator for Apollo 7. No crew members were assigned to the cancelled Apollo missions but if normal crew rotation had been followed, Pogue would have been assigned as command module pilot for the Apollo 19 mission. Pogue was the pilot of Skylab 4, the third and final crewed visit to the Skylab Orbital Workshop, from November 16, 1973, to February 8, 1974. At 84 days, 1 hour and 15 minutes, it was the longest crewed flight to that date. It held the record for the longest spaceflight until 1978, when the crew of Soviet ship Salyut 6 spent 140 days at the space station. Pogue was accompanied on the 34.5 million miles (55.5×106 km) flight by Commander Gerald Carr and science pilot Edward Gibson. As a crew, they completed 56 experiments, 26 science demonstrations, 15 subsystem detailed objectives, and 13 student investigations across 1,214 revolutions of the Earth. After around six weeks of flight, there were disagreements between crew and ground control. On December 28, 1973, radio transmission was turned off with the crew spending the time relaxing and gazing at the Earth from orbit. The incident was later referred to as the Skylab mutiny.Pogue later commented that the team was ”studying the Sun, the Earth below, and ourselves.” Once radio transmission had resumed, an agreement for the flight to continue; with tensions being significantly diminished. Pogue commented in 1985 that the flight had made him more empathetic, saying ”I try to put myself into the human situation, instead of trying to operate like a machine.” The crew also acquired extensive Earth resources observations data using Skylab's Earth resources experiment package camera and sensor array, and logged 338 hours of operations of the Apollo Telescope Mount that made extensive observations of the sun's processes. Pogue and Carr viewed a comet transiting the sky during an extravehicular activity (EVA). He logged 13 hours and 34 minutes in two EVAs outside the orbital workshop. On September 1, 1975, Pogue retired from the USAF, as a colonel, and NASA, to become vice president of High Flight Foundation. Pogue logged 7,200 hours of flight time, including 4,200 hours in jet aircraft and 2,000 hours in space flight during his career.