William R. Pogue was the pilot of a record-setting American mission in space, and one of the very few astronauts ever to go on strike — while in orbit — to demand more time for contemplating the universe.

Colonel Pogue, who died on March 3 at 84 at his home in Cocoa Beach, Fla., was a member of the three-man crew that flew the longest, and the last, manned mission aboard Skylab, from Nov. 16, 1973, to Feb. 8, 1974. The 118-foot-long space station, designed for scientific research, orbited the Earth from 1973 until 1979, when it ran out of steam and disintegrated (unoccupied) upon re-entering the atmosphere.

The job action came about halfway through the crew’s 84-day mission. “We had been overscheduled,” Colonel Pogue wrote. “We were just hustling the whole day. The work could be tiresome and tedious, though the view was spectacular.”

He was known for his candor — a Baptist-educated fighter pilot who seemed willing to jettison the heroic image long attached to the first generation of Americans in space in favor of a more regular-guy model. Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr., a former staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of books about American and Soviet space missions, called Colonel Pogue “the earthiest of all the astronauts.”