Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

When I arrive in the morning, my team’s welding experiment has been loaded onto the C-9. From the outside, the plane looks like any large jetliner, but inside it has been gutted. Only six rows of seats remain, in the back. The welding device is an automated arm mounted in a glass-fronted box in a doored cabinet. The cabinet is affixed to a cart, like something a magician wheels around a stage. Two of the students and their supervisor are on their hands and knees, struggling to fit the legs of the cart into brackets mounted on the floor. The measurements are off by a fraction of an inch.

Team member Michelle Rader explains their project. Although much of what the astronauts have been doing on the space station the past decade amounts to zero-gravity construction work, things are typically bolted rather than welded. Sparks and molten metal make NASA nervous. A blob of superheated metal that drifts onto an astronaut’s suit could melt through the layers and cause a leak. An enclosed and/or robotic welder is a possibility, but you first need to be sure that welding in zero gravity doesn’t compromise the strength of the weld. That’s what the Missouri students are testing today.

A loud crack causes heads to turn. One of the welding students has tried to force a leg into place and now it has broken. The Reduced Gravity Program manager, Dominic Del Rosso, stares at the scrum of students. His head is shaved. His arms are crossed. Do you recall Yul Brynner as the King of Siam? This is him, in a flight suit. Icy and annoyed. “What happened here?”

A small voice: “We um…”

Someone else takes over. “A weld broke.”

The weld team points out that they did not weld the cart legs. These welds were done by someone at Missouri S&T’s metal shop. Someone dials this man’s number on a cell phone. There isn’t anything the man can do for them, other than feel bad, which is probably all they want right now. Del Rosso doesn’t care whose fault it is. He points to the exit. “Take it out of here.”

Ruh-roh . Have I endured two days of NASA safety orientation briefings for nothing? Is it too late to switch teams? Do I need to start cozying up to Team Analyte Detection Via Protein Nanospores? Back in the hangar, I chat up one of the other Missouri students. He has a minor in explosives and the slightly bitter, misanthropic personality of someone who shouldn’t. I ask him whether his team will still fly if they can’t fix the leg.

He doesn’t know. He’s on the ground crew and does not get to fly. He gives me a forced smile. “It’s okay.” And then, remembering words that someone has told him to say: “It’s an honor just to be here.”

By midday, the welding unit is back on board, affixed directly to the floor of the plane. Space Weld Team is go for launch.

YOU NEVER THINK about the weight of your organs inside you. Your heart is a half-pound clapper hanging off the end of your aorta. Your arms burden your shoulders like buckets on a yoke. The colon uses the uterus as a beanbag chair. Even the weight of your hair imparts a sensation on your scalp. In weightlessness, all this disappears. You organs float inside your torso. [20] 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.) The result is a subtle physical euphoria, an indescribable sense of being freed from something you did not realize was there.

If you go to the NASA Microgravity University Web page, you will see photo after photo of students concentrating intently on their projects and, in the background of many of these shots, a pair of grinning fools floating into each other like shirts in a dryer. That’s me and Joyce. Joyce is from the education department at NASA headquarters in Washington. She helps run the student flights program but had never been on one of the flights. I should really be down on the floor with my team, taking notes on how it’s going. I can’t do this, however, because my notebook is floating in front of my face with the pages all fanned out, and I need to stare at it for a while longer. It hovers, not rising and not falling, in the manner of a party balloon a few days postparty. (When I get back to my room to review my notes, I find that I’ve written nothing of substance. I wasn’t so much taking notes as testing my Fisher Space Pen. My notes say: “WOO” and “yippee.”)

Last night on NASA TV an astronaut, in response to a schoolchild’s question, said that being in zero gravity was like floating in water. Not exactly. In water, you sense the liquid’s help—buoying you and supporting your weight. When you move, you feel it push back on you. You are floating, but a heaviness remains. Here on the C-9, for twenty-two seconds at a go, you are floating in air without effort, without help, without resistance. Gravity has given you a hall pass.

The thing weighing us down is Del Rosso. He has told us to hold on to a strap with one hand. This means that every time I’m floating, I reach the limits of my tether and swing around to the left. This causes me to enter the air space over the Kansas University team’s electromagnetic docking rig. To retreat, I have to extend my leg down and push off the frame of it. “Don’t kick their experiment!” barks Del Rosso. Like I meant to. I hate your stupid electromagnetic docking thing, take that! It’s just that this floating business takes getting used to. You can ask Lee Morin. Mission Specialist Morin told me it takes about a week to feel comfortable floating. “Then it seems like the natural thing. To float like an angel. I don’t know whether it’s like you’re, you know, back in the womb or something, but it’s like the natural way. And it seems very odd to think about walking with shoes.”

“Feet down!” yells a blue flight suit. This is our cue to bring our legs back underneath us, because gravity is coming back. It comes on gently—you’re not dropped from the ceiling—but still, you don’t want to come down on your head. Some of us lie on our backs during the double gravity portion, as we’ve heard we’re less likely to become nauseated that way.

Gravity disappears again, and we rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave. It’s like the Rapture in here every thirty seconds. Weightlessness is like heroin, or how I imagine heroin must be. You try it once, and when it’s over, all you can think about is how much you want to do it again. But apparently the thrill wears off. “At first,” wrote astronaut Michael Collins in a book for young adults, “just floating around is great fun, but then after a while it becomes annoying, and you want to stay in one place…. My hands kept floating up in front of me, and I wished I had pockets or somewhere to put them.” Astronaut Andy Thomas told me how irritating it was to never be able to set something down. “Everything has to have a bit of Velcro on it. You’re forever losing things. I brought one nail file with me on Mir, so I was very careful with it. About a month before the end of the mission, it popped out of my hand. I turned to grab it, and it was just gone. It went down with Mir. Once we lost a whole Sharps container. Big thing. Gone. We never saw it again.”

There is some annoyance going on today. One team’s computer keeps shutting down. It’s one of those rugged laptops that protect themselves by shutting down when they detect a sudden spike in acceleration. On Earth, this means it has been dropped. Up here, it means the pilot is pulling out of the dive.