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

by Mary Roach

Psychologists use the term “irrational antagonism” to describe what happens between people isolated together for more than about six weeks.

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.

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.

Simons compared the breakaway phenomenon to “the deadly raptures of the deep.” “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).

EVA height vertigo is not a phobia, but a normal response to the novel and terrifying cognitive reality of falling through space at 17,500 miles per hour.

When you launch something into orbit, whether it’s a spacecraft or a communications satellite or Timothy Leary’s remains, you have launched it, via rocket thrust, so powerfully fast and high and far that when gravity’s pull finally slows the object’s forward progress enough that it starts to fall back down, it misses the Earth. It keeps on falling around the Earth rather than to it.

Dan Fulgham has heard about pilots who ejected at 600-plus miles per hour. “Ejection seats back then had metal wings on each side of the head to keep it from flopping around,” he told me. “When they did autopsies they found the brains had just been emulsified because of the tremendous vibration of the head between those steel plates.”