Packing for Mars, page 27
† Does this sound gentle? It is not. Recall Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. If you missed the film, think of pork workers described in a MedPage Today article as using jolts of compressed air to force pig brains out of heads. “This ‘emulsifies’ the brain tissue,” explained a source.
* And in the paper “Voluntary Tolerance of the Human to Impact Accelerations of the Head.” Eleven subjects, at least one of them dressed in a suit and tie, received blows to the head with 9-and 13-pound pendulums. As the authors put it: “Considerable distortion of the face was observed as the bony structure of the head was accelerated away from the softer portions.” We owe these men a debt of thanks. In the early investigations of head impact, a cadaver was of limited help. You couldn’t ask him to count backward by sevens or name the president, and you’d never know what sort of headache he had.
* Here’s another possible reason NASA avoids cadaver research: astronauts. “I floated into a sleep restraint and extended my arms through the armholes then ducked my head into the bag,” wrote Mullane. “Pepe and Dave taped the skull on top…They silently floated the bag to the flight deck and maneuvered me behind John Casper, who was engaged at an instrument panel. When he turned to find the creature in his face with arms waving, it scared the bejesus out of him. Later, we clamped [it] on the toilet.” If you read just one astronaut memoir in your life, make it Mullane’s.
* A comma would have been good. “Astrochimp Ham” is perilously suggestive of a cut of meat made from a dead research animal. It wouldn’t be a first. In a stunning public relations lapse known as Project Barbecue, pigs who died on Air Force crash sleds in a 1952 test of seatbelt safety were served in the mess hall later that night.
* Piloting could be done by the astronauts, via directional thrusters, but it didn’t need to be. The capsule could be flown on autopilot and operated from the ground in, to quote astronaut Mike Collins, “chimp mode.”
* The simulated astronaut is a tradition dating all the way back to the Sputnik era, when the Soviets flew test runs with a mannequin they called Ivan Ivanovich and, sometimes, recordings to test voice transmissions. A tape of a person singing was originally proposed, so as to make clear to Western listening posts that it wasn’t a spy. Someone pointed out that this would generate rumors of a cosmonaut spy gone mad. The recording was switched to choral voices, as even the most gullible Western intelligence man knew you couldn’t fit a choir in a Korabl-Sputnik satellite. A voice reading a Russian soup recipe was thrown in for good measure. The simulated astronaut named Enos orbited with a voice-check tape recording that said, “Cap com, this astro is. Am on the window and the view is great…,” prompting President Kennedy to announce to the world, “The chimp took off at 10:08. He reported that everything is perfect and working well.” No doubt generating KGB rumors of a U.S. president gone mad.
* Ham and Enos traveled in pressurized compartments and thus didn’t need pressurized spacesuits and helmets. Nonetheless, some prototype chimp suits had been developed, including the “SPCA Suit”—certified humane by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “To prove that a suit was safe for a man, we were going to test it on a chimp, but to prove the suit was safe for a chimp, we had to test it on a man,” U.S. Spacesuits coauthor Joe McMann said in an email. “That was a mind boggler.”
* A lasting fixation for young Caroline. Three months earlier, around the time of Enos’s flight, Jackie Kennedy rented a monkey for her daughter’s first birthday party in the White House, an event widely covered by the wire services at the time. In addition to a live monkey, the party featured “jelly sandwiches,” whistles, tricycles going “up and down the ground floor of the White House,” and, hopefully, sedatives for Jackie. Caroline no doubt wanted her very own space chimp. It was a reasonable expectation, given that Nikita Khrushchev had presented her mom with one of the puppies of space dog Strelka. The puppy was a gift, but also a nose-thumb: Strelka had beaten Enos into orbit by over a year. According to Animals in Space, White House staff had the pup searched and X-rayed “to check for bugs or a possible doomsday device.”
* Curiously, also situated in New Mexico. The Smokey plot does not contain the remains of the Forest Service mascot, who is a cartoon, but of a black bear cub burned in a New Mexico fire and named after the mascot. Confusion surrounds the official mascot name, which is Smokey Bear, not Smokey the Bear. Just as the official slogan of New Mexico is Land of Enchantment, not Land of Pants-Wearing-Animal Memorials.
* Not that Stapp was unsentimental. The colonel composed sonnets and love poems for his wife Lillian, a ballerina with the American Ballet Theatre. They’re included in a collection of Stapp’s verse, on sale for $5 in the New Mexico Museum of Space History gift shop. Stapp didn’t read from his oeuvre at Ham’s service, though one line in particular would have fit the occasion: “If chimpanzees could talk, we would soon wish they wouldn’t.”
† Ham is entered twice, initially as “Chang,” and later as “Ham” (an acronym of Holloman Aeromedical). Once the animal had been chosen as a finalist to fly, government officials rethought the name, worrying that an ape named Chang might offend the Chinese. To be on the safe side, chimps were thereafter named for Holloman staff or, in the case of Double Ugly, Miss Priss, Big Mean, and Big Ears, themselves.
* Holloman moved away from this term after receiving letters from irritated etymologists. The suffix “naut” comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests “a sailor in space.” Chimponaut suggests “a chimpanzee in sailor pants.”
* According to space historian Asif Siddiqi, the Soviets preferred to train dogs for space travel, because apes were too excitable, too prone to catching colds, and “more difficult to dress.” And because Soviet space program bigwig Sergei Korolev loved dogs. Both the United States and the Soviet Union built a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but only Russia has a Tomb of the Unknown Dog (outside St. Petersburg), honoring the contributions of canine research subjects.
* These were not great papers. Headlines proclaimed absurdities like “Black Label Was Elected a Fine Beer” and “Science Cures Piles!”—advertisements misleadingly typeset to look like news. Not to mention the very confusing “Thieves Get Ham.” In what I first took to be an astrochimp kidnapping plot, two men pried open the rear door of a supermarket and made off with a dozen three-pound canned Rath Blackhawk hams and a half-dozen canned Wilson (clearly the inferior ham) half-pounders.
* Contrary to popular lore, an astronaut’s blood does not boil if his spacesuit tears or his craft depressurizes. And though he would swell, he would not burst. The body functions as a sort of pressure suit for the blood, keeping dissolved gases in their liquid state. Only body fluids directly exposed to a vacuum actually boil. (As happened to a 1965 NASA test subject in a leaky spacesuit in an altitude chamber. The last thing he recalled before losing consciousness was the sensation of his saliva bubbling on his tongue.) Also, current EVA suits are designed to compensate for tears or leaks by blasting in air at far greater pressure. Bottom line: Provided he has an oxygen supply, an astronaut in a spacecraft depressurization has about two minutes to figure out what’s wrong and set it right. Beyond that he’s in trouble. This is known from experiments in vacuum chambers that would, if you knew the details, make your blood boil.
* Or not at all, if the 2010 NASA budget passes as is.
* Up until Obama’s first NASA budget appeared, in February 2010, the moon base was slated to be built sometime in the 2020s. That program (Constellation) has been cut, and now we’re headed to a near-Earth asteroid and on to Mars. Then again, Congress has yet to approve the budget plan, so it’s hard to know for sure, at the time of this writing, just where we’ll end up hauling our rovers next.
† Six months after our traverse, NASA, recognizing a public relations opportunity, will change the name Small Pressurized Rover to Lunar Electric Rover. It was originally called the Flexible Roving Expedition Device, or FRED, until NASA Headquarters nixed it. They nixed it for the same reason they took the word Excursion out of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module—it sounded frivolous. A larger mobile lunar habitat prototype called the All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer (ATHLETE) recently squeaked past the NASA fun censor. Whoever he is, he’s very thorough. I skimmed the entire 53-page NASA acronym list and failed to find anything amusing. (Business Manager came closest.)
* A meteoroid is a bit of debris, usually planetary, hurtling through the solar system. If it’s bigger than a boulder, then it’s an asteroid. If any part of a meteoroid makes it to Earth intact rather than burning up as it barrels through Earth’s atmosphere, then it’s a meteorite. A meteoroid’s visible path through the atmosphere is a meteor. An astronaut struck by a meteoroid is a goner. A meteoroid the size of a tomato seed can pierce a spacesuit.
* NASA buys it by the ton, but you can buy it by the kilogram ($28). Go to the eNasco educational products Web site, but not if you’re squeamish. “Save on Lab Time!” says the promo copy for skinned cats. The eNasco dissection specimen section offers ten different skinned cat products, proving that there is, in fact, more than one way.
* And you will wear a diaper. These days it’s called a maximum absorbent garment. The MAG replaces the DACT (disposable absorbent containment trunk), which had less (not enough) capacity. In the Apollo era, astronauts wore both a pull-up fecal containment device (FCD) and a condom-attached urine containment device. Let’s let astronaut Charlie Duke, providing commentary for NASA’s Apollo 16 Lunar Surface Journal, explain the system: “[The FCD] was like a ladies’ girdle you pulled on and it cut out in the front so that your penis could hang out so you could get on the UCD…I think there was maybe a jockstrap that went on, also, and it had a hole for your penis, and then you rolled on your UCD and then you buttoned that or snapped it to the jockstrap.”
* In this case, to keep the island more Mars/moon–like. (Biowaste encourages plant growth.) Fourteen 50-gallon drums of urine are flown off the island each season. Men go directly into the drum via a funnel. Women squat over a pitcher first. It’s one of those clear plastic pitchers they use for beer at campus pubs. Pouring it out was like an entire Saturday night of drinking condensed in a single gesture. Solid waste happens on a toilet seat mounted over a plastic bag that you then take away and drop in the trash. You are your own dog.
* Borman could be a bit crusty. As Lovell put it, “Two weeks with Frank Borman anyplace is a trial.”
* That is why some deodorant and antiperspirant efficacy tests include an “emotional collection.” A group of subjects sit with pads under their arms to absorb secretions while being forced to sing karaoke or speak in front of a group. The pads are then weighed and the armpit smells rated by professional odor judges. I was once, as part of an article on body odor, invited to be a guest judge. “Take little bunny sniffs,” I was told.
* Because of all the sweat and dead skin (calluses), the bottoms of the feet and the spaces between the toes are a Mecca for bacteria—high numbers, much more variety. One class of dead-skin-eating bacteria, L. brevis, excretes compounds that smell like ripe cheese. Though it may be technically more accurate to say that certain ripe cheeses smell like feet: Cheesemakers routinely inoculate certain of their creations with L. brevis.
* And possibly deer. A 1994 issue of Crop Protection details the failed but entertaining efforts of botanists at the University of Pennsylvania to deter white-tailed deer by dousing an assortment of ornamental shrubbery with 3-methyl-2-hexanoic acid. Which raises the unusual marketing question, Will a homeowner abide a rhododendron that smells like BO?
† A.k.a., shed skin. Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defines scurf as “a branny substance of epidermic origin”—an evocative pairing of dander and breakfast cereal. Try new Kellogg’s Dandruff Flakes!
* Roughly 4.2 milliliters per day, according to a table in a paper by Mattoni and Sullivan, entitled “Synopsis of Weight and Volume of Waste Product Generation from All Sources in the Closed Environment of a High Performance Manned Space Vehicle.” That is just under a teaspoon of skin oil, an equivalency made with the help of a recipe conversion table. Employed in tandem, the two tables would enable the deranged or geographically isolated baker to substitute sebum for vegetable shortening or calculate the equivalent of a cup of flour in desquamated epithelium.
* Astronauts’ families take turns picking it. In the Gemini era, Mission Control would pipe in music, not always in a pleasing manner, as this Gemini VII exchange suggests:
CAP COM [capsule communicator]:…How do you like the music?
COMMAND PILOT FRANK BORMAN: We turned it off. We got a little busy there and we turned if off for a while.
CAP COM: Okay. They’ve got some good Hawaiian stuff coming up to you.
* An unusual display of syllabic restraint in journal naming. Only Gut earns my higher praise. Take note, American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics, Official Publication of the American Association of Orthodontists, Its Constituent Societies, and the American Board of Orthodontics.
* I had to look up BAMF on Google. It stands for Bad Ass Motherfucker, but don’t tell that to the Berkeley Avenue Mennonite Fellowship or the Builders’ Association of Metropolitan Flint.
* Like all astronaut activities, interviews are exactingly planned and timed. They are like tiny space missions. Whitson’s and mine was aborted and rescheduled twice. When the moment finally arrived, my call was relayed via an operator to a booth where Whitson would be sitting. Time passed. “I’m not getting an answer,” the operator said. “What time are you scheduled for?” I told her 12:30. “Okay, you’re calling early,” she said. “I’ve got 12:28 P.M.” You’ll hear the NASA TV commentator say things like “The sleep shift is scheduled to start at 1:59 A.M. Central Time. Crew due to awaken at 9:58 A.M. Central Time.” Sleeping pills? You betcha.
* You often read that astronauts’ skulls get thicker in zero G. I assumed that this was because the extra fluid in the top half of the body plumps the brain, and that the body responds to the increased pressure by thickening the cranium—just as it responds to increased blood pressure by thickening the arteries. “Interesting hypothesis,” said NASA physiologist John Charles. Then he told me it’s not true that living in space makes astronauts’ skulls thicker. Or not literally anyway. Charles says they do routinely develop the “space stupids”—cognitive impairment brought on by “sleep deprivation, over-scheduled time-lines, and all the other indignities we heap onto astronauts.”
* How often do research subjects cheat? From skimming the posts on Guinea Pig Zero, I’d say pretty often. “Everyone cracks open their pills to see if they’re cornstarch,” says one drug study subject on the topic of supposedly blind control groups.
* You would be too if your foreplay included “creaky door vocalizations” and coming to the surface to “maintain eye contact as they breathe heavily into each other’s faces.”
* Further evidence of the difficulties of reduced-gravity sex comes from the sea otter. To help hold the female in place, the male will typically pull the female’s head back and grab onto her nose with his teeth. “Our vets have had to do rhinoplasties on some of the females,” says Michelle Staedler, sea otter research coordinator at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. (Sex can also be traumatic for the male otter, who endures aerial pecking attacks by seagulls mistaking his erect penis for a novel ocean delicacy.)
† This is no doubt the reason that even Steven “the Hunter” Hunt, the man whose pictures and video feed comprise underwatersex.net, chose to opt out of neutral buoyancy and “drop down about 30 feet to a sand bar” for his “Nude Scuba” encounter with an unnamed “bored, lonely housewife.” Says Steve: “Can you imagine all the positions you can do while weightless?” You’ll have to, because Steve runs through the same old positions you’d see back in the dive shack, only with unattractive, face-distorting scuba gear.
* They can literally grasp things—including, on occasion, people who have paid to swim with the dolphins. “There have been cases in captivity when males…have gripped the person around the ankle with their penis,” said dolphin researcher Janet Mann. Mann said male dolphins have quietly been eliminated from most of the programs for this reason. If the Web site Sex with Dolphins is to be believed, females do it too. “She suddenly decided to grab my foot with her genital slit,” writes the author, going on to explain that females not only have muscular vaginal orifices but can use these muscles to “manipulate objects and carry them.” What a boon for the limbless! I wanted to ask Mann what objects dolphins have been seen to carry with their genitals, but she had by this point begun dodging my emails.
