The decisions made by the astronauts were made by their mission commander - a Marine Colonel. Rather than a labor/capitalist take, this goes back to the old mi

The decisions made by the astronauts were made by their mission commander - a Marine Colonel. Rather than a labor/capitalist take, this goes back to the old military traditions that a captain has the final authority for the safety of his ship and crew, and that at the end of the day, he only makes the call. For example, the recent collision between the USS Fitzgerald, which happened while the captain was asleep. The officer in charge of the ship, and the officer in charge of the CiC spent that whole night leading up to the collision making one giant mistake after another, and still the commander is going to court martial. He's going to court martial because by naval tradition, he was responsible for knowing that his officers had insufficient training because of over scheduling and should have rather kept the ship in port than sail. It's bad either way - not sailing your ship will make a lot of people unhappy with you, and may be career limiting, but that's what is expected. In the end, official NASA histories admitted that ground control was indeed wrong, and had schedule too much each day, and made poorly thought out, last minute changes to the plan, and weren't listening to the astronaut concerns. (And that there were lots of astronaut affecting problems with Skylab itself) The Skylab 4 situation was also the final round in the culture clash between mission control, who believed they had the final say, and the astronaut commanders carrying on the naval/aviation tradition that the captain onboard has the final say. After this mission, it was hashed out that mission control did have the final say, however mission control would respond if the astronauts said there was a problem.