Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

Do space agencies ever discuss human hibernation? They have, and they do. “It never dies,” says John Charles. “It just hibernates.” Charles puts little stock in the possibility. “Even if it did work, would we really short-supply a crewed vehicle on a three-year mission to Mars? What if the hibernaculum malfunctioned, and everyone woke up? How much food and oxygen do you carry, just in case? And when is that amount sufficiently large that the savings due to hibernation are lost?”

Here’s another reason it won’t work. Hibernating bears derive all their water and energy from reserves of fat that they build up by bingeing before they den. According to the Bear Center at Washington State University, a small (astronaut-sized) bear gorging on apples and berries consumes up to 40 percent of its body weight each day during this period. That’s about 65 pounds of food a day.

Six months of living on nothing but fat—even your own—probably isn’t healthy unless your body has somehow adapted to it. Little known fact: Hibernating bears have high “bad” cholesterol levels. (They also have very high “good” cholesterol—which probably explains why heart disease is unknown in bears.)

BED-RESTERS ARE not bears. They have to eat and drink and excrete, and that last one was Tim’s undoing. At FARU, B’s are to be M’d in bed, and no place else. Using a bedpan while lying flat on one’s back is an awkward and unnatural way to “make,” as my mother-in-law Jeanne likes to say. Tim sat up, and was caught on film by the camera aimed at his roommate Aaron’s bed. (He hadn’t drawn the curtain around that side of his bed because Aaron was out of the room.) “I didn’t think it would have that much of an impact,” he told me. “But it really threw off the scientific data.” [71] How often do research subjects cheat? From skimming the posts on Guinea Pig Zero, I’d say pretty often. “Everyone cracks open their pills to see if they’re cornstarch,” says one drug study subject on the topic of supposedly blind control groups. Tim was asked to leave.

Leon had no trouble with this particular aspect of bed rest. “After the first couple times, it’s second nature. And I go… a lot . I go at least four or five times more than any subject here. By the end of three months, I’ll be at around 260….” This is one way bed-resters are different from astronauts. With bed-resters, there are no taboo interview topics.

Including sex. Earlier, Joe Neigut was showing me the shower area, a tiled room the size of a horse stall, outfitted with a waterproof gurney. “So the shower,” I said, “is their only… private time, do you know what I mean?”

“Yes…” Joe replied. Then he began talking about the new shower head, which had replaced an industrial sprayer of the type used by restaurant dishwashers. I wasn’t sure he did know what I meant, so I asked Leon. Leon confirmed that the shower was “where most of them do it.” As with astronauts in orbit, masturbation is not formally addressed in the FARU rules or orientation. Leon, being Leon, asked the unit psychologist. “I mean, if it’s something that would throw off the test or something, I wouldn’t do it.” The psychologist blushed and then gave Leon the go-ahead, leaving the logistics up to him.

In a memoir, astronaut Michael Collins relates a story of a physician back in the Apollo era who recommended regular masturbation on long missions, lest astronauts develop prostate infections. The flight surgeon for Collins’s moon mission “decided to ignore that advice,” and ignoring seems to have been the basic approach to the human sex drive ever since. It’s the same way at the Russian space agency. Cosmonaut Alexandr Laveikin told me he too had heard that lengthy abstinence could cause prostate infections, but that the space agency pretends the issue doesn’t exist. “It’s up to yourself how you will deal with it. But everybody is doing it, everybody understands. It’s nothing. My friends ask me, ‘How are you making sex in space?’ I say, ‘By hand!’” As for the logistics: “There are possibilities. And sometimes it happens automatically while you sleep. It’s natural.” John Charles told me he’d heard about the link between prostate health and “self-stim”—at NASA, there’s an abbreviation for everything—but never heard any formal discussion, pro or con, of orbital masturbation.

Or two-party sex, for that matter. Here at FARU, that is covered in the rules, though indirectly. Visitors can’t sit or lie down on the beds. “My wife didn’t mind,” jokes Leon. “That was a plus of me leaving!” I had stopped in to his room again to say good-bye. He’s been showing me family photos on his computer.

“I should probably get going. I know you’ve got…”

Leon grins. “Nothing to do?”

Sean Hayes was taking off his wet suit when I called. Hayes is a marine biologist who wrote his dissertation on harbor seal mating strategies. Since floating in water is a useful approximation of floating in zero gravity—useful enough that astronauts rehearse spacewalk duties in a giant pool—and since it is easier to get a seal expert (hell, a seal ) to expound on weightless sex than it is to get NASA going on the topic, I turned to the marine biologists.

“They’re very discreet,” [72] You would be too if your foreplay included “creaky door vocalizations” and coming to the surface to “maintain eye contact as they breathe heavily into each other’s faces.” said Hayes, of earless seals in general (as opposed to the shore-mating, circus-ball-balancing eared variety). Hayes built special equipment to spy on wild harbor seals and still never caught a glimpse of floating pinniped bliss. In its natural habitat, the spotted seal, much like the spaceman, has never been caught in the act. If you want to see how it’s done, you need to put a couple of them in a swimming pool. Hayes sent me a paper written by two Johns Hopkins researchers who did just that.

What the biologists observed confirmed what I had suspected: that when it comes to sexual intercourse, gravity is your friend. “The male spent most of his time grasping the female tightly, attempting to hold on and remain in the coital position,” the researchers wrote. He used his teeth as a third hand, biting onto the female’s back to help keep the two of them from floating apart. [73] Further evidence of the difficulties of reduced-gravity sex comes from the sea otter. To help hold the female in place, the male will typically pull the female’s head back and grab onto her nose with his teeth. “Our vets have had to do rhinoplasties on some of the females,” says Michelle Staedler, sea otter research coordinator at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. (Sex can also be traumatic for the male otter, who endures aerial pecking attacks by seagulls mistaking his erect penis for a novel ocean delicacy.) A photograph shows the blubbery couple on the bottom of the pool, attempting to counteract Newton’s Third Law: To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Take away or greatly reduce the force of gravity, and thrusting just pushes the object of one’s affections away. [74] This is no doubt the reason that even Steven “the Hunter” Hunt, the man whose pictures and video feed comprise underwatersex.net, chose to opt out of neutral buoyancy and “drop down about 30 feet to a sand bar” for his “Nude Scuba” encounter with an unnamed “bored, lonely housewife.” Says Steve: “Can you imagine all the positions you can do while weightless?” You’ll have to, because Steve runs through the same old positions you’d see back in the dive shack, only with unattractive, face-distorting scuba gear.