Packing for Mars, page 26
* Did she or didn’t she? Arresting officer William Becton wrote in his affidavit that he found a trash bag containing two used diapers inside Lisa Nowak’s car. “I asked Mrs. Nowak why she had the diapers. Mrs. Nowak said that she did not want to stop and use the restroom, so she used the diapers to collect her urine.” That’s what astronauts do—you can’t take a bathroom break on a spacewalk, so you wear a diaper inside your spacesuit.
Nowak later denied wearing diapers. She now says her family had used the diapers when Houston was evacuated during Hurricane Rita, two years earlier. If I were Nowak, I wouldn’t have worried about the diapers. I’d have worried about the buck knife, steel mallet, BB gun, gloves, rubber tubing, and large plastic garbage bags also found in her car. I’d be peeing my pants.
* And to keep their distance vision from deteriorating. When your view extends no farther than a few yards, the muscles that squeeze the lens for near focus can eventually lock in a short-lived “accommodative spasm.” Submarine myopia is enough of a problem that submarine crews aren’t allowed to drive for from one to three days after coming ashore from a long assignment—a good idea for several reasons.
* If the plants are edible, a conflict can arise. As much as astronauts miss nature, they miss fresh food. The diary of cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev includes a story about a batch of onion bulbs taken on board Salyut as part of an investigation of plant growth in zero gravity. “As we were unloading the resupply ship, we found some rye-bread and a knife. So we ate some bread. Then we saw the onion bulbs we were supposed to plant. We ate them right then and there, with bread and salt. They were delicious. Time went by and the biologists asked us, ‘How are the onions?’
“‘They are growing,’ we answered….
“‘Do they have shoots?’ Without any hesitation we replied that they even had shoots. There was great excitement at the communication station. Onions have never bloomed in space before! We asked to speak to the head biologist in private. ‘For god’s sake,’ we told him, ‘don’t get upset, we ate your onions.’”
* Yuri Gagarin loved Soviet rocketry mastermind Sergei Korolev, though not in a space food tube sort of way. When searchers found Gagarin’s wallet after the fighter jet crash that killed him, there was just one photo inside (now on display beside the mangled wallet in the Star City museum). The photo is of Korolev—not Gagarin’s wife or child, not his beloved mother. Not even Gina Lollobrigida. “She kissed him!” said our ebullient museum guide Elena while fanning herself with a plastic fan as though overcome by the thought of it.
* Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration. Eskimo hunters traveling alone on still, glassy waters are sometimes stricken by “kayak angst”—delusions that their boat is flooding or that the front end is either sinking or rising up out of the water. Of related interest: “A Preliminary Report of Kayak-Angst Among the Eskimo of West Greenland” includes a discussion of Eskimo suicide motives and notes that four out of the fifty suicides investigated were elderly Eskimos who “took their lives as a direct result of uselessness due to old age.” No mention was made of whether they cast themselves adrift on ice floes, as you sometimes hear, and whether travel by ice floe has its own unique anxiety syndrome.
* It would have had to be affixed to a holder inside the helmet, just as in-helmet snack bars are. The snack bar, made of the same stuff as Fruit Roll-Ups, is positioned so that astronauts can simply bend their head down and take a bite. Or, as astronaut Chris Hadfield told me, bend their head and smear it on their face. The fruit bars are mounted alongside the drink tube, which tends to leak a bit, turning the fruit into a “gooey mass.” “We just stopped using them,” Hadfield said.
* One self-help phobia Web site helpfully reassures the afflicted that “if you have no plans to travel into space…astrophobia may not significantly impact your life.”
* Using—how cool is this?—a gravity meter. Walk over an area of very dense rock while holding one of these meters, and you can watch the pull of gravity increase. (Fluctuations in Earth’s density change its gravity enough to pull missiles off their trajectory by as much as a mile or so; gravity maps of Earth were once top-secret Cold War possessions.) This effect is lessened if the dense rock is a tall mountain and you’re four or five miles above the mean surface of Earth. If you carry a bathroom scale to the top of Mt. Everest, you may see that you actually weigh a tiny bit less, not counting the marbles you have obviously lost.
* Or a space station garbage bag or a NASA spatula. When astronauts let go of objects, they become satellites for the few weeks or months it takes them to lose speed and fall out of orbit. The term “satellite” applies to any object orbiting the earth. The “spat sat,” as the orbiting spatula was known, had been used to test a spackling technique to fix dings in the exterior of the Space Shuttle caused by, ironically, orbiting debris. You don’t have to worry about being killed by falling spatulas or LSD gurus, because these things burn up when they reenter the Earth’s atmosphere. (Dr. Leary was recremated sometime in 2003.)
* To inspire future generations to take up the fight against gravity, Babson paid for stone monuments to be erected at thirteen prominent American colleges. Colby College’s “antigravity stone,” as it became known, states its goal as follows: “To remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents.” The students were differently inspired: In what became a joyous progravity rite, the antigravity stone was knocked over so many times that the college eventually relocated it to a less prominent spot. Along with the stones, Babson left the colleges small grants but did not explicitly state that the money must go toward antigravity research. Loath to sponsor “Mickey Mouse” science, Colby used the money to erect a skyway connecting two science buildings. “At least,” noted a college spokesperson, “it’s off the ground.”
* The V-2’s directional system was notoriously erratic. In May 1947, a V-2 launched from White Sands Proving Ground headed south instead of north, missing downtown Juarez, Mexico, by 3 miles. The Mexican government’s response to the American bombing was admirably laid back. General Enrique Diaz Gonzales and Consul General Raul Michel met with United States officials, who issued apologies and an invitation to come to “the next rocket shoot” at White Sands. The Mexican citizenry was similarly nonchalant. “Bomb Blast Fails to Halt Spring Fiesta,” said the El Paso Times headline, noting that “many thought the explosion was a cannon fired for the opening of the fiesta.”
* Some months after I visited, the flights were outsourced to the Zero G Corporation, which uses a 727. Most people just call the plane the Vomit Comet. Though NASA would like them to stop. They asked us to refer to it as the Weightless Wonder. Which pretty much makes you vomit.
† I mentioned this to an Oregon Air Guardsman I met a few weeks later. He replied that this had happened to a guy he knew. “I saw pictures,” he told me, leaning forward in his seat. “He was basically leaking out the back.” If you do a Google search on “Human FOD” (Human Foreign Object Damage), you will find footage of a young airman being pulled into the intake of an A-6 jet, causing sparks to shoot out the other side but not the airman himself. He appears in footage shot later that day, awake and chatting, his head bandaged but otherwise okay. A flight surgeon told me that the trick to surviving is to have your flash-light or socket wrench precede you into the maw. The object will be chewed to pieces, shutting down the engine before your head arrives on the scene. One site recommends buying neck cords for eyeglasses, lest they be pulled off one’s face. It goes on to say that jet intake suction can be strong enough to “pull the person’s eyeballs out,” but does not recommend a product for that.
* That would be a NASA Type A Mishap, as it would likely entail “injury or illness resulting in a fatality.” A “mishap” as you or I might define it (say, something involving a slippery floor), is not a mishap, not even a Type D Mishap. It is a Close Call. Nonetheless, there is paperwork: the JSC Form 1257 Close Call Report Form.
* They migrate up under your ribcage, reducing your waistline in a way no diet can. One NASA researcher called it the Space Beauty Treatment. Without gravity, your hair has more body. Your breasts don’t sag. More of your body fluid migrates to your head and plumps your crow’s feet. Because blood volume sensors are in the upper body only, your system thinks you are retaining too much fluid and dumps 10 to 15 percent of your water weight. (Then again, I have also heard it called Puffy-Face Chicken-Leg Syndrome.)
* A journalist’s ride in Tom Cruise’s two-seat biplane. Cruise piloted us through a run of aerobatic stunts, the last of which, a “hammerhead,” did me in. The plane had an open cockpit, and I was in the front seat, meaning that anything that might escape the “Sic Sac” that flapped in the breeze at my elbow would blow back onto Mr. Cruise’s tanned and flawless face. Cruise is a cleanly man. Disaster loomed. I managed to keep my tacos down, though barely.
* Aerospace medicine cannot take credit for this one. Nineteenth-century insane asylums often prescribed a whirl in the Cox’s chair for their more turbulent patients. Wrote one physician in an 1834 report on novel psychiatric techniques: “After having committed some irrational and spiteful act, the patient is forthwith placed on the rotating chair and revolved…until he becomes quiet, apologizes, and promises improvement, or until he starts to vomit.” These were trying times for the mad. Alternate “treatments” included “surprise plunges into icy water.”
* Intestinal activity has also been looked into as a warning bell for incipient nausea. One Space Shuttle astronaut wore a “bowel sound monitor” on his belly for the duration of the mission. Don’t feel bad for him; feel bad for the Air Force security guy assigned to listen to two weeks of bowel sounds to be sure no conversations including classified information had been inadvertently recorded.
* Hanging around upside down is inconsiderate to your crewmates for another reason. It’s hard to understand what someone is saying when his mouth is upside down. We rely on lip-reading more than we think in everyday conversation. Astronaut Lee Morin told me that it’s very hard to read someone’s lips if he or she is tilted more than 45 degrees. Plus, he added, “you get the chin thing.” Chins look like noses. Very distracting.
* On a parabolic flight, evasive maneuvers are critical. Joe McMann, who used to run NASA’s EVA Management Office, told me he was once flying with a man who threw up very abruptly. “I realized that in about three seconds, that vomit is going to come down on me in 2 G’s. I was doing all kind of motions to get out of the way.” One NASA employee I met swears double gravity makes it harder to throw up.
* NASA didn’t invent Tang, but their Gemini and Apollo astronauts made it famous. (Kraft Foods invented it, in 1957.) NASA still uses Tang, despite periodic bouts of bad publicity. In 2006, terrorists mixed Tang into a homemade liquid explosive intended for use on a transatlantic flight. In the 1970s, Tang was mixed with methadone to discourage rehabbing heroin addicts from injecting it to get high. They did anyway. Consumed intravenously, Tang causes joint pain and jaundice, though fewer cavities.
† Annoying, but probably less so than when the condom piece of his urine containment device slipped off, just before liftoff from the moon. Duke shrugged it off: “You know, warm stream down the left leg…and a boot full of urine.”
* And how sick is that? Depends on the dog, and how he’s traveling. According to research done at McGill University in the 1940s, 19 percent of dogs cannot be made sick at all. In one experiment, sixteen dogs were taken out on a lake in rough weather. Two vomited in the truck on the way to the lake. Seven vomited in the boat, and one vomited both in the truck and again in the boat. Though the boat trip rendered these dogs “dejected and obviously miserable”—though perhaps no more so than the owners of the truck and boat—a later experiment with dogs on a large swing elicited much vomiting but “little subjective evidence that the dog finds the experience unpleasant.” Dogs are used to study human motion sickness because the two species are about equally susceptible. Guinea pigs are not used because they, along with rabbits, are among the only mammals thought to be immune to motion sickness.
* By odd coincidence, I went to a noontime lecture today that addressed this issue. (“Turkey Vultures: Fact or Fiction?”) The lecturer had brought along his pet turkey vulture, Friendly, who smelled even worse than one might imagine a turkey vulture to smell. This was, he said, because Friendly had become sick in the car on the ride over and vomited. Earlier he told us that turkey vultures will vomit at you if you harass them. I was in the second row, and have no trouble believing that turkey vulture vomit makes a powerful deterrent. Unless you are a coyote. Fact: The coyote considers turkey vulture vomitus a delicacy, and will harass the birds simply to get a snack.
* Merrick scholars disagree as to whether it was suicide or accident, but they do agree on his true first name, which was in fact Joseph, not John. The London production, as I seem to recall, used the more widely known “John,” perhaps to avoid amending the program with a footnote, as I’m having to do. While I have you here, I’ll tell you that David Bowie played Merrick. He wore no makeup or prosthetics and almost no clothes. He held himself crooked, just as Merrick had been, and broke your heart.
* Thus the best way to survive in a falling elevator is to lie down on your back. Sitting is bad but better than standing, because buttocks are nature’s safety foam. Muscle and fat are compressible; they help absorb the G forces of the impact. As for jumping up in the air just before the elevator hits bottom, it only delays the inevitable. Plus, then you may be squatting when you hit. In a 1960 Civil Aeromedical Research Institute study, squatting on a drop platform caused “severe knee pain” at relatively low G forces. “Apparently the flexor muscles…acted as a fulcrum to pry open the knee joint,” the researchers noted with interest and no apparent remorse.
* Whitson and her crewmates, much to their surprise, did have help. Not long after touchdown, she felt someone pull her from the capsule. “I was like, ‘Cool, the search-and-rescue guys are here already.’ They laid me on the ground near the cesium altimeter. Which seemed odd, because we were always told to stay away from the cesium altimeter. So I start looking at the SAR guys…. One of them, literally, was wearing what looked like a burlap sack sewn into pants. They were Kazakh locals.” One spoke some Russian. He asked Whitson’s crewmate Yuri Malenchenko, “Where did this boat come from?” (The fire had consumed the parachutes.) “Yuri’s like, ‘No, this is a spacecraft. We were up in space.’ And the guy says, ‘Nu, ladna,’ which is kind of like ‘Fine, whatever.’”
* No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size. It is assumed that a man will fit one of the three sizes available in the condom-style urine collection device hose attachment inside the EVA suit. To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts opting for L when they are really S, there is no S. “There is L, XL, and XXL,” says Hamilton Sundstrand suit engineer Tom Chase. This was not the case during Apollo. Among the 106 items left on the moon’s surface by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are four urine collection assemblies—two large and two small. Who wore which remains a matter of conjecture.
* And a diaper. Though the lack of a diaper doesn’t mean race-car drivers don’t pee in their suits. “People do it all the time,” reported Danica Patrick in an interview in Women’s Health. Except Danica. “I tried last year.” She explains that this was during, appropriately enough, a yellow flag (the signal to slow down and follow the pace car, usually because of an accident). “I was like, ‘…Just do it.’” No Nike sponsorship for Danica!
† How do you tell when a cadaver is done defrosting? Bolte sticks a temperature transducer down the trachea. When the internal temperature passes 60 degrees, it’s ready. Lacking that, a “thermometer up the rectum” will give you a good idea, as will moving the arms and legs to see if the joints move freely. Two to three days (in a refrigerator, please) usually does it.
* Beware the hard things in between. The April 1995 issue of the Journal of Trauma includes a case report of a man whose pipe was between his BMW’s airbag and his face when the bag deployed. A piece of the stem shot into his eye, resulting in “a ruptured globe.” The author, a Swiss physician, has a keen globe for detail, noting that “there was tobacco all over the floor” and that the injury was similar to those seen “after a thrust of a pointed cow horn.” The paper concludes with an exhortation to “behave appropriately”—no “drinking from cups,…holding articles on the lap, or wearing spectacles while driving.” Not to thrust too pointed a cow horn, but wearing one’s eyeglasses while driving surely prevents more injuries than it causes.
* How much does it move? Enough that you can sometimes feel it. In one Apollo-era study of sudden deceleration (stopping fast), five out of twenty-four subjects complained of what the researcher called “abdominal visceral displacement sensation.”
