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by
Mary Roach
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March 13 - March 16, 2019
The Outer Space Treaty, of which the United States is a signer, prohibits claims of sovereignty upon celestial bodies.
A flag doesn’t fly without wind. The moon has no atmosphere to speak of, and thus no wind. And though it has only about a sixth the gravity of Earth, that is enough to bring a flag down in an inglorious droop. So a crossbar was hinged to the pole and a hem sewn along the top of the flag. Now the Stars and Stripes would appear to be flying in a brisk wind—convincingly enough to prompt decades of moon hoax jabber—though in fact it was hanging, less a flag than a diminutive patriotic curtain.
Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much normalcy can people forgo? For how long, and what does it do to them?
“They were exhausted by overwork. The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm.
Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God. In the beginning, the cosmos was nothing but empty space and vast clouds of gases. Eventually the gases cooled to the point where tiny grains coalesced. These grains would have spent eternity moving through space, ignoring each other, had gravitational attraction not brought them together. Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.
Gravity is the prime reason there’s life on Earth. Yes, you need water for life, but without gravity, water wouldn’t hang around. Nor would air. It is Earth’s gravity that holds the gas molecules of our atmosphere—which we need not only to breathe but to be protected from solar radiation—in place around the planet. Without gravity, the molecules would fly off into space along with the water in the oceans and the cars on the roads and you and me and Larry King and the dumpster in the In-N-Out Burger parking lot.
Spacecraft like the International Space Station orbit at an altitude of around 250 miles, where the Earth’s gravitational pull is only 10 percent weaker than it is on the planet’s surface.
In low Earth orbit, where spacecraft roam, there’s still a trace of atmosphere, enough air molecules to create a teeny amount of drag and—after a couple years—slow a spacecraft* down enough that without a rocket engine blast it falls out of orbit.)
Weight is a bit of a mind-bender. I had always thought of my weight, on any given day, as a constant, a physical trait like my height or my eye color. It’s not. I weigh 127 pounds on Earth, but on the much smaller moon, whose gravitational pull is one sixth of Earth’s, I weigh about as much as a beagle. Neither weight is my real weight. There is no such thing as a real weight, only real mass. Weight is determined by gravity. It’s a measure of how fast you’ll accelerate if you happen to be dropping through the air like Newton’s apple.
(Despite what seem to me to be impressive results, Cowings to this day struggles with biofeedback’s touchy-feely reputation. Even her own employer doesn’t use her method. “I say to NASA: There’s this big company? They’re called the Navy? And they’re using it now.”)
Vomiting makes sense as a bodily response to poisoned or contaminated food—gets it out of you ASAP—but as a reaction to sensory conflict? Pointless, says Oman. He says it’s just an unfortunate evolutionary accident that the emetic brain happened to evolve right next to the part of the brain that oversees balance. Motion sickness is most likely a case of cross talk between the two.
Hadfield told me that the famous Apollo 13 incident—the explosion on the way to the moon and the solution Jim Lovell and his crewmates undertook—had actually been “simmed” by NASA at least once. Apparently everything Lovell did in space had been simmed on the ground. Including not taking a bath for two weeks.
Personal hygiene as practiced in the U.S. today is largely a cultural fetish, actively promoted by those with commercial interests.”
The human body is a frugal contractor. It keeps the muscles and skeleton as strong as they need to be, no more and no less. “Use it or lose it” is a basic mantra of the human body. If you take up jogging or gain thirty pounds, your body will strengthen your bones and muscles as needed. Quit jogging or lose the thirty pounds, and your frame will be appropriately downsized. Muscle is regained in a matter of weeks once astronauts return to earth (and bed-resters get out of bed), but bone takes three to six months to recover.
The body’s foreman on call is a cell called the osteocyte, embedded all through the matrix of the bone. Every time you go for a run or lift a heavy box, you cause minute amounts of damage to your bone. The osteocytes sense this and send in a repair team: osteoclasts to remove the damaged cells, and osteoblasts to patch the holes with fresh ones. The repaving strengthens the bone. This is why bone-jarring exercise like jogging is recommended to beef up the balsa-wood bones of thin, small-boned women of northern European ancestry, whose genetics, postmenopause, will land them on the short list
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NASA funded the work that led to Carter’s computer models. “But it seems like no one there read our report,” he says. “They have this idea that they can send astronauts up and the bone loss will level off in a few months, but the evidence that has come back doesn’t support that view. If you look at a two-year mission to Mars, it’s kind of a scary prospect.”
Without the weight of a body compressing it, the spine’s curvature lessens and the discs between the vertebrae expand and absorb more water. Astronauts are as much as 2.5 inches taller after about a week in space. (The typical gain is 3 percent of one’s height.) Like children, they will “outgrow” their suits if a “growth” spurt has not been factored in.
some osteoporosis experts feel that fall prevention is a better way to avoid broken hips than is load-bearing exercise.
Is it possible to bolster one’s hip bones by doing some type of controlled fall? Here too, I did not expect a yes. Carter told me that a graduate student at the Oregon State University Bone Research Laboratory had looked into this. As part of her thesis, Jane LaRiviere had subjects lie on one side, raise themselves up 4 inches, and then drop onto a wood floor. They did this thirty times in a row, three times a week. At the end of the trial, scans showed a statistically significant, though small, increase in bone density in the femoral neck on that side, as compared with the undropped-upon
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The bones of black women are 7 to 24 percent denser, on average, than those of white and Asian women. (I don’t have statistics for black men, but presumably they have sturdier bones as well.) I asked Charles whether NASA ought to consider an all-black crew for Mars. “Why not?” he said. “For decades, we had an all-blond, blue-eyed program.”
If you read The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of 13 American Women and the Dream of Space Flight, you’ll see that the women pilots had other things working against them. Like Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who, rather than signing a letter to the director of NASA urging him to let female fighter pilots apply to become astronauts, wrote “Let’s stop this now!” across the bottom.
Upon the occasion of history’s first manned flights—in the 1780s, aboard the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloons—someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. “What use,” he replied, “is a newborn baby?”
The nobility of the human spirit grows harder for me to believe in. War, zealotry, greed, malls, narcissism. I see a backhanded nobility in excessive, impractical outlays of cash prompted by nothing loftier than a species joining hands and saying “I bet we can do this.” Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government red-lining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let’s squander some on Mars. Let’s go out and play.
