14 SEPARATION ANXIETY
Apollo 10 Onboard Voice Transcription—Command Module, Day 6, pp. 364–365, 414–420. http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/ history/mission_trans/apollo10.htm.
Broyan, James Lee, Jr. “Waste Collector System Technology Comparisons for Constellation Applications.” SAE Technical Paper 2007-01-3227.
Wignarajah, Kanapathipillai, and Eric Litwiller. “Simulated Human Feces for Testing Human Waste Processing Technologies in Space Systems.” SAE Technical Paper 2006-01-2180, presented at the 36th International Conference on Environmental Systems, Norfolk, Va. July 17–20, 2006.
15 DISCOMFORT FOOD
“A Guideline of Performing Ibadah at the International Space Station (ISS).” The Islamic Workspace blog: http://makkah.wordpress.com.
Apollo 16 Mission Commentary. NASA History Portal: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/ mission_trans/apollo16.htm.
Bourland, Charles T. Oral history. Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories.htm.
Bourland, Charles T., and Gregory L. Vogt. The Astronaut’s Cookbook: Tales, Recipes, and More. New York: Springer, 2010.
Congressional Record. 111 Cong. Rec. 16514. Senate hearings, July 12, 1965.
uke, Charlie, and Dotty Duke. Moonwalker. Nashville: Oliver-Nelson, 1990. Flentge, Robert. L., and Ronald L. Bustead. “Manufacturing Requirements of Food for Aerospace Feeding.” Technical Report of the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine, Brooks Air Force Base, Texas. SAM-TR 70-23. May 1970.
“Food for Space Is Studied at Brooks AFB.” Military News Service, San Antonio, Texas. June 10, 1966.
Heidelbaugh, Norman D., and Marvin A. Rosenbusch. “A Method to Manufacture Pelletized Formula Foods in Small Quantities.” Technical Report of the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine, Brooks Air Force Base, Texas. SAM-TR 67-75. August 1967.
Ingelfinger, Franz J. “Gastric and Bowel Motility: Effect on Diet.” Paper presented at the Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems, Tampa, Fla., April 27–30, 1964. Sponsored by NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.
Lepkovsky, Samuel. “The Appetite Factor.” Paper presented at the Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems, Tampa, Fla., April 27–30, 1964. Sponsored by NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.
Murphy, Edwin, L. “Flatus.” Paper presented at the Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems, Tampa, Fla., April 27–30, 1964. Sponsored by NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.
Slonim, A. R., and H. T. Mohlman. “Effects of Experimental Diets and Simulated Space Conditions on the Nature of Human Waste.” Technical Report of the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. AMRL-TR 66-147. November 1966.
16 EATING YOUR PANTS
Kleiber, Max. “Animal Food for Astronauts.” Paper presented at the Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems, Tampa, Fla., April 27–30, 1964. Sponsored by NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.
Worf, D. L. “Multiple Uses for Foods.” Paper presented at the Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems, Tampa, Fla., April 27–30, 1964. Sponsored by NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.
* As when astronaut Mike Mullane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he’d like to have on his gravestone. Mullane answered, “A loving husband and devoted father,” though in reality, he jokes in Riding Rockets, “I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.”
* Between the astronauts who used their status to win a place in the Senate and the senators who used their influence to win a spot on a NASA mission, there’s practically been a Senate quorum in space. (John Glenn managed to work it both ways, returning to space as a seventy-seven-year-old senator.) The gambit occasionally backfires, as when Jeff Bingaman defeated Apollo-astronaut-turned-New-Mexico-senator Harrison Schmitt using the campaign slogan “What on Earth has he done for you lately?”
* It was a ten-hour flight to Tokyo.
* I read an unedited draft of an oral history last week that had the “dangs” and “hells” inked out like operatives in a CIA dossier. When Gene Cernan responded to an Apollo 10 close call with “more than a few goddams, fucks and shits,” the president of Miami Bible College wrote to President Nixon demanding public repentance. NASA made Cernan comply. He got the last word in his memoir: “Bunch of goddam hogwash.”
* A common theme throughout Russian-American space collaborations. NASA psychologist Al Holland tells the tale of driving a carful of Russians across Moscow during the Shuttle-Mir program. When the cars in his lane slowed to a standstill, a Russian man in the back seat asked, “What’s going on up there?” Holland was proud to be able to use a new vocabulary word: stopka—traffic jam. Only he used popka: “It’s a big rear end!”
* Did she or didn’t she? Arresting officer William Becton wrote in his affidavit that he found a trash bag containing two used diapers inside Lisa Nowak’s car. “I asked Mrs. Nowak why she had the diapers. Mrs. Nowak said that she did not want to stop and use the restroom, so she used the diapers to collect her urine.” That’s what astronauts do—you can’t take a bathroom break on a spacewalk, so you wear a diaper inside your spacesuit.
Nowak later denied wearing diapers. She now says her family had used the diapers when Houston was evacuated during Hurricane Rita, two years earlier. If I were Nowak, I wouldn’t have worried about the diapers. I’d have worried about the buck knife, steel mallet, BB gun, gloves, rubber tubing, and large plastic garbage bags also found in her car. I’d be peeing my pants.
* And to keep their distance vision from deteriorating. When your view extends no farther than a few yards, the muscles that squeeze the lens for near focus can eventually lock in a short-lived “accommodative spasm.” Submarine myopia is enough of a problem that submarine crews aren’t allowed to drive for from one to three days after coming ashore from a long assignment—a good idea for several reasons.
* If the plants are edible, a conflict can arise. As much as astronauts miss nature, they miss fresh food. The diary of cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev includes a story about a batch of onion bulbs taken on board Salyut as part of an investigation of plant growth in zero gravity. “As we were unloading the resupply ship, we found some rye-bread and a knife. So we ate some bread. Then we saw the onion bulbs we were supposed to plant. We ate them right then and there, with bread and salt. They were delicious. Time went by and the biologists asked us, ‘How are the onions?’
“‘They are growing,’ we answered….
“‘Do they have shoots?’ Without any hesitation we replied that they even had shoots. There was great excitement at the communication station. Onions have never bloomed in space before! We asked to speak to the head biologist in private. ‘For god’s sake,’ we told him, ‘don’t get upset, we ate your onions.’”
* Yuri Gagarin loved Soviet rocketry mastermind Sergei Korolev, though not in a space food tube sort of way. When searchers found Gagarin’s wallet after the fighter jet crash that killed him, there was just one photo inside (now on display beside the mangled wallet in the Star City museum). The photo is of Korolev—not Gagarin’s wife or child, not his beloved mother. Not even Gina Lollobrigida. “She kissed him!” said our ebullient museum guide Elena while fanning herself with a plastic fan as though overcome by the thought of it.
* Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration. Eskimo hunters traveling alone on still, glassy waters are sometimes stricken by “kayak angst”—delusions that their boat is flooding or that the front end is either sinking or rising up out of the water. Of related interest: “A Preliminary Report of Kayak-Angst Among the Eskimo of West Greenland” includes a discussion of Eskimo suicide motives and notes that four out of the fifty suicides investigated were elderly Eskimos who “took their lives as a direct result of uselessness due to old age.” No mention was made of whether they cast themselves adrift on ice floes, as you sometimes hear, and whether tr
avel by ice floe has its own unique anxiety syndrome.
* It would have had to be affixed to a holder inside the helmet, just as in-helmet snack bars are. The snack bar, made of the same stuff as Fruit Roll-Ups, is positioned so that astronauts can simply bend their head down and take a bite. Or, as astronaut Chris Hadfield told me, bend their head and smear it on their face. The fruit bars are mounted alongside the drink tube, which tends to leak a bit, turning the fruit into a “gooey mass.” “We just stopped using them,” Hadfield said.
* One self-help phobia Web site helpfully reassures the afflicted that “if you have no plans to travel into space…astrophobia may not significantly impact your life.”
* Using—how cool is this?—a gravity meter. Walk over an area of very dense rock while holding one of these meters, and you can watch the pull of gravity increase. (Fluctuations in Earth’s density change its gravity enough to pull missiles off their trajectory by as much as a mile or so; gravity maps of Earth were once top-secret Cold War possessions.) This effect is lessened if the dense rock is a tall mountain and you’re four or five miles above the mean surface of Earth. If you carry a bathroom scale to the top of Mt. Everest, you may see that you actually weigh a tiny bit less, not counting the marbles you have obviously lost.
* Or a space station garbage bag or a NASA spatula. When astronauts let go of objects, they become satellites for the few weeks or months it takes them to lose speed and fall out of orbit. The term “satellite” applies to any object orbiting the earth. The “spat sat,” as the orbiting spatula was known, had been used to test a spackling technique to fix dings in the exterior of the Space Shuttle caused by, ironically, orbiting debris. You don’t have to worry about being killed by falling spatulas or LSD gurus, because these things burn up when they reenter the Earth’s atmosphere. (Dr. Leary was recremated sometime in 2003.)
* To inspire future generations to take up the fight against gravity, Babson paid for stone monuments to be erected at thirteen prominent American colleges. Colby College’s “antigravity stone,” as it became known, states its goal as follows: “To remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents.” The students were differently inspired: In what became a joyous progravity rite, the antigravity stone was knocked over so many times that the college eventually relocated it to a less prominent spot. Along with the stones, Babson left the colleges small grants but did not explicitly state that the money must go toward antigravity research. Loath to sponsor “Mickey Mouse” science, Colby used the money to erect a skyway connecting two science buildings. “At least,” noted a college spokesperson, “it’s off the ground.”
* The V-2’s directional system was notoriously erratic. In May 1947, a V-2 launched from White Sands Proving Ground headed south instead of north, missing downtown Juarez, Mexico, by 3 miles. The Mexican government’s response to the American bombing was admirably laid back. General Enrique Diaz Gonzales and Consul General Raul Michel met with United States officials, who issued apologies and an invitation to come to “the next rocket shoot” at White Sands. The Mexican citizenry was similarly nonchalant. “Bomb Blast Fails to Halt Spring Fiesta,” said the El Paso Times headline, noting that “many thought the explosion was a cannon fired for the opening of the fiesta.”
* Some months after I visited, the flights were outsourced to the Zero G Corporation, which uses a 727. Most people just call the plane the Vomit Comet. Though NASA would like them to stop. They asked us to refer to it as the Weightless Wonder. Which pretty much makes you vomit.
† I mentioned this to an Oregon Air Guardsman I met a few weeks later. He replied that this had happened to a guy he knew. “I saw pictures,” he told me, leaning forward in his seat. “He was basically leaking out the back.” If you do a Google search on “Human FOD” (Human Foreign Object Damage), you will find footage of a young airman being pulled into the intake of an A-6 jet, causing sparks to shoot out the other side but not the airman himself. He appears in footage shot later that day, awake and chatting, his head bandaged but otherwise okay. A flight surgeon told me that the trick to surviving is to have your flash-light or socket wrench precede you into the maw. The object will be chewed to pieces, shutting down the engine before your head arrives on the scene. One site recommends buying neck cords for eyeglasses, lest they be pulled off one’s face. It goes on to say that jet intake suction can be strong enough to “pull the person’s eyeballs out,” but does not recommend a product for that.
* That would be a NASA Type A Mishap, as it would likely entail “injury or illness resulting in a fatality.” A “mishap” as you or I might define it (say, something involving a slippery floor), is not a mishap, not even a Type D Mishap. It is a Close Call. Nonetheless, there is paperwork: the JSC Form 1257 Close Call Report Form.
* They migrate up under your ribcage, reducing your waistline in a way no diet can. One NASA researcher called it the Space Beauty Treatment. Without gravity, your hair has more body. Your breasts don’t sag. More of your body fluid migrates to your head and plumps your crow’s feet. Because blood volume sensors are in the upper body only, your system thinks you are retaining too much fluid and dumps 10 to 15 percent of your water weight. (Then again, I have also heard it called Puffy-Face Chicken-Leg Syndrome.)
* A journalist’s ride in Tom Cruise’s two-seat biplane. Cruise piloted us through a run of aerobatic stunts, the last of which, a “hammerhead,” did me in. The plane had an open cockpit, and I was in the front seat, meaning that anything that might escape the “Sic Sac” that flapped in the breeze at my elbow would blow back onto Mr. Cruise’s tanned and flawless face. Cruise is a cleanly man. Disaster loomed. I managed to keep my tacos down, though barely.
* Aerospace medicine cannot take credit for this one. Nineteenth-century insane asylums often prescribed a whirl in the Cox’s chair for their more turbulent patients. Wrote one physician in an 1834 report on novel psychiatric techniques: “After having committed some irrational and spiteful act, the patient is forthwith placed on the rotating chair and revolved…until he becomes quiet, apologizes, and promises improvement, or until he starts to vomit.” These were trying times for the mad. Alternate “treatments” included “surprise plunges into icy water.”
* Intestinal activity has also been looked into as a warning bell for incipient nausea. One Space Shuttle astronaut wore a “bowel sound monitor” on his belly for the duration of the mission. Don’t feel bad for him; feel bad for the Air Force security guy assigned to listen to two weeks of bowel sounds to be sure no conversations including classified information had been inadvertently recorded.
* Hanging around upside down is inconsiderate to your crewmates for another reason. It’s hard to understand what someone is saying when his mouth is upside down. We rely on lip-reading more than we think in everyday conversation. Astronaut Lee Morin told me that it’s very hard to read someone’s lips if he or she is tilted more than 45 degrees. Plus, he added, “you get the chin thing.” Chins look like noses. Very distracting.
* On a parabolic flight, evasive maneuvers are critical. Joe McMann, who used to run NASA’s EVA Management Office, told me he was once flying with a man who threw up very abruptly. “I realized that in about three seconds, that vomit is going to come down on me in 2 G’s. I was doing all kind of motions to get out of the way.” One NASA employee I met swears double gravity makes it harder to throw up.
* NASA didn’t invent Tang, but their Gemini and Apollo astronauts made it famous. (Kraft Foods invented it, in 1957.) NASA still uses Tang, despite periodic bouts of bad publicity. In 2006, terrorists mixed Tang into a homemade liquid explosive intended for use on a transatlantic flight. In the 1970s, Tang was mixed with methadone to discourage rehabbing heroin addicts from injecting it to get high. They did anyway. Consumed intravenously, Tang causes joint pain and jaundice, though fewer cavities.
† Annoying, but probably less so than when the cond
om piece of his urine containment device slipped off, just before liftoff from the moon. Duke shrugged it off: “You know, warm stream down the left leg…and a boot full of urine.”
* And how sick is that? Depends on the dog, and how he’s traveling. According to research done at McGill University in the 1940s, 19 percent of dogs cannot be made sick at all. In one experiment, sixteen dogs were taken out on a lake in rough weather. Two vomited in the truck on the way to the lake. Seven vomited in the boat, and one vomited both in the truck and again in the boat. Though the boat trip rendered these dogs “dejected and obviously miserable”—though perhaps no more so than the owners of the truck and boat—a later experiment with dogs on a large swing elicited much vomiting but “little subjective evidence that the dog finds the experience unpleasant.” Dogs are used to study human motion sickness because the two species are about equally susceptible. Guinea pigs are not used because they, along with rabbits, are among the only mammals thought to be immune to motion sickness.