Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

The dangers of spinning were explained to me by retired Air Force colonel and master parachutist Dan Fulgham. Fulgham was Joe Kittinger’s backup for the record-setting Project Excelsior jump and a veteran escape-system tester for the U.S. Air Force and NASA. During a test of the X-20 “space plane” ejection system, Fulgham went into a flat spin and experienced centrifugal forces so strong that he could not bend his arms to his chest to pull the ripcord. “It was like I was encased in iron,” he told me. His chute opened automatically, but he came close to dying even so. Sensors clocked him spinning at 177 revolutions per minute (rpm). “We ran some monkeys on the centrifuge at Wright-Pat,” he said, referring to the Wright-Patterson Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories,, “where the force was outward on the head at about 144 rpm. The brain compressed enough into the top of the skull that it separated from the spinal cord. That should have happened to me.” He could also have died from redout, wherein blood is spun into the brain with enough force to rupture vessels. Did you see figure skater Mirai Nagasu with a bloody nose at the end of her 2010 Olympic routine? Same sort of thing. Centrifugal force spun the blood in her head outward like water in a salad spinner.

One thing Baumgartner and the Stratos team want to check today is whether the suit allows him to get into “tracking” posture: angled downward with his arms extended Superman-style in front of him. Tracking position causes the skydiver to move laterally as he falls. This is explained to me by Art Thompson, the technical director of the Red Bull Stratos Mission, who is overseeing tonight’s tests. Thompson uses a pair of folded reading glasses to demonstrate. By shifting the center of rotation, the tracking position changes a tight, level turntable spin into a larger, slower three-dimensional spiral. Thompson’s glasses track out away from his chest and arc around to the left. If that doesn’t work, the forces of the spin will trigger the release of a stabilizing chute called a drogue. The drogue will pull Baumgartner’s head upright and keep him from spinning into a redout scenario and, hopefully, save his life. (Unless it deploys prematurely, winds around his neck, and chokes him until he passes out, as Joe Kittinger’s did in an Excelsior dress rehearsal jump from 76,400 feet.)

There is no way, down on Earth, to simulate free fall in a near vacuum. The Project Excelsior team used to try by dropping anthropomorphic dummies out of high-altitude balloons. The results were worrisome. On a side note, civilians would sometimes be passing through the drop zone and head over to see what was going on. Because the project was operated in secrecy and the recovery teams behaved in a furtive, scurrying manner—and because the dummies had fused fingers and no ears or noses—rumors began to spread that a UFO carrying aliens had crashed in the scrubland outside Roswell, [82] The dummies were realistic enough to fool a group of officers’ wives who had gathered for tea at the home of Air Force General Edwin Rawlings. Without warning, a human form thudded to the ground a few hundred feet from the Rawlings’ yard. This was followed by Joe Kittinger driving up in a pickup truck and tossing it in the back and speeding away. The women didn’t think it was an alien; they thought it was an airman. Later that day Kittinger received a call informing him that Mrs. Rawlings’s guests had complained about the careless nature in which the dead “parachutist” was handled. and that the military was trying to cover it up.

On one occasion, the “alien” that people were sure they’d seen was Dan Fulgham. Fulgham and Kittinger crashed one Saturday morning as their balloon came down in a field on the outskirts of Roswell. The 800-pound gondola was freed from the balloon too early and began to tumble, coming to a stop on Fulgham’s head. When Fulgham took off his helmet, his head swelled so severely that Kittinger was moved to describe his face as “just a big blob.” Fulgham was taken to the hospital at Walker Air Force Base, which was staffed in part by civilians. I asked Fulgham if he recalls people pointing and staring as though they’d seen an alien. “I don’t know,” he said, “because the only way I could see was to put my fingers up and pry my eyelids open.” When Kittinger led Fulgham down the steps of a plane to his waiting wife, the woman asked Kittinger where her husband was. “I replied, ‘This is your husband,’ and she screamed and began to cry,” wrote Kittinger in his witness statement in the Air Force publication The Roswell Report. I saw photographs of Fulgham taken after the crash. It was weeks before he looked human again.

Thompson thinks the dummy results were misleading and that high-altitude spinning is unlikely to be a serious problem for Baumgartner. I brought up Fulgham’s near-lethal spin and Kittinger’s drogue-chute cravat. Thompson pointed out that back then people didn’t skydive for sport the way they do now. “They weren’t used to the idea of controlling body position in flight. There’s been so much advancement.” This is evident to anyone who’s spent time watching the SkyVenture staff hover and dart like hummingbirds.

But astronauts aren’t experienced skydivers like these guys. And while Baumgartner will begin his descent at zero miles per hour, jumping from a balloon that’s drifting on air currents, a person ejecting from a spacecraft during reentry would be traveling in the neighborhood of 12,000 miles per hour. It’s not a neighborhood you’d want to spend any time in.

THE RED BULL STRATOS MISSION medical director is well qualified for his post. Jon Clark was a high-altitude parachutist for the U.S. Special Forces. He’s been a flight surgeon for NASA Space Shuttle crews, and he was involved in the Columbia investigation. (Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry in February 2003; a piece of foam insulation had broken off the external tank and knocked a hole in the left wing during launch, damaging the thermal protection that the craft needed to reenter the atmosphere safely.) Clark’s team examined the remains of the crew to determine at what point in the disaster’s unfolding they had perished and how, and whether anything might have been done to save them.

Clark isn’t here in Perris today. I met him more than a year ago, up on Devon Island, where I’d gone for the lunar expedition simulations at the HMP Research Station. I heard him before I saw him. His tent was pitched next to mine, and each evening around eleven, I’d hear the pained exhalations of a middle-aged human trying to get comfortable on hard-frozen ground. The night I finally met Clark, he showed me a PowerPoint presentation about the technologies that air forces and space agencies and, lately, private companies have come up with to keep fliers and astronauts alive when things go wrong. It also covered the things that happen when those technologies fail—as Clark put it, “all the things that can kill ya.”

We sat at his desk in the medical tent. No one else was around. A wind turbine outside made a haunted droning sound. At one point, without comment, Clark handed me an STS-107 mission patch, like the one the Columbia astronauts had worn on their suits. I thanked him and set it down on the desk. It seemed like a good time to ask about his work on the Columbia investigation.

I knew from reading the Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report that the astronauts had not had their visors down when the crew compartment lost pressure. I wondered whether they might have survived had their suits been pressurized and had they been equipped with self-deploying parachutes. The closest thing to a precedent was the crash of Air Force test pilot Bill Weaver. On January 25, 1966, Weaver survived when his SR-71 Blackbird broke up around him while traveling Mach 3.2—more than three times the speed of sound. His pressure suit—and the fact that he was flying at 78,000 feet, where the air is about 3 percent as dense as the air at sea level—protected him from the friction heating and windblast that would, at lower altitudes, handily kill a person moving that fast. Columbia was traveling at Mach 17, but given the negligible density of the atmosphere at 40 miles up, the windblast was about the equivalent of a 400-miles-per-hour blast at sea level. (More on windblast shortly.) It presented what Art Thompson describes as a manageable risk. “It’s survivable,” said Clark.