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

by Mary Roach

  * By odd coincidence, I went to a noontime lecture today that addressed this issue. (“Turkey Vultures: Fact or Fiction?”) The lecturer had brought along his pet turkey vulture, Friendly, who smelled even worse than one might imagine a turkey vulture to smell. This was, he said, because Friendly had become sick in the car on the ride over and vomited. Earlier he told us that turkey vultures will vomit at you if you harass them. I was in the second row, and have no trouble believing that turkey vulture vomit makes a powerful deterrent. Unless you are a coyote. Fact: The coyote considers turkey vulture vomitus a delicacy, and will harass the birds simply to get a snack.

  * Merrick scholars disagree as to whether it was suicide or accident, but they do agree on his true first name, which was in fact Joseph, not John. The London production, as I seem to recall, used the more widely known “John,” perhaps to avoid amending the program with a footnote, as I’m having to do. While I have you here, I’ll tell you that David Bowie played Merrick. He wore no makeup or prosthetics and almost no clothes. He held himself crooked, just as Merrick had been, and broke your heart.

  * Thus the best way to survive in a falling elevator is to lie down on your back. Sitting is bad but better than standing, because buttocks are nature’s safety foam. Muscle and fat are compressible; they help absorb the G forces of the impact. As for jumping up in the air just before the elevator hits bottom, it only delays the inevitable. Plus, then you may be squatting when you hit. In a 1960 Civil Aeromedical Research Institute study, squatting on a drop platform caused “severe knee pain” at relatively low G forces. “Apparently the flexor muscles…acted as a fulcrum to pry open the knee joint,” the researchers noted with interest and no apparent remorse.

  * Whitson and her crewmates, much to their surprise, did have help. Not long after touchdown, she felt someone pull her from the capsule. “I was like, ‘Cool, the search-and-rescue guys are here already.’ They laid me on the ground near the cesium altimeter. Which seemed odd, because we were always told to stay away from the cesium altimeter. So I start looking at the SAR guys…. One of them, literally, was wearing what looked like a burlap sack sewn into pants. They were Kazakh locals.” One spoke some Russian. He asked Whitson’s crewmate Yuri Malenchenko, “Where did this boat come from?” (The fire had consumed the parachutes.) “Yuri’s like, ‘No, this is a spacecraft. We were up in space.’ And the guy says, ‘Nu, ladna,’ which is kind of like ‘Fine, whatever.’”

  * No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size. It is assumed that a man will fit one of the three sizes available in the condom-style urine collection device hose attachment inside the EVA suit. To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts opting for L when they are really S, there is no S. “There is L, XL, and XXL,” says Hamilton Sundstrand suit engineer Tom Chase. This was not the case during Apollo. Among the 106 items left on the moon’s surface by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are four urine collection assemblies—two large and two small. Who wore which remains a matter of conjecture.

  * And a diaper. Though the lack of a diaper doesn’t mean race-car drivers don’t pee in their suits. “People do it all the time,” reported Danica Patrick in an interview in Women’s Health. Except Danica. “I tried last year.” She explains that this was during, appropriately enough, a yellow flag (the signal to slow down and follow the pace car, usually because of an accident). “I was like, ‘…Just do it.’” No Nike sponsorship for Danica!

  † How do you tell when a cadaver is done defrosting? Bolte sticks a temperature transducer down the trachea. When the internal temperature passes 60 degrees, it’s ready. Lacking that, a “thermometer up the rectum” will give you a good idea, as will moving the arms and legs to see if the joints move freely. Two to three days (in a refrigerator, please) usually does it.

  * Beware the hard things in between. The April 1995 issue of the Journal of Trauma includes a case report of a man whose pipe was between his BMW’s airbag and his face when the bag deployed. A piece of the stem shot into his eye, resulting in “a ruptured globe.” The author, a Swiss physician, has a keen globe for detail, noting that “there was tobacco all over the floor” and that the injury was similar to those seen “after a thrust of a pointed cow horn.” The paper concludes with an exhortation to “behave appropriately”—no “drinking from cups,…holding articles on the lap, or wearing spectacles while driving.” Not to thrust too pointed a cow horn, but wearing one’s eyeglasses while driving surely prevents more injuries than it causes.

  * How much does it move? Enough that you can sometimes feel it. In one Apollo-era study of sudden deceleration (stopping fast), five out of twenty-four subjects complained of what the researcher called “abdominal visceral displacement sensation.”

  † Does this sound gentle? It is not. Recall Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. If you missed the film, think of pork workers described in a MedPage Today article as using jolts of compressed air to force pig brains out of heads. “This ‘emulsifies’ the brain tissue,” explained a source.

  * And in the paper “Voluntary Tolerance of the Human to Impact Accelerations of the Head.” Eleven subjects, at least one of them dressed in a suit and tie, received blows to the head with 9-and 13-pound pendulums. As the authors put it: “Considerable distortion of the face was observed as the bony structure of the head was accelerated away from the softer portions.” We owe these men a debt of thanks. In the early investigations of head impact, a cadaver was of limited help. You couldn’t ask him to count backward by sevens or name the president, and you’d never know what sort of headache he had.

  * Here’s another possible reason NASA avoids cadaver research: astronauts. “I floated into a sleep restraint and extended my arms through the armholes then ducked my head into the bag,” wrote Mullane. “Pepe and Dave taped the skull on top…They silently floated the bag to the flight deck and maneuvered me behind John Casper, who was engaged at an instrument panel. When he turned to find the creature in his face with arms waving, it scared the bejesus out of him. Later, we clamped [it] on the toilet.” If you read just one astronaut memoir in your life, make it Mullane’s.

  * A comma would have been good. “Astrochimp Ham” is perilously suggestive of a cut of meat made from a dead research animal. It wouldn’t be a first. In a stunning public relations lapse known as Project Barbecue, pigs who died on Air Force crash sleds in a 1952 test of seatbelt safety were served in the mess hall later that night.

  * Piloting could be done by the astronauts, via directional thrusters, but it didn’t need to be. The capsule could be flown on autopilot and operated from the ground in, to quote astronaut Mike Collins, “chimp mode.”

  * The simulated astronaut is a tradition dating all the way back to the Sputnik era, when the Soviets flew test runs with a mannequin they called Ivan Ivanovich and, sometimes, recordings to test voice transmissions. A tape of a person singing was originally proposed, so as to make clear to Western listening posts that it wasn’t a spy. Someone pointed out that this would generate rumors of a cosmonaut spy gone mad. The recording was switched to choral voices, as even the most gullible Western intelligence man knew you couldn’t fit a choir in a Korabl-Sputnik satellite. A voice reading a Russian soup recipe was thrown in for good measure. The simulated astronaut named Enos orbited with a voice-check tape recording that said, “Cap com, this astro is. Am on the window and the view is great…,” prompting President Kennedy to announce to the world, “The chimp took off at 10:08. He reported that everything is perfect and working well.” No doubt generating KGB rumors of a U.S. president gone mad.

  * Ham and Enos traveled in pressurized compartments and thus didn’t need pressurized spacesuits and helmets. Nonetheless, some prototype chimp suits had been developed, including the “SPCA Suit”—certified humane by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “To prove that a suit was safe for a man, we were going to test it on a chimp, but to prove the suit was safe for a chimp, we had to test it on a man,” U.S. Spaces
uits coauthor Joe McMann said in an email. “That was a mind boggler.”

  * A lasting fixation for young Caroline. Three months earlier, around the time of Enos’s flight, Jackie Kennedy rented a monkey for her daughter’s first birthday party in the White House, an event widely covered by the wire services at the time. In addition to a live monkey, the party featured “jelly sandwiches,” whistles, tricycles going “up and down the ground floor of the White House,” and, hopefully, sedatives for Jackie. Caroline no doubt wanted her very own space chimp. It was a reasonable expectation, given that Nikita Khrushchev had presented her mom with one of the puppies of space dog Strelka. The puppy was a gift, but also a nose-thumb: Strelka had beaten Enos into orbit by over a year. According to Animals in Space, White House staff had the pup searched and X-rayed “to check for bugs or a possible doomsday device.”

  * Curiously, also situated in New Mexico. The Smokey plot does not contain the remains of the Forest Service mascot, who is a cartoon, but of a black bear cub burned in a New Mexico fire and named after the mascot. Confusion surrounds the official mascot name, which is Smokey Bear, not Smokey the Bear. Just as the official slogan of New Mexico is Land of Enchantment, not Land of Pants-Wearing-Animal Memorials.

  * Not that Stapp was unsentimental. The colonel composed sonnets and love poems for his wife Lillian, a ballerina with the American Ballet Theatre. They’re included in a collection of Stapp’s verse, on sale for $5 in the New Mexico Museum of Space History gift shop. Stapp didn’t read from his oeuvre at Ham’s service, though one line in particular would have fit the occasion: “If chimpanzees could talk, we would soon wish they wouldn’t.”

  † Ham is entered twice, initially as “Chang,” and later as “Ham” (an acronym of Holloman Aeromedical). Once the animal had been chosen as a finalist to fly, government officials rethought the name, worrying that an ape named Chang might offend the Chinese. To be on the safe side, chimps were thereafter named for Holloman staff or, in the case of Double Ugly, Miss Priss, Big Mean, and Big Ears, themselves.

  * Holloman moved away from this term after receiving letters from irritated etymologists. The suffix “naut” comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests “a sailor in space.” Chimponaut suggests “a chimpanzee in sailor pants.”

  * According to space historian Asif Siddiqi, the Soviets preferred to train dogs for space travel, because apes were too excitable, too prone to catching colds, and “more difficult to dress.” And because Soviet space program bigwig Sergei Korolev loved dogs. Both the United States and the Soviet Union built a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but only Russia has a Tomb of the Unknown Dog (outside St. Petersburg), honoring the contributions of canine research subjects.

  * These were not great papers. Headlines proclaimed absurdities like “Black Label Was Elected a Fine Beer” and “Science Cures Piles!”—advertisements misleadingly typeset to look like news. Not to mention the very confusing “Thieves Get Ham.” In what I first took to be an astrochimp kidnapping plot, two men pried open the rear door of a supermarket and made off with a dozen three-pound canned Rath Blackhawk hams and a half-dozen canned Wilson (clearly the inferior ham) half-pounders.

  * Contrary to popular lore, an astronaut’s blood does not boil if his spacesuit tears or his craft depressurizes. And though he would swell, he would not burst. The body functions as a sort of pressure suit for the blood, keeping dissolved gases in their liquid state. Only body fluids directly exposed to a vacuum actually boil. (As happened to a 1965 NASA test subject in a leaky spacesuit in an altitude chamber. The last thing he recalled before losing consciousness was the sensation of his saliva bubbling on his tongue.) Also, current EVA suits are designed to compensate for tears or leaks by blasting in air at far greater pressure. Bottom line: Provided he has an oxygen supply, an astronaut in a spacecraft depressurization has about two minutes to figure out what’s wrong and set it right. Beyond that he’s in trouble. This is known from experiments in vacuum chambers that would, if you knew the details, make your blood boil.

  * Or not at all, if the 2010 NASA budget passes as is.

  * Up until Obama’s first NASA budget appeared, in February 2010, the moon base was slated to be built sometime in the 2020s. That program (Constellation) has been cut, and now we’re headed to a near-Earth asteroid and on to Mars. Then again, Congress has yet to approve the budget plan, so it’s hard to know for sure, at the time of this writing, just where we’ll end up hauling our rovers next.

  † Six months after our traverse, NASA, recognizing a public relations opportunity, will change the name Small Pressurized Rover to Lunar Electric Rover. It was originally called the Flexible Roving Expedition Device, or FRED, until NASA Headquarters nixed it. They nixed it for the same reason they took the word Excursion out of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module—it sounded frivolous. A larger mobile lunar habitat prototype called the All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer (ATHLETE) recently squeaked past the NASA fun censor. Whoever he is, he’s very thorough. I skimmed the entire 53-page NASA acronym list and failed to find anything amusing. (Business Manager came closest.)

  * A meteoroid is a bit of debris, usually planetary, hurtling through the solar system. If it’s bigger than a boulder, then it’s an asteroid. If any part of a meteoroid makes it to Earth intact rather than burning up as it barrels through Earth’s atmosphere, then it’s a meteorite. A meteoroid’s visible path through the atmosphere is a meteor. An astronaut struck by a meteoroid is a goner. A meteoroid the size of a tomato seed can pierce a spacesuit.

  * NASA buys it by the ton, but you can buy it by the kilogram ($28). Go to the eNasco educational products Web site, but not if you’re squeamish. “Save on Lab Time!” says the promo copy for skinned cats. The eNasco dissection specimen section offers ten different skinned cat products, proving that there is, in fact, more than one way.

  * And you will wear a diaper. These days it’s called a maximum absorbent garment. The MAG replaces the DACT (disposable absorbent containment trunk), which had less (not enough) capacity. In the Apollo era, astronauts wore both a pull-up fecal containment device (FCD) and a condom-attached urine containment device. Let’s let astronaut Charlie Duke, providing commentary for NASA’s Apollo 16 Lunar Surface Journal, explain the system: “[The FCD] was like a ladies’ girdle you pulled on and it cut out in the front so that your penis could hang out so you could get on the UCD…I think there was maybe a jockstrap that went on, also, and it had a hole for your penis, and then you rolled on your UCD and then you buttoned that or snapped it to the jockstrap.”

  * In this case, to keep the island more Mars/moon–like. (Biowaste encourages plant growth.) Fourteen 50-gallon drums of urine are flown off the island each season. Men go directly into the drum via a funnel. Women squat over a pitcher first. It’s one of those clear plastic pitchers they use for beer at campus pubs. Pouring it out was like an entire Saturday night of drinking condensed in a single gesture. Solid waste happens on a toilet seat mounted over a plastic bag that you then take away and drop in the trash. You are your own dog.

  * Borman could be a bit crusty. As Lovell put it, “Two weeks with Frank Borman anyplace is a trial.”

  * That is why some deodorant and antiperspirant efficacy tests include an “emotional collection.” A group of subjects sit with pads under their arms to absorb secretions while being forced to sing karaoke or speak in front of a group. The pads are then weighed and the armpit smells rated by professional odor judges. I was once, as part of an article on body odor, invited to be a guest judge. “Take little bunny sniffs,” I was told.

  * Because of all the sweat and dead skin (calluses), the bottoms of the feet and the spaces between the toes are a Mecca for bacteria—high numbers, much more variety. One class of dead-skin-eating bacteria, L. brevis, excretes compounds that smell like ripe cheese. Though it may be technically more accurate to say that certain ripe cheeses smell like feet: Cheesemakers routinely inoculate certain of their creat
ions with L. brevis.

  * And possibly deer. A 1994 issue of Crop Protection details the failed but entertaining efforts of botanists at the University of Pennsylvania to deter white-tailed deer by dousing an assortment of ornamental shrubbery with 3-methyl-2-hexanoic acid. Which raises the unusual marketing question, Will a homeowner abide a rhododendron that smells like BO?

  † A.k.a., shed skin. Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defines scurf as “a branny substance of epidermic origin”—an evocative pairing of dander and breakfast cereal. Try new Kellogg’s Dandruff Flakes!

  * Roughly 4.2 milliliters per day, according to a table in a paper by Mattoni and Sullivan, entitled “Synopsis of Weight and Volume of Waste Product Generation from All Sources in the Closed Environment of a High Performance Manned Space Vehicle.” That is just under a teaspoon of skin oil, an equivalency made with the help of a recipe conversion table. Employed in tandem, the two tables would enable the deranged or geographically isolated baker to substitute sebum for vegetable shortening or calculate the equivalent of a cup of flour in desquamated epithelium.