Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

Following his flight, Schweickart dedicated himself to the study of space motion sickness. “I went over to Pensacola, and… I became the guinea pig, the pincushion that people stuffed their pins in and their probes in and whatnot. For six months, …my main job was learning as much as we could about motion sickness. And frankly, we didn’t learn that much, and we don’t know that much about it today, to be honest with you.” The work was worthwhile in that, if nothing else, Schweickart managed to drag motion sickness out of the closet. “Rusty paid the price for us all,” Cernan wrote. “Nothing was ever said in public against him, but he never flew another mission.”

Things were said in public about Jake Garn, the astronaut-senator from Utah. Things were said in a nationally syndicated comic strip. Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau had been lam-basting Garn’s 1985 shuttle flight as a costly boondoggle. When Trudeau got wind of the fact that Garn was ill for much of the mission, one of his characters referred to “the Garn” as the unit by which space motion sickness would henceforth be measured. (In reality, there is no unit, but there is a scale, starting at “Mild Malaise” and ending at “Frank Vomiting.”)

Pat Cowings laughed louder than most. When Garn was in training, Cowings had offered to teach him a biofeedback technique she developed for preventing space motion sickness. He waved her away, saying, “Yeah, I heard about that California meditation stuff. Will it grow back my hair?” (Despite what seem to me to be impressive results, Cowings to this day struggles with biofeedback’s touchy-feely reputation. Even her own employer doesn’t use her method. “I say to NASA: There’s this big company? They’re called the Navy? And they’re using it now.”)

No one, not Jake Garn or Rusty Schweickart or Frank Vomiting, should be embarrassed about getting sick in space. Some 50 to 75 percent of astronauts have suffered symptoms of space motion sickness. “That’s why you don’t see much shuttle news footage the first day or two. They’re all, like, throwing up in a corner somewhere,” says Mike Zolensky, NASA’s curator of cosmic dust. Zolensky himself was epically sick on a parabolic flight. The only passenger worse off was the one helping astronauts practice drawing blood in zero gravity. Since his arms were strapped down, someone else had to hold the bag to his face.

Technically speaking, motion sickness is not a sickness. It’s a normal response to an abnormal situation. It hits some people faster and harder than it hits others, but everyone can be made to hurl. Even fish can get seasick. One Canadian researcher recalls a story told to him by the owner of a codfish hatchery. The fishmonger had call to transport some of his tank-raised charges by sea. “After the boat had been under way for some time, all the feed they had eaten was seen to be on the bottom of the tank.” The researcher listed all the species known to be susceptible to motion sickness: monkeys, chimps, seals, sheep, cats. Horses and cows can be nauseated but cannot, for anatomical reasons, throw up. There is disagreement, he said, about birds. [29] 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. The author put forth that he personally had witnessed a pigeon vomiting while being spun on a rotating platform. “It is unusual,” he added. I’d say.

The only humans who are predictably immune are those with nonfunctioning inner ears. It was a group of five “deaf-mutes” who failed to fall ill on a harrowing sea voyage that first alerted science to the link between motion sickness and the vestibular system. The year was 1896. Among the miserable was a physician named Minor. He states in his paper that he had heard of two other parties of deaf-mutes—twenty-two in the first group and thirty-one in the second—who regularly made long sea voyages without falling ill. Prior to Minor’s paper, medical science had blamed motion sickness on lurching stomach contents and oscillating air pressure in the gut. A variety of girdles and belts were prescribed in Lancet articles around the time. Readers responded with their own stomach-stabilizing strategies: Singing, holding one’s breath as the boat crests the swells, and “eating pickled onions freely.” The rationale behind the last one being that it produces gas, which inflates the stomach and steadies abdominal pressure. The singing and flatulence perhaps explains the preponderance of deaf-mutes on ocean voyages around that time.

Ironically, NASA Ames motion sickness researcher Bill Toscano has a defective vestibular system. He didn’t realize it until he rode the rotating chair. “We thought there was something wrong with the chair,” says Toscano’s fellow researcher Pat Cowings. I carried on a conversation with Toscano while he sat in the rotating chair, his voice rising and fading with each revolution. It’s his superpower.

Since motion sickness is a natural response to a novel or sensorially perplexing motion or gravitational environment, astronauts have to go through it all over again when they return to Earth after a long mission. During the weeks or months of no gravity, their brains have been interpreting all otolith cues as acceleration in one direction or another. So when they move their head, their brain tells them they’re moving. Astronaut Peggy Whitson described her first moments on Earth after coming back from 191 days on the International Space Station like this: “I stood up and the world was going around me at 17,500 miles per hour, as opposed to me going around the world at 17,500 miles per hour.” It’s called landing vertigo, or Earth sickness. (Other obscure motion sickness spin-offs include amusement park ride sickness, spectacle sickness, wide-screen movie sickness, camel sickness, flight simulator sickness, and swing sickness.)

Vile as it is, the act of vomiting deserves your respect. It’s an orchestral event of the gut, complex and seamlessly coordinated: “There is a forced inspiration, the diaphragm descends, the abdominal muscles contract, the duodenum contracts, the cardia and oesophagus relax, the glottis closes, the larynx is drawn forward, the soft palate rises, and the mouth opens.” Small wonder an entire “emetic brain”—or “vomiting center”—is devoted to the cause. Somewhere, I recall reading that the dinosaur formerly known as brontosaurus had a brain at the base of its tail to coordinate its lower body movements. I envisioned a brain-shaped gray organ nestled in the dinosaur’s pelvis. Now I think I was wrong. Because the “emetic brain” isn’t an actual brain any more than the Vomiting Center has a parking lot and a board of trustees. It’s just a place in the fourth ventricle, a few clusters of nuclei a fraction of a millimeter across.

In the case of motion sickness, vomiting is an impressive lot of bother for no apparent reason. Vomiting makes sense as a bodily response to poisoned or contaminated food—gets it out of you ASAP—but as a reaction to sensory conflict? Pointless, says Oman. He says it’s just an unfortunate evolutionary accident that the emetic brain happened to evolve right next to the part of the brain that oversees balance. Motion sickness is most likely a case of cross talk between the two. “Just one of God’s jokes,” says Pat Cowings.