Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

The concerns were not altogether fatuous. In a study published in the April 1957 issue of Aviation Medicine , 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. For a majority of these pilots, the feeling wasn’t one of panic, but of euphoria. Only 18 of the 137 characterized their feelings as fear or anxiety. “It seems so peaceful, it seems like you are in another world.” “I feel like a giant.” “A king,” said another. Three commented that they felt nearer to God. A pilot named Mal Ross, who set a series of altitude records in experimental aircraft in the late 1950s, twice reported an eerie “feeling of exultation, of wanting to fly on and on.”

The year the Aviation Medicine article ran, Colonel Joe Kittinger ascended to 96,000 feet in an upright, phone-booth-sized sealed capsule suspended beneath a helium balloon. With his oxygen dangerously low, Kittinger was ordered by his superior, David Simons, to begin his descent. “COME AND GET ME,” replied Kittinger, letter by letter in Morse code. Kittinger says it was a joke, but Simons didn’t take it that way. (Morse code has always been a tough medium for humor.) In his memoir Man High, Simons recalls thinking that “the weird and little understood breakaway phenomenon could be taking hold of Kittinger’s mind, …that he… was gripped in this strange reverie and was hellbent on flying on and on without regard for the consequences.”

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). Simons speculated that one day soon aerospace physicians would be talking about a condition “known as the deadly rapture of space.” [10] 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 travel by ice floe has its own unique anxiety syndrome.

He was right, though NASA preferred the less flowery term “space euphoria.” “Some NASA shrinks,” wrote astronaut Gene Cernan in his memoir, “had warned that when I looked down and saw the Earth speeding past so far below, I might be swamped by space euphoria.” Cernan would soon be undertaking a spacewalk—history’s third—during Gemini IX. The psychologists were nervous because the first two spacewalkers had expressed not only an odd euphoria but a worrisome disinclination to go back inside the capsule. “I felt excellent and in a cheerful mood and reluctant to leave free space,” wrote Alexei Leonov, the first human to, in 1965, float freely in the vacuum of space, attached to his Vokshod capsule by an air hose. “As for the so-called psychological barrier that was supposed to be insurmountable by man preparing to confront the cosmic abyss alone, I not only did not sense any barrier, but even forgot that there could be one.”

Four minutes into NASA’s first spacewalk, Gemini IV astronaut Ed White gushed that he felt “like a million dollars.” He struggled to find the words for it. “I’ve… it’s just tremendous.” There are moments when the mission transcript reads like the transcript of a 1970s encounter group. Here are White and his commander, James McDivitt, a couple of Air Force guys, after it’s over:

WHITE: That was the most natural feeling, Jim.

McDIVITT: …You looked like you were in your mother’s womb.

NASA’s concern was not that their astronaut was euphoric, but that euphoria might have overtaken good sense. During White’s twenty minutes of bliss, Mission Control repeatedly tries to break in. Finally the capsule communicator, Gus Grissom, gets through to McDivitt.

GRISSOM: Gemini 4, get back in!

McDIVITT: They want you to come back in now.

WHITE: Back in?

McDIVITT: Back in.

GRISSOM: Roger, we’ve been trying to talk to you for awhile here.

WHITE: Aw, Cape, let me just [take] a few pictures.

McDIVITT: No, back in. Come on.

WHITE: …Listen, you could almost not drag me in, but I’m coming.

But he wasn’t. Two more minutes passed. McDivitt starts to plead.

McDIVITT: Just come on in…

WHITE: Actually, I’m trying to get a better picture.

McDIVITT: No, come on in.

WHITE: I’m trying to get a picture of the spacecraft now.

McDIVITT: Ed, come on in here!

Another minute passes before White makes a move toward the hatch, saying, “This is the saddest moment of my life.”

Rather than worrying about astronauts not wanting to come back in, the space agencies should have been worrying about them not being able to. It took White twenty-five minutes to get back through the hatch and safely in the spacecraft. Not helping his general state of mind was the knowledge that—should he run out of oxygen or pass out for any other reason—McDivitt was under orders to cut him loose rather than risk his own life trying to wrestle White back through the hatch.

Alexei Leonov is said to have sweated away 12 pounds in a similar struggle. His suit had pressurized to the extent that he could not bend his knees and had to go in head first, rather than feet first, as he had trained for. He got stuck trying to close the hatch behind him and had to lower his suit pressure to get back in—a potentially lethal move, akin to a diver ascending too quickly.

The NASA History Office account includes an intriguing Cold War detail: Leonov, it claims, had been given a suicide pill in case he couldn’t get back in and crewmate Pavel Belyayev was forced to “leave him in orbit.” Given that death from cyanide, the poison most commonly associated with suicide pills, is slower and more ghastly than death from having one’s oxygen supply cut off, there would have been little call for the pill. (As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.)

Space physiology expert Jon Clark told me the suicide pill story is most likely untrue. I had emailed Clark at his office at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute regarding the perplexing logistics of pill-popping in a spacesuit, [11] 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. and he did some asking around. His Russian sources also dismissed another rumor, that Belyayev was under orders to shoot Leonov if he couldn’t get back in. In fact, it was Leonov and Belyayev’s wayward landing, inside the territory of a pack of lurking wolves, that resulted in the addition, at least for a while, of a lightweight pistol to the cosmonauts’ wilderness survival gear.