In 1973, the year after the last manned mission to the moon, Skylab became the earth's first inhabited space station. By this time, the excitement and optimism that followed Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind" had transformed into general indifference and grumbling about whether the space program was a cost-effective use of tax dollars.

Had NASA dropped the space program's squeaky-clean image however, Skylab might have attracted a lot more public interest. After the first two crews had to deal with major repairs and technical issues, the third crew was overloaded with experiments from mission control and started rebelling. Trash talk was spoken, hipster beards were grown and orders generally ignored, culminating in the first astronaut industrial action when the crew refused to work until they could renegotiate their schedules.

One of their biggest gripes was that there was no time to just do nothing and contemplate the enormity of their situation. They wanted time to look out the window and take pictures that weren't for scientific research. This was indeed such an issue that time is now allocated for crews on the International Space Station for exactly that. Bean counters and space skeptics will be shocked to learn from the "Mission [Space × Art] — Beyond Cosmologies" exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) that not only are astronauts spending time staring into space, but they are also involved in art projects.