Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

The NASA Ames simulant blew the Umpqua dump out of the water. The recipe features eight ingredients, including miso, peanut oil, psyllium, cellulose, and “dried coarsely ground vegetable matter.” It may not taste as good as the Umpqua simulant but is in every other respect a vastly superior product. The main ingredient is the fecal bacteria E. coli , accounting for—as it does in real human feces—30 percent of the weight of the material. I don’t know whether the Ames toilet division has colonies of fecal bacteria on site—other than the ones inside the gut of every living employee—or whether they are procured by mail order. Wignarajah did not answer my email.

The one feature lacking in the Ames simulant was fecal odor. To be sure future toilets’ odor control measures are living up to expectations, Wignarajah plans to add malodorous compounds to the Ames simulant. Which leads one to wonder, Why bother with a simulant? If they need something that smells like the real thing, why not use the real thing? They do, but only at the very end. “Final testing can be completed with limited experiments on real human feces.” So powerful is the taboo against contact with human excrement that NASA researchers have, in days past, run simulations with monkey or dog feces playing the role.

ON THE FRONT of Broyan’s polo shirt is a patch from International Space Station Assembly Mission ULF2. The design incorporates various facets of the ISS toilet, arranged inside an oval toilet seat. A slogan reads, Proud to Be of Service.

Broyan has good reason to be proud, as do Weinstein, Chase, Rethke, Wignarajah, and everyone they work with. A successful zero-gravity toilet is a subtle finessing of engineering, materials science, physiology, psychology, and etiquette. As with Wiggy’s simulants, if just one element is missing, things don’t come out right. And few other technical failures have the power to so reliably and drastically compromise a crew’s well-being.

It’s possible the elimination issue has had even deeper ramifications. I interviewed a retired Air Force colonel named Dan Fulgham, who had been involved in the selection of the first Mercury astronauts. Colonel Fulgham told me the excretion conundrum was the main reason female pilots weren’t considered. [88] It’s also the main reason the Russians did select females—for animal flights anyway. Training male dogs to urinate into a collection device proved extremely difficult, because cramped conditions in the capsule kept them from assuming their natural posture—lifting a leg. “We knew women were as good as men. We had female pilots all during World War II. They could fly fighters. They could fly bombers.” But they couldn’t use a condom-ended in-suit urine collection device. “The collection of body waste was a real issue logistically.” (The adult diaper was apparently not on anyone’s radar screen.) [89] According to the Diaper Evolution Time Line on disposablediaper.net, the adult diaper debuted in 1987 (in Japan). Though the general disposable diaper concept dates back to 1942. The inventor was a Swedish company—not, as you sometimes hear, NASA. Skimming the time line, it does sometimes sound as though NASA were involved. There are vacuum-dry diapers, pulpless diapers, diapers with flexible closing systems and “reduced chassis and elastic ears.” NASA’s adult diapers are COTS—a “commercial off the shelf” product. The current one is a product called Absorbencies. It is hard to imagine a worse name for a diaper, except possibly NASA’s previous commercial off-the-shelf adult diaper, Rejoice. “We were under the gun to get this thing underway,” Fulgham recalled. “So we said, ‘Let’s limit the amount of concerns we have.’”

If you read The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of 13 American Women and the Dream of Space Flight , you’ll see that the women pilots had other things working against them. Like Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who, rather than signing a letter to the director of NASA urging him to let female fighter pilots apply to become astronauts, wrote “Let’s stop this now!” across the bottom.

As mission lengths grew long enough to require a fecal strategy and crews grew to two-person, the female problem persisted. “The issue of privacy had been a big factor in NASA’s reluctance to include women as astronauts,” writes former NASA psychiatrist Patricia Santy of the Apollo-Gemini era. In Choosing the Right Stuff, Santy cites the development of the private space bathroom—“probably more than any other reason”—as the motivating factor behind NASA’s decision to allow female astronauts.

Were toilets a reason to exclude women, or an excuse? You would think that the passage of federal prohibitions on gender-based hiring discrimination would have been a more powerful impetus than a toilet door. The irony is that female astronauts are the more practical choice for spaceflight. On average, they weigh less, breathe less, and need to drink and eat less than men. Which means less oxygen, water, and food have to be launched.

Rather than keeping launch costs down by flying smaller, more compact humans, NASA chose to fly smaller, more compact pot roast and sandwiches and cake. Rarely has anything so cute been so loathed.

On March 23, 1965, a corned beef sandwich from Wolfie’s delicatessen was launched into space. This particular branch of Wolfie’s was in Cocoa Beach, Florida, not far from the Kennedy Space Center. Astronaut Wally Schirra ordered it to-go and drove it back to Kennedy, where he convinced astronaut John Young to smuggle it on board the Gemini III capsule and surprise his crewmate Gus Grissom. Two hours into the five-hour-long flight, that is what Young did. The moment did not go entirely as envisioned.

GRISSOM: Where did that come from?

YOUNG: I brought it with me. Let’s see how it tastes. Smells, doesn’t it?

GRISSOM: Yes, [and] it’s breaking up. I’m going to stick it in my pocket.

YOUNG: It was a thought, anyway.

GRISSOM: Yep.

The “corned beef sandwich incident” became ammunition for NASA detractors at congressional budget hearings later that year. In the Congressional Record for July 12, 1965, one Senator Morse, pushing for a 50 percent reduction to the proposed $5 billion NASA budget, said Young had “made a mockery” of the entire Gemini science program, with its carefully measured intakes and outputs. Someone else asked NASA administrator James Webb how he could expect to control a multibillion-dollar budget if he could not control two astronauts. Young was given a formal reprimand.

The contraband Wolfie’s sandwich violated no less than sixteen of the formal manufacturing requirements for “Beef Sandwiches, Dehydrated (Bite-sized).” The requirements cover six pages and are set forth in the ominous phrasing of biblical commandments. (“There shall be no… damp or soggy areas.” “The coating shall not chip or flake.”) Moreover, the Wolfie’s sandwich exhibited Defect #102 (“foreign odor, e.g., rancid”) and Defect #153 (“breaks when handled”), among dozens of others but hopefully excluding Defect #151, “visible bone, shell or hard tendonous material.”

Food to eat in a space capsule must be the opposite of a Wolfie’s deli sandwich. It must be lightweight. Every extra pound that NASA launches into space costs thousands of dollars in fuel needed to lift it into orbit. It must be compact. The Gemini III capsule was no bigger than the interior of a sports car. Because of the strict size and weight limits, space food technologists were preoccupied with “caloric density”: packing the most nutrition and energy into the smallest volume of food. (Polar explorers, facing similar constraints and caloric demands but lacking government research budgets, pack sticks of butter.) Even bacon had to be squeezed under a hydraulic press and made more compact (and renamed the Bacon Square).