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

by Mary Roach

  Dooling thinks it unlikely that anyone at NASA gave serious thought to Cord and Seale’s one-way moon mission. But it does lend credence to the possibility that the aerospace community had—however fleetingly—considered launching a one-way chimped mission.

  I went back and reread Williams’s AP stories. Outside of the headlines, there were no specific references to a lunar mission. Were the newspaper* editors taking liberties to make the story more provocative? I needed another source. Major Reynolds is dead. Jerry Fineg had left Holloman by 1962. Both he and Britz said they didn’t recall hearing anything about it, though Britz recalled seeing rhesus monkeys at Brooks Air Force Base, near San Antonio, being taught to operate a joystick. “They were trying to see if they could actually fly,” he told me in an email. “They were good!” Britz didn’t know what the ultimate goal of the project had been. I do know chimpanzees were being trained for space-related tasks at Brooks as late as 1964, because I found a paper that referred to a chimp injured in the spacecraft simulator when the foot plates malfunctioned and delivered more than the customary “small but annoying” electrical shock.

  Air Force historian Rudy Purificato is at work on a history of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the other hotbed of aerospace medicine research in the sixties. I sent him a note. “There could very well have been actual plans to send a chimp to the moon,” he replied. He added that most of the primate research was still classified, and in that case Fineg and Britz (and Purificato) couldn’t talk about what they knew. So who would have told the AP reporter? He had probably, Purificato said, benefited from a “slip-up” by someone he interviewed.

  Holloman Air Force Base is a ten-minute drive from the New Mexico Museum of Space History. Perhaps the base archives could provide some answers. The curator here at the New Mexico museum, George House, gave me a phone number to try. The staff played hot potato with my call until someone could locate the Person in Charge of Lying to the Press. The PCLP said that the room that houses the base archives is locked. And that only the curator would have a key. And that Holloman currently has no curator. Evidently the new curator’s first task would be to find a way to open the archives. Now I was sure of it: the chimp-to-the-moon files were locked up in there along with the Enos in-flight sex tapes and pictures of Colonel Stapp in a tutu. Paranoia is a way of life here in Alamogordo, home of the first atomic bomb test and not far from Roswell and Area 51, the secretive Air Force experimental aircraft proving ground/UFO hub. House said that emails containing the word primate, including some from me, mysteriously disappear en route to his computer. But House didn’t think it had anything to do with secret chimp moon missions. He said it had to do with a lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The suit isn’t against the Air Force per se, but rather the facility they’d contracted to take over the care—“care” being a rather gross overstatement—of the chimpanzee colony in the 1970s, when the Air Force no longer had use for them. Oh.

  I went back out to the missile garden and paged through my photocopies again. I noticed something I’d overlooked. One of the articles said that before being taken out of the capsule, the chimp Glenda “had to re-enter through the jarring forces of earth’s atmosphere.” That meant Glenda’s simulated mission was round-trip, not one-way.

  I’m guessing that Glenda was a simulated Gemini astronaut. (The Gemini space program, 1965 to 1966, was the precursor to the Apollo program’s lunar missions.) From 1964 to early 1966, “Chimp College” primates were called on to provide answers to questions like, What will happen to an astronaut if his pressure suit tears while he’s outside the capsule? “Previously,” said the AP reporter who covered a series of chimpanzee-crewed EVA simulations designed to answer that question, “scientists believed direct exposure to space vacuum would result in death, with the blood boiling and the lack of atmospheric pressure possibly leading to the body expanding and even bursting.”* Yet another reason Holloman can’t get their archives door open.

  That the prospect of a chimpanzee-piloted lunar mission was taken seriously enough to be printed as news demonstrates how political the Apollo space program had been. The goal? Pure and simple: Land something before they do. Science on the first lunar surface missions was something of an afterthought: Pick up some rocks while you’re there, okay? The first geologist wouldn’t set foot on the moon until Apollo 17, six missions later.

  The Cold War has ended, and the goals of space exploration are ostensibly grounded in science. There are those who argue that the science is more effectively—or cost-effectively, at least—carried out by robotic landers. And that the main reason to employ humans in space exploration and planetary science is to maintain the public’s interest and support. As the saying goes, “No bucks without Buck Rogers.”

  Others disagree. “If your goal is to answer very specific questions like, How hard are the rocks on the surface of Mars? a robot is perfect. If your questions are bigger, like, What is the history of Mars? well, that’s a hell of a lot of robots,” says Ralph Harvey, a planetary geologist who has helped plan research expeditions on the moon. “But it could be only one or two human beings. Because human beings have this amazing tool called intuition, where they’ve built up a catalogue of experiences and they can draw on it instantaneously and spend one minute looking at a scene—whether it’s on Mars or at a crime scene—and know what happened here.”

  For the past twenty-three years, Harvey has overseen the Antarctic Search for Meteorites, so he knows a great deal about doing geology under extremely harsh conditions. When we spoke, he had just returned from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where he was helping plan a lunar traverse scheduled to take place sometime around 2025.*

  Why does it take fifteen years to plan an outing on the moon? You’ll see.

  NEXT GAS: 200,000 MILES

  Planning a Moon Expedition Is Tough, but Not as Tough as Planning a Simulated One

  Once upon a time, astronauts tooled around the moon in an open two-seat electric buggy. It was the sort of thing one might see on a golf course or at one of those big Miami delis whose elderly patrons appreciate a lift to and from the parking lot. It gave lunar exploration in the seventies a relaxed, retirement-community feel. That’s gone now. NASA’s new rover prototypes more resemble a futuristic camper van. The entire cab is pressurized, which is good, because that means the astronauts can take off their bulky, uncomfortable white bubble-head EVA suits. The NASA shorthand for a pressurized interior is “a shirtsleeve environment,” which makes me picture astronauts in polo shirts and no pants. If NASA ever builds an outpost on the moon,* astronauts will be undertaking rover traverses of unprecedented length and complexity. Teams of explorers will head out in two vehicles that rendezvous daily, finally returning to the base after two weeks on the roll. The new rovers sleep two and are equipped with a food warmer, a toilet with “privacy curtain,” and cup holders (two).

  Before actual prototypes of the pressurized rovers are tested in analog settings—earthly terrain that resembles the moon’s surface—NASA is undertaking some rough cuts. These are two-day “excerpts” of fourteen-day traverses using similarly sized Earth vehicles. Simulated traverses help NASA get a hands-on sense of “performance and productivity”—how much gets done, how long things take, what works and what doesn’t. This summer, the Small Pressurized Rover† simulator is an orange Humvee that lives at the HMP Research Station on Devon Island in Canada’s High Arctic. (HMP stands for Haughton-Mars Project; Devon Island also resembles parts of Mars, and simulated Martian traverses have also taken place up here.)

  In short, Devon Island is as close to the moon as you can come without a rocket. Twelve-mile-wide Haughton Crater is a ringer for the moon’s Shackleton Crater, upon whose rim NASA had, since 2004, been planning to establish a base. Craters are formed by strikes from meteoroids* hurtling through space at somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 miles per hour; with no atmospheric friction to slow them down and burn them up, as happens above Earth, eve
n tiny ones blast holes in the moon’s surface. A pebble strike can open a crater a few feet across. Planetary scientists are fond of meteorites because they’re natural excavators, yielding access to geological material from past eras that is normally costly and difficult to get to.

  Devon Island is also, like the moon or Mars, extremely inconvenient. It’s thousands of miles from the things one needs for a geology expedition. Devon is uninhabited: no electricity, no cell coverage, no port or airport or supplies. That is part of the draw. Doing science here is a lesson in extreme planning. A moon or Mars analog, rather than the orb itself, is the place to figure out that, say, three people might be a better size for an exploration party than two. Or that it takes twice as long as the mission planners thought to drive a rover over a block field or twice as much oxygen to climb the loose scree on the slope of a crater. As someone at yesterday’s pretraverse planning meeting said, “This is the place to make mistakes.”

  LIKE THE MOON, Devon Island doesn’t get interesting until you start to get close. Out the window of a low-flying Twin Otter, ground that had appeared on satellite images to be dirt, straight no chaser, reveals itself to be riverine windings of tan, gray, gold, cream, rust. Polar meltwater has carved, scoured, and tinted the ground in such a way that you feel as though you’re flying over an expanse of Italian marbled paper.

  Set out on foot, and you soon see why planetary geologists make their way to the top of the Earth to visit this place. There are other places where meteorites have gouged out craters the size of Haughton, but most are covered with forest or mall. The High Arctic is landscape at its most elemental: earth and sky. Radiating out from the center of Haughton Crater is an “ejecta blanket” of the same kind you find around lunar craters. When a meteoroid slams a fellow celestial body, the energy of the impact simultaneously smashes and renders molten the rock beneath. The resulting magmalike rock stew is blasted away from the impact, lands, and cools into a sort of nougat, called impact breccia (pronounced as though it were an Italian delicacy). And then sits for 39 million years until some guy in hiking boots and a space helmet comes along and picks it up.

  Today there are two guys in helmets. In the driver’s seat of the Small Pressurized Rover simulator is planetary scientist and Haughton-Mars project director Pascal Lee. With support from NASA, the SETI Institute, the Mars Institute, and other partners, Lee established the HMP Research Station at Haughton Crater in 1997. Riding shotgun is Andrew Abercromby, of NASA’s EVA Physiology Systems and Performance Project. Abercromby has blond, freckled good looks that are rescued from Buzz Lightyear all-American wholesomeness by a curious silver-dollar-sized circle of white hair and a Fyfe accent. Squeezed between Lee and Abercromby is HMP intern Jonathan Nelson and Lee’s ubiquitous canine pal Ping Pong. Three all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) follow along behind the Humvee, carrying camp mechanic Jesse Weaver, spacesuit engineer Tom Chase, and me. Together we six are Small Pressurized Rover Alpha, or as “ground control” calls us, SPR-Alpha. Out on a different route, scheduled to rendezvous with us at the end of the day, are the men and women of SPR-Bravo.

  We’re driving slowly, keeping to the projected 6-miles-per-hour average of the actual rover. The low, gravelly hills are more uniformly grey here than elsewhere on the island. The scenery looks a lot like the moon’s Taurus-Littrow Valley, where Apollo 17 astronauts explored by rover in 1972. Tooling along this barren terrain in a bulbous, visored ATV helmet, I find it easy, if embarrassing, to pretend I’m on the moon. Lee’s evident excitement over the excursion—“Can you believe I get paid for this, barely?”—has become easier for me to understand. The place has made geeks of all of us.

  Except our mechanic. Weaver never looks around to admire the scenery. I do, almost constantly. Yesterday, I came within inches of slamming the back of the ATV in front of me. Lunar scenery was a potentially dangerous distraction during Apollo landings. Concerned mission planners built gawp time into the minute-by-minute schedules. “We’re allowed two quick looks out the window,” Gene Cernan reminded Harrison Schmitt as they prepared to descend to the moon’s surface during Apollo 17.

  Lee stops the Humvee and consults the GPS. We’ve reached our first “way point.” It’s a geology pit stop: don spacesuits, climb a bluff, collect samples. Lee and Abercromby are standing outside the vehicle, fiddling with their communications headsets, which enable them to speak to each other and to “ground control,” back at the HMP base. Around the rear of the Humvee, Chase has laid out simulated suit components on two mats. If this were the actual rover, the suits would be hanging off a pair of suit ports cut into the vehicle’s rear panels. The astronauts would step into them from inside the rover, twist their torsos to unlock suit from port, and walk away. And then reverse the process when they return, leaving their suits dangling like shed exoskeletons. This way the suits don’t clutter the cramped interior, and no dust gets inside.

  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. Dusting on the moon is a fool’s errand. Unlike on the Earth, where the planet’s magnetic field wards off charged particles of solar wind, these particles bombard the moon’s surface and impart an electrostatic charge. Moon dust clings like dryer socks. Astronauts who stepped from the Lunar Module in gleaming white marshmallow suits returned a few hours later looking like miners. The Apollo 12 suits and long johns became so filthy that at one point, astronaut Jim Lovell told me, the crew “took off all their underwear and they were naked for half the way home.”

  Another reason to keep moon dust outside the rover: With so little gravity, inhaled particles may settle more slowly and thus penetrate farther into the lungs, reaching the more vulnerable tissue deeper in. NASA has been funding so much research on dust and dust mitigation that an entire lunar dust simulant industry exists.* (Moon rocks and pebbles are classified as “national treasure” and can’t be sold, but no such prohibition applies to moon dust, real or simulated. Which explains why a dust-coated Apollo 15 mission patch sold for $300,000 at a 1999 Christie’s auction.)

  Lee considered cutting holes in the back of the Humvee and trying to rig a pair of mimic suit ports for this week’s simulations. Weaver was aghast. “I told him, ‘You are not cuttin’ up the Humvee.’” The HMP mechanic is a high school student from Tennessee, barely shaving but possessed of a scraggy, hard-shelled sang-froid. Lee, who knows Weaver’s mother, saw him rebuilding a dirt bike motor and offered him the greatest summer job in the history of summer jobs.

  Lee genuflects on one of the mats while Chase prepares to lower the simulated PLSS (portable life support system—that bulky white astronaut backpack) onto Lee’s torso. His arms are outstretched, as though in supplication, or delivery of a Broadway musical number. Chase’s employer, Hamilton Sundstrand, makes both real and simulated spacesuits, both of which require valets. (One of the less heroic aspects of a spacewalk: Someone will have to help you pull up your pants.)* As Chase and Lee grapple with the PLSS simulator, Weaver takes a pack of Camels from a pocket.

  EVAs, to him, are more or less cigarette breaks. He’s leaning toward a career in flight, but as a bush pilot, not an astronaut.

  Since there’s oxygen in Canada, you may be wondering what’s inside a simulated life support backpack. A fan, mostly, to keep the helmet faceplate from fogging. It doesn’t much matter what’s in it. The idea is to burden the wearers and restrict their movements and field of view in the same manner that an astronaut will be burdened and restricted. Then give them some tools and tasks and see what sorts of problems develop.

  As on Apollo, tasks are written on a pad Velcroed to the cuff of the spacesuit. Outer space is list world: cuff checklists, lunar surface checklists, lists of mission rules and “get-ahead tasks.” Morning in orbit begins with a fax or email of the day’s schedule and tasks, updated with last-minute changes. Any deviation must be reported to Missio
n Control. Outside of the hour or two designated as “pre-sleep,” every waking hour is planned. It’s like a book tour.

  Abercromby is flipping through his cuff checklist. He has laminated it, because it rains a lot on Devon Island and because he has a head for planning. I don’t know much about Abercromby, or NASA for that matter, but from what I’ve seen, I could imagine him running the place one day. He is taking these simulations very seriously. His 66-page Field Test Plan includes time lines, objectives, a four-page hazard analysis, an Off-Nominal Situation Resolution Tree and, for each simulated traverse, science priorities, targets of opportunity, get-ahead tasks, and mission rules. The document has been distributed to, but possibly not read by, everyone participating.

  Abercromby steps into a set of the white Tyvek coveralls that are standing in for pressure suits. Ping Pong is biting one of Lee’s gloves and dancing around the men’s feet. “Does Ping Pong want to go EVA?” Lee is using his special, high-pitched Ping Pong voice. Abercromby interrupts them. “We should talk about get-ahead tasks and targets of opportunity.”

  Weaver watches through smoke. “You look like a crew of painters.”

  Once the helmets and life support simulators are on, Chase shoots some video. Abercromby looks mildly uncomfortable. Lee has no problem with the getup. Even a pretend spacesuit, I’m told but have some trouble believing, is a chick magnet. Lee, forty-five, is single and something of a heartthrob in the space community.

  Rock hammer in hand, Lee heads up the slope of a hill. Abercromby follows with a sample bag. The teams’ tasks are modeled on Apollo-era EVAs—selecting and bagging rock and soil samples, photographing, and taking gravity meter and radiation readings.