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

by Mary Roach

Joe Kittinger ascended to 96,000 feet in an upright, phone-booth-sized sealed capsule suspended beneath a helium balloon. With his oxygen dangerously low, Kittinger was ordered by his superior, David Simons, to begin his descent. “COME AND GET ME,” replied Kittinger, letter by letter in Morse code.

The last attempt at something similar took place in 1783. That time the experimenters were Joseph and Étienne de Montgolfier, the inventors of the hot-air balloon. It was like something from a children’s book. A duck, a sheep, and a rooster went for a ride beneath a beautiful balloon, in the skies over Versailles on a summer afternoon.

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.

After gravity pulled Babson’s sister toward the bottom of a river and she drowned, he became history’s most voluble antigravity activist, publishing screeds like Gravity: Our Enemy No. 1.

So naturally, von Beckh went out and got some snake-necked turtles. Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.

One of Oman’s Spacelab interviewees recalls sitting with a colleague who was eating an apple. “Right in the middle of it, he said, ‘Aw gee!’ threw the apple in the air, and vomited just like that.”

If you inhale your vomit, or for that matter anyone else’s, it will trigger a protective airway reflex: you’ll cough.

I didn't need to read that.

Why not send some rats into orbit and see what happens? The Soviet space agency did. In 1979, a group of rats was launched in an unmanned biosatellite. After launch, a compartment separator automatically pulled out, allowing male rats to do the opposite. None of the females came back to earth pregnant, though there were signs that conception had taken place.

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.)

Then Chase told me something quite stunning. He said he’d known women who, while out hiking or backpacking, are “able to take their pants down to their ankles and kind of lean back against a tree and just by moving things around a little bit, getting some room there, be able to fire away and direct it.” There was a silence while I contemplated this new and life-changing information.

Compressed food not only took up less stowage—which is how children and aircraft designers say “storage”—space, it was less likely to crumble.

Tube eating is a uniquely disquieting experience. It requires bypassing the two quality control systems available to the human organism: looking and sniffing. Bourland told me the astronauts hated the tubes for precisely this reason: “Because they could not see or smell what they were eating.” Also unnerving is the texture, or “mouthfeel,” to use a food technology coinage.

In his work, Murphy had encountered one such ideal astronaut candidate. “Of special interest for further research was the subject who produced essentially no flatus on 100 grams dry weight of beans.” As opposed to the average gut, which will, during the peak flatulence period (five to six hours post–bean consumption) pass anywhere from one to almost three cups of flatus per hour. 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.

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?”