Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

by Mary Roach

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You’re inconstant. You take weeks to fix.

Only someone who has drifted free in the unlimited stretch of the universe could understand that burial in space, like the sailor’s burial at sea, holds not disrespect but honor. In orbit, everything gets turned on its head. Shooting stars streak past below you, and the sun rises in the middle of the night. 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?

Lovell’s crewmate Frank Borman presses the TALK button. “Borman’s dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute.” Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, “What a sight to behold!” We don’t know what he’s referring to, but there’s a good chance it’s not the moon. According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.

The genius of the Thousand Cranes test is that it creates a chronological record of each candidate’s work. As they complete their cranes, candidates string them on a single long thread. At the end of the isolation, everyone’s string of cranes will be taken away and analyzed. It’s forensic origami: As the deadline nears and the pressure increases, do the candidate’s creases become sloppy? How do the first ten cranes compare to the last? “Deterioration of accuracy shows impatience under stress,” Inoue says.

Manami explained that when people first moved to Tsukuba, there weren’t any trees or parks or anything to do other than work. No major roads or express trains led into or out of the city. People just worked and worked. There were a lot of suicides, she said, a lot of people jumping off the institute roofs. So the government built a mall and some parks and planted trees and grass, and changed the name to Tsukuba, City of Science and Nature. It seemed to help. The story made me think about a trip to Mars and what it would be like to spend two years trapped inside sterile, man-made structures with no way to escape one’s work and colleagues and no flowers or trees or sex and nothing to look at outside the window but empty space or, at best, reddish dirt.

To paraphrase Gushin, Russian men prefer that women act like women, not equals—even if they’re astronauts. According to Soviet/Russian space program historian Peter Pesavento, U.S. astronaut Helen Sherman was criticized by her crewmates on Mir for what was perceived as an overly professional demeanor—i.e., she didn’t flirt. In the decades after Valentina Tereshkova snagged the “First Woman in Space” title for the Soviet Union, in 1963, only two women have flown as cosmonauts. The first, Svetlana Savitskaya, was handed a floral-print apron when she floated through the Salyut hatch.

On the record, there was only one bottle of champagne, provided by IBMP for the 2000 Millennium Eve. In reality, there were many bottles, not just champagne, but vodka and cognac. Kraft says they find their way into isolation chambers as bribes. If you want the Russian volunteers to do a good job with your research, he says, you “better pack vodka and a salami with your experiment.”

Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other.

Someone should have warned Lapierre, for example, that “it’s nothing” (Gushin’s words) for a Russian man to kiss a woman at a party. And that if you want him to stop, you slap him. That “no” means “maybe.” And that when Russian men bloody each other’s noses, it’s “a friendly fight.” (Kraft confirmed this surprising item. “It’s how they settle disputes. They did it on Mir.”)

“In Spain,” the man explained, “the barbers burn the tips of your hair, and I like the smell.” For the first week, his tentmate was amused, but it soon became a source of friction. “It’s on the questionnaire now,” joked Harvey. “Do you burn your own hair for fun?”

“Siberia is a big, big space here in Russia. But our hunters who go to taiga [forest] for half year, they’re trying to go on their own, just with a dog.” Romanenko sits where he used to sit on Mir, in the left-hand spot at the control console, on a backless seat with a bar for hooking one’s feet. (Later space stations dispensed with seats, because zero gravity dispenses with sitting.) “Because if there are two or three of you go, it will be conflict.” “And this way,” Laveikin grins, “you can eat the dog at the end.” Psychologists use the term “irrational antagonism” to describe what happens between people isolated together for more than about six weeks.

A 1961 Aerospace Medicine paper included a fine example, from the diary of a French anthropologist who spent four months in the Arctic with a Hudson’s Bay fur trader: I liked Gibson as soon as I saw him…. He was a man of poise and order, he took life calmly and philosophically…. But as winter closed in around us, and week after week our world narrowed until it was reduced to the dimensions of a trap…I began to rage inwardly and the very traits…which in the beginning had struck me as admirable, ultimately seemed to me detestable. The time came when I could no longer bear the sight of this man who was unfailingly kind to me. That calm which I had once admired I now called laziness, that philosophic imperturbability became in my eyes insensitiveness. The meticulous organization of his existence was maniacal old-manliness. I could have murdered him.

The bottom line is that space is a frustrating, ungiving environment, and you are trapped in it. If you’re trapped long enough, frustration metastasizes to anger. Anger wants an outlet and a victim. An astronaut has three from which to choose: a crewmate, Mission Control, and himself. Astronauts try not to vent at each other because it makes a bad situation worse. There’s no front door to slam or driveway to speed out of. You’re soaking in it. “Also,” says Jim Lovell, who spent two weeks on a loveseat with Frank Borman during Gemini VII, “you’re in a risky business and you depend on each other to stay alive. So you don’t antagonize the other guy.”

“I wanted to hang myself. Of course, it’s impossible because of weightlessness.”

In a study published in the April 1957 issue of Aviation Medicine, 35 percent of 137 pilots interviewed reported having experienced a strange feeling of detachment from Earth while flying at high altitudes, almost always during a solo flight. “I feel like I have broken the bonds from the terrestrial sphere,” said one pilot. The phenomenon was pervasive enough for psychologists to give it a name: the breakaway effect. For a majority of these pilots, the feeling wasn’t one of panic, but of euphoria.

“Rapture of the deep” is a medical condition—a feeling of calm and invulnerability that can steal over a diver, usually at depths below 100 feet. It is more prosaically known as nitrogen narcosis, or as the Martini Effect (one drink for every 33 feet below 65 feet).

He told me that in the early days of the railway system, there was concern that people would be driven insane by the sight of trees and fields rushing past through the windows. “There was suggestion to build fences on both sides of railroad, otherwise the passengers are going to be crazy. And no one was talking about this except psychologists.”

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.

Zero gravity is part of the reason NASA price tags seem so extravagant. For every new piece of equipment that goes up on a mission—every pump, fan, throttle, widget—a prototype must be flown on the C-9 to be sure it works in weightlessness.

Vomit is a more dangerous material to inhale than, say, pond water. As little as a quarter of a mouthful can cause significant damage. The stomach acid that is a routine ingredient in vomit will handily digest the lining of the lungs. Also, vomit, unlike (hopefully) pond water, often includes chunks of recently ingested food: things to get stuck in your windpipe and suffocate you. If stomach acid can digest a lung, imagine getting it in your eyes. “Barf bouncing off the helmet and back into the eyes would be really debilitating,”

The only humans who are predictably immune are those with nonfunctioning inner ears. It was a group of five “deaf-mutes” who failed to fall ill on a harrowing sea voyage that first alerted science to the link between motion sickness and the vestibular system.

Dust is the lunar astronaut’s nemesis. With no water or wind to smooth them, the tiny, hard moon rock particles remain sharp. They scratched faceplates and camera lenses during Apollo, destroyed bearings, clogged equipment joints.

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.

When you fall, the top of your hip—or more specifically, the femoral neck and greater trochanter at the top of your thighbone—takes the brunt of the force in a side-smack manner. That’s not the same architecture that gets strengthened when you jog or do squats. The parts of the bone that are stressed by walking and everyday activity hold up surprisingly well with age. The body tends to redistribute bone to those areas—at the expense of other structures, including the ones you fall onto. For this reason, some osteoporosis experts feel that fall prevention is a better way to avoid broken hips than is load-bearing exercise. I asked Tom Lang whether anyone had looked into the possibility of preventing hip fractures by simply thwacking the aged on the sides of their hips a few times a day. Not hard enough to break anything, obviously, but vigorously enough that the impact would stimulate the osteocytes to strengthen the structure. I didn’t expect him to say yes.

Play roller derby ;p

Two orbiting space shuttles, one Russian and one American, have commenced a belly-to-belly docking maneuver. Even the spacecraft are having sex.

Rats who’d spent two weeks in space had fewer, and weaker, uterine contractions. In Ronca’s view, this is a dangerous difference. Contractions play an important role in a newborn’s adjustment to life outside the womb. The compressions of vaginal birth cause a huge release of stress hormones in the fetus; these are the same fight-or-flight hormones that fuel feats of extreme strength in adults. “This hormonal surge appears to be very important for getting physiological systems moving. All of a sudden a newborn has to breathe on its own, it has to figure out how to suckle from a nipple. If there aren’t enough contractions, the hormone release is smaller and the fetus has a harder time.” Studies have shown that infants born via planned C-section, with no contractions—as compared to those delivered vaginally—have a higher risk of respiratory distress and high blood pressure, a harder time expelling lung fluids, and delayed neurodevelopment. In other words, stressing an infant appears to be part of nature’s plan. (For this reason, Ronca is also not an advocate of water births.)

On one occasion, the “alien” that people were sure they’d seen was Dan Fulgham. Fulgham and Kittinger crashed one Saturday morning as their balloon came down in a field on the outskirts of Roswell. The 800-pound gondola was freed from the balloon too early and began to tumble, coming to a stop on Fulgham’s head. When Fulgham took off his helmet, his head swelled so severely that Kittinger was moved to describe his face as “just a big blob.” Fulgham was taken to the hospital at Walker Air Force Base, which was staffed in part by civilians. I asked Fulgham if he recalls people pointing and staring as though they’d seen an alien. “I don’t know,” he said, “because the only way I could see was to put my fingers up and pry my eyelids open.” When Kittinger led Fulgham down the steps of a plane to his waiting wife, the woman asked Kittinger where her husband was. “I replied, ‘This is your husband,’ and she screamed and began to cry,” wrote Kittinger in his witness statement in the Air Force publication The Roswell Report. I saw photographs of Fulgham taken after the crash. It was weeks before he looked human again.

An unnamed test pilot mentioned in a paper by John Paul Stapp ejected at more than 600 miles per hour. The windblast pried open his epiglottis and inflated his stomach like a pool toy. (This worked to his advantage, as he had ejected over water. “The estimated three liters of air in the stomach substituted as flotation gear, which he was in no condition to inflate,” wrote Stapp.)

[And again eight minutes later, while discussing the timing of a waste-water dump.] YOUNG: Did they say we could do it anytime? CERNAN: They said on 135. They told us that—Here’s another goddam turd. What’s the matter with you guys? Here, give me a— YOUNG/STAFFORD: [laughter]… STAFFORD: It was just floating around? CERNAN: Yes.

LOL reminds me of the infamous pool scene in Caddyshack

You do not want fecal decapitation taking place aboard your ship.

I should say not!

“We knew women were as good as men. We had female pilots all during World War II. They could fly fighters. They could fly bombers.” But they couldn’t use a condom-ended in-suit urine collection device. “The collection of body waste was a real issue logistically.” (The adult diaper was apparently not on anyone’s radar screen.)† “We were under the gun to get this thing underway,” Fulgham recalled. “So we said, ‘Let’s limit the amount of concerns we have.’” 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.

Is this mentioned in any of those five ridiculously long volumes about LBJ?

Coke spent $450,000 developing a zero-gravity dispenser, only to be undone by biology. Since bubbles also don’t rise to the top of a stomach, the astronauts had trouble burping.

“An obese person with 20 kilograms of fat…carries reserves of 184,000 calories. This would provide over 2900 calories daily for 90 days.” In other words: Think of the rocket fuel that could be saved by not launching any food at all! Starving your astronauts for the duration of the mission would resolve another early NASA concern: waste management. Not only was the act of using a fecal bag powerfully objectionable, but the end product stank and took up precious cabin space. “What the astronauts wanted to do is to just be able to take a pill and not eat,” says Bourland. “They talked about it all the time.” The food scientists tried but failed to make it happen.

Thinking outside the box.

IRONICALLY, IF YOU wanted to minimize an astronaut’s “residue,” you could have fed him exactly what he wanted: a steak. Animal protein and fat have the highest digestibility of any foods on Earth. The better the cut, the more thoroughly the meat is digested and absorbed—to the point where there’s almost nothing to egest (opposite of ingest). “For high-quality beef, pork, chicken, or fish, digestibility is about ninety percent,” says George Fahey, professor of animal and nutritional sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Fats are around 94 percent digestible. A 10-ounce sirloin steak generates but a single ounce of, as they say in George Fahey’s lab, egesta.* Best of all: the egg. “Few foods,” writes Franz J. Ingelfinger, a panelist at the 1964 Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems, “are digested and assimilated as completely as a hard-boiled egg.”

USDA flatus researcher

There's a job.

At the high end of the range, that’s about two Coke cans full of fart. In a small space where you can’t open the window.

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.