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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mary Roach
Read between
June 18 - June 22, 2021
Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.
“Capacity to Tolerate Boredom and Low Levels of Stimulation” is one of the recommended attributes on a Space Shuttle–era document drafted by the NASA In-House Working Group on Psychiatric and Psychological Selection of Astronauts.
In reality, maybe 1 percent of an astronaut’s career takes place in space, and 1 percent of that is done in a pressure suit.
Anything else to avoid should you wish to become an astronaut? Snoring,
the medical screening for Chinese astronauts excludes candidates with bad breath.
People can’t anticipate how much they’ll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it.
the story of an unnamed spacewalker exiting the hatch and then turning to wrap both spacesuited arms around a colleague’s legs.
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.
Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God.
Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.
Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.
Like war, space is a formidable bogeyman that takes its victims no matter how carefully you what-if the situation.
Motion sickness drugs don’t make you immune; they simply raise the threshold for sickness.
Some 50 to 75 percent of astronauts have suffered symptoms of space motion sickness.
Even fish can get seasick.
You can see what a rat’s organs look like inside its body at 10 G’s and 19 G’s by tracking down the February 1953 issue of Aviation Medicine and opening to p. 54, but I don’t recommend this.
How many excess G’s the human body can tolerate without injury depends upon how long it’s exposed. For a tenth of a second, people can typically hack between 15 and 45 G’s, depending on what position they’re in relative to the force. When you get up into the range of a minute or more, tolerance drops alarmingly.
Recall, if you are old like me, the Memorex ads with Ella Fitzgerald and the exploding wine glass. The same sort of thing can happen to an organ that hits its resonant frequency in a crash.
A launching rocket, on the other hand, creates powerful infrasonic vibration. Could those sound waves shake apart your organs? NASA did testing on this back in the sixties, to be sure, as one infrasound expert told me, “that they didn’t deliver jam to the moon.”
the unusual talents and abilities of the dead.
Dead people make NASA uncomfortable. They don’t use the word cadaver in their documents and publications, preferring the new euphemism postmortem human subject (or, yet more cagily, PMHS).
In 1990, a human skull rode Space Shuttle Atlantis, kitted out with dosimeters, to help researchers determine how much radiation penetrates astronauts’ heads in low Earth orbit. Worried that the astronauts would be unnerved by their decapitated crewmate, the researchers covered the bone with pinkish plastic molded to approximate a face. “The result was far more menacing than plain bone would have been,” noted astronaut Mike Mullane.
The careers of Ham and Enos—the chimpanzees who, in 1961, flew the dress rehearsals for the first U.S. suborbital (January) and orbital (November) flights were in some respects not all that far off from the careers of Alan Shepard and John Glenn.
astronauts are classified as radiation workers.)
