PACKING FOR MARS ALSO BY MARY ROACH Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex PACKING FOR MARS THE CURIOUS SCIENCE OF LIFE IN THE VOID MARY ROACH W W NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON Copyright © 2010 by Mary Roach All rights reserved Photograph credits: Frontmatter: © Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation 2010 All rights reserved; Chapter 1: Image by Deirdre O’Dwyer; Chapter 2: Dmitri Kessel / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images; Chapter 3: Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 4: CBS Photo Archive / Hulton Archive / Getty Images; Chapter 5: Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 6: Image Source / Getty Images; Chapter 7: Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 8: Bettman/Corbis; Chapter 9: Ryan McVay / Riser / Getty Images; Chapter 10: Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 11: Hulton Archive / Getty Images; Chapter 12: Joanna McCarthy / Riser / Getty Images; Chapter 13: Hulton Archive / Getty Images; Chapter 14: Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 15: Courtesy of NASA; Chapter 16: Tim Flach / Stone+ / Getty Images For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W W Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roach, Mary Packing for Mars: the curious science of life in the void / Mary Roach.—1st ed p cm Includes bibliographical references ISBN: 978-0-393-07910-4 Space biology—Popular works I Title QH327.R63 2010 571.0919—dc22 2010017113 W W Norton & Company, Inc 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10110 www.wwnorton.com W W Norton & Company Ltd Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT For Jay Mandel and Jill Bialosky, with cosmic gratitude CONTENTS Countdown HE’S SMART BUT HIS BIRDS ARE SLOPPY Japan Picks an Astronaut LIFE IN A BOX The Perilous Psychology of Isolation and Confinement STAR CRAZY Can Space Blow Your Mind? YOU GO FIRST The Alarming Prospect of Life Without Gravity UNSTOWED Escaping Gravity on Board NASA’s C-9 THROWING UP AND DOWN The Astronaut’s Secret Misery THE CADAVER IN THE SPACE CAPSULE NASA Visits the Crash Test Lab ONE FURRY STEP FOR MANKIND The Strange Careers of Ham and Enos NEXT GAS: 200,000 MILES Planning a Moon Expedition Is Tough, but Not as Tough as Planning a Simulated One 10 HOUSTON, WE HAVE A FUNGUS Space Hygiene and the Men Who Stopped Bathing for Science 11 THE HORIZONTAL STUFF What If You Never Got Out of Bed? 12 THE THREE-DOLPHIN CLUB Mating Without Gravity 13 WITHERING HEIGHTS Bailing Out from Space 14 SEPARATION ANXIETY The Continuing Saga of Zero-Gravity Elimination 15 DISCOMFORT FOOD When Veterinarians Make Dinner, and Other Tales of Woe from Aerospace Test Kitchens 16 EATING YOUR PANTS Is Mars Worth It? Acknowledgments Time Line Bibliography PACKING FOR MARS * Because the astronauts’ time was rigidly scheduled and because bowel movements generally can’t be, crew members were forced into conversations like this one, in the Apollo 15 mission transcript, between Commander Dave Scott and Lunar Module Pilot James Irwin SCOTT: Al, why don’t you and I switch off here when… IRWIN: I’d like to take a crap if I can work it in, Dave SCOTT: Okay IRWIN: Tell me when * Astronaut specimens from the Skylab and Apollo eras are still around, in freezers on the top floor of a windowless high-security building at Houston’s Johnson Space Center—the one that houses NASA’s collection of (non-biological) moon rocks “I am not sure what our inventory of excreta from Apollo is right now,” John Charles told me “Forty years of freezing, with occasional thaws due to power outages during hurricanes, may have reduced them to mere vestiges of their former glory.” They were there as of 1996, because planetary geologist Ralph Harvey stumbled onto them when he got lost taking a group of VIPs on a tour “Back then all the doors opened to the same code,” he recalls “I opened this one door and it was almost like the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark There were these rows of long, low freezers They all had a little light on them that’s blinking, and a temperature readout, and a piece of tape with the astronaut’s name I’m like, Shit, they stored the astronauts in here! and I quickly got the people out I found out later that was where they stored the astronaut feces and urine.” Harvey can’t recall the room number “You have to stumble onto it, that’s the only way you can find it It’s like Narnia.” * Rethke called this the “orange peel effect.” The term also refers to a defect in a spray-painted surface, most typically the finish on a car Either way, the auto body guy owes you an apology * It’s also the main reason the Russians did select females—for animal flights anyway Training male dogs to urinate into a collection device proved extremely difficult, because cramped conditions in the capsule kept them from assuming their natural posture— lifting a leg † According to the Diaper Evolution Time Line on disposablediaper.net, the adult diaper debuted in 1987 (in Japan) Though the general disposable diaper concept dates back to 1942 The inventor was a Swedish company—not, as you sometimes hear, NASA Skimming the time line, it does sometimes sound as though NASA were involved There are vacuum-dry diapers, pulpless diapers, diapers with flexible closing systems and “reduced chassis and elastic ears.” NASA’s adult diapers are COTS—a “commercial off the shelf” product The current one is a product called Absorbencies It is hard to imagine a worse name for a diaper, except possibly NASA’s previous commercial off-the-shelf adult diaper, Rejoice * Religious observations are even tougher in a real spacecraft Launch weight limitations forced Buzz Aldrin to pack a “tiny Host” and thimble-sized wine chalice for his DIY Communion on the moon Zero gravity and a ninety-minute orbital day created so many questions for Muslim astronauts that a “Guideline of Performing Ibadah at the International Space Station” was drafted Rather than require Muslim astronauts to pray five times during each ninety-minute orbit of Earth, the guidelines allowed them to go by the twentyfour-hour cycle of the launch location Wipes (“not less than pieces”) could be used for preprayer cleansing And since the orbiting Muslim who began his prayer while facing Mecca was likely, by prayer’s end, to be mooning Mecca, provisions were made allowing him to simply face the Earth or “wherever.” Lastly, instead of lowering the face to the ground, a trying maneuver in zero gravity, prostrating oneself could be approximated by “bringing down the chin closer to the knee,” “using the eye lid as an indicator of the changing of posture” or—in the vein of “wherever”—simply “imagining” the sequence of movements * The first food consumed by a NASA astronaut, but not the first food in space The Soviets won this space race, too Glenn’s applesauce lost out to Laika’s powdered meat and breadcrumb gelatin and the unnamed snack of Yuri Gagarin (in the words of Elena, the Gagarin Museum archivist, “Some say soup, some say purée For sure there was something in the tube!”) * Sorry, I mean innovative That is the adjective used by the author of Lepkovsky’s 1985 UC Berkeley obituary Here we learn that Lepkovsky coauthored the first atlas of the chicken brain and isolated riboflavin from “several hundred thousand gallons of milk.” In what little spare time remained, he enjoyed dancing and amateur stock-market analysis, no doubt reaping great gains in dairy futures * The space simulator diet tests were big news in San Antonio, Brooks Air Force Base’s home town In addition to the Express story, the San Antonio Light ran a story The advertisement that ran alongside was for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, then the nation’s leading insurer The tag line, and I will send you a copy if you don’t believe me, reads, “Come on, San Antonio! Let’s all go No 1!” * Egesta is my new favorite euphemism for “feces,” and an even better toilet brand name than Ejecto Certainly better than Toto Who names a toilet after a lapdog? Unless it’s Shit-Tzu I’d buy a Shit-Tzu toilet † Could astronauts live on steak and eggs? Bad idea Setting aside cholesterol issues, you’d be missing most vitamins Fahey pointed out that even wild dogs don’t live on protein alone “When they kill prey, they eat a smorgasbord of things.” It is a different smorgasbord than the one at Sweden House “They’ll eat the stomach contents first usually.” Since the prey is usually some grazing animal, this is their side of vegetables * If you’re among the 50 percent of the population who produce methane, you can play human pilot light Your friends can hold a match to your gas and watch it ignite and burn blue * Cabbage resurfaced in the form of kimchi—fermented spiced cabbage—on board the International Space Station when Korea’s first astronaut visited Space kimchi developer Lee Ju-woon works at the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute, where scientists are developing ways to harness energy from intestinal kimchi fission No, they aren’t But they should be * If it’s cordless, fireproof, lightweight and strong, miniaturized, or automated, chances are good NASA has had a hand in the technology We are talking trash compactors, bulletproof vests, high-speed wireless data transfer, implantable heart monitors, cordless power tools, artificial limbs, dustbusters, sports bras, solar panels, invisible braces, computerized insulin pumps, fire-fighters’ masks Every now and then, earthbound applications head off in an unexpected direction: Digital lunar image analyzers allow Estée Lauder to quantify “subtleties otherwise undetectable” in the skin of women using their products, providing a basis for ludicrous wrinkle-erasing claims Miniature electronic Apollo heat pumps spawned the Robotic Sow “At feeding time a heat lamp simulating a sow’s body warmth is automatically turned on, and the machine emits rhythmic grunts like a mother pig summoning her piglets As piglets scamper to their mechanical mother, a panel across the front opens to expose the row of nipples,” wrote an unnamed NASAfacts scribe, surely eliciting grunts from superiors in the NASA Public Affairs Office Table of Contents Countdown HE’S SMART BUT HIS BIRDS ARE SLOPPY LIFE IN A BOX STAR CRAZY YOU GO FIRST UNSTOWED THROWING UP AND DOWN THE CADAVER IN THE SPACE CAPSULE ONE FURRY STEP FOR MANKIND NEXT GAS: 200,000 MILES 10 HOUSTON, WE HAVE A FUNGUS 11 THE HORIZONTAL STUFF 12 THE THREE-DOLPHIN CLUB 13 WITHERING HEIGHTS 14 SEPARATION ANXIETY 15 DISCOMFORT FOOD 16 EATING YOUR PANTS Acknowledgments Time Line Bibliography ... Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 Library of Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Roach, Mary Packing for Mars: the curious science of life in the void / Mary Roach. —1st ed p cm Includes.. .PACKING FOR MARS ALSO BY MARY ROACH Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex PACKING FOR MARS THE CURIOUS. .. by and large the playthings of generals, but the V-2s caught the imagination of a handful of scientists and dreamers, men more interested in the going-up than the coming-down One of them was David