Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

“If the imagination is allowed to wander”—and with D.L. Worf it surely should be—astronauts could also eat their dirty clothes. Worf estimated that “a space crew of four men will, for a 90-day flight regime, dispose of approximately 120 pounds of clothing, if laundry facilities are not available.” (Thanks in large part to Sherwin Gormly, they now are.) For a three-year Mars mission, that’s 1,440 pounds of dirty wash/victuals. Worf reported that several companies were already spinning textiles from soybeans and milk proteins and that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has “prepared [textile] fibers from egg whites and chicken feathers that would be highly acceptable as food under the controlled environment of a spacecraft.” Meaning, I think, that a man who is willing to dine on used clothing is a man unlikely to balk at chicken feathers.

But why go to the added expense of shopping at USDA experimental research stations? “Keratin protein fibers such as wool and silk,” muses Worf, “could be converted to food by partial hydrolysis….”

Onboard hydrolysis is the point where astronauts start to get uncomfortable. Hydrolysis is a process by which proteins, edible if not necessarily palatable, are broken down into still edible but typically less palatable constituents. Vegetable protein, for instance, can be hydrolyzed to make MSG. Pretty much any amino acid arrangement can be hydrolyzed, including those of the recyclable that dares not speak its name. A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of feces. In the ominous words of sixties space nutritionist Emil Mrak, “The possibility of reuse must be considered.”

Sometime in the early 1990s, University of Arizona microbiologist Chuck Gerba was invited to a Martian strategy workshop whose topics included solid-waste management. Gerba told me that he recalls one of the chemists saying, “Shoot, what we could do is hydrolyze the stuff back to carbon and make patties out of it.” Whereupon the astronauts in attendance went, “We are not eating shit burgers on the way back.”

Moralewise, this brand of extreme recycling is ill advised. The current Mars thinking is to deposit caches of food ahead of time, using unmanned landers. (The strategy of leaving caches on Mars came up during an interview with some Russian cosmonauts. My interpreter Lena paused and said, “Mary, what did you say about kasha on Mars?”)

A better way to recycle astronautical by-product would be to seal it into plastic tiles and use it as shielding against cosmic radiation. Hydrocarbons are good for this. Metal spacecraft hulls are not; radiation particles break down into secondary particles as they pass through. These fragmented bits can be more dangerous than the intact primary particles. So what if you’d be, as Gerba crowed, “flying in shit!” Beats leukemia.

GORMLY AND I have been talking about psychological barriers to progress. As it turns out, we’re not the only Californians drinking treated urine this afternoon. (In solidarity, Gormly treated a batch of his own.) The citizens of Yellow, I mean Orange, County are drinking it right along with us. The difference, says Gormly, is that Orange County pumps theirs into the ground for a while before they call it drinking water again. “There is absolutely no technical justification for what they’re doing. It’s psychosocial and political,” he says. People are not ready for “toilet to tap.”

Even here at Ames. As Gormly stood in line to pay for his sandwich, the man ahead of us asked what was in the bottle. “It’s treated urine,” said Gormly, straight-faced but obviously enjoying himself. The man glanced at Gormly, looking for something that might confirm the hope that Gormly had made a joke. “No, it’s not,” he decided and walked away.

The cashier was going to be tougher. “What did you say was in the bottle?” She looked like she might be wanting to call security.

This time Gormly said, “Life support experiment.” Confronted with science, the woman backed down.

One of the things I love about manned space exploration is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn’t acceptable. And possible. It’s amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation that saves multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy? The latter, by Jim Lovell’s reckoning. “You get to know each other so well you don’t even bother turning away.” Your wife and kids have seen you on the toilet. So Frank Borman sees you. Who cares? Worth it for the prize at the bottom of the box.

When someone tells a crew of astronauts they’re going to have to drink treated sweat and urine—not only their own, but that of their crewmates and, who knows, the 1,700 mice in the pantry, they shrug and say, “No biggie.” Maybe astronauts aren’t just expensive action figures. Maybe they’re the poster boys and girls for the new environmental paradigm. As Gormly says, “Sustain-ability engineering and human spaceflight engineering are just different sides of the same technology.”

The tougher question is not “Is Mars possible?” but “Is Mars worth it?” An outside estimate of the cost of a manned mission to Mars is roughly the cost of the Iraq war to date: $500 billion. Is it similarly hard to justify? What good will come of sending humans to Mars, especially when robotic landers can do a lot of the science just as well, if not as fast? I could parrot the NASA Public Affairs Office and spit out a long list of products and technologies [98] If it’s cordless, fireproof, lightweight and strong, miniaturized, or automated, chances are good NASA has had a hand in the technology. We are talking trash compactors, bulletproof vests, high-speed wireless data transfer, implantable heart monitors, cordless power tools, artificial limbs, dustbusters, sports bras, solar panels, invisible braces, computerized insulin pumps, fire-fighters’ masks. Every now and then, earthbound applications head off in an unexpected direction: Digital lunar image analyzers allow Estée Lauder to quantify “subtleties otherwise undetectable” in the skin of women using their products, providing a basis for ludicrous wrinkle-erasing claims. Miniature electronic Apollo heat pumps spawned the Robotic Sow. “At feeding time a heat lamp simulating a sow’s body warmth is automatically turned on, and the machine emits rhythmic grunts like a mother pig summoning her piglets. As piglets scamper to their mechanical mother, a panel across the front opens to expose the row of nipples,” wrote an unnamed NASAfacts scribe, surely eliciting grunts from superiors in the NASA Public Affairs Office. spawned by aerospace innovations over the decades. Instead, I defer to the sentiments of Benjamin Franklin. Upon the occasion of history’s first manned flights—in the 1780s, aboard the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloons—someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. “What use,” he replied, “is a newborn baby?”

It might not be that hard to raise the funds. If the nations involved were to approach their respective entertainment conglomerates, an impressive hunk of funding could be raised. The more you read about Mars missions, the more you realize it’s the ultimate reality TV.

I was at a party the day the Phoenix robotic lander touched down on Mars. I asked the party’s host, Chris, if he had a computer I could use to watch the NASA TV coverage. At first it was just Chris and I watching. By the time Phoenix had plowed intact through the Martian atmosphere and was about to release its parachute for the descent, half the party was upstairs crowded around Chris’s computer. We weren’t even watching Phoenix. The images hadn’t yet arrived. (It takes about twenty minutes for signals to travel between Mars and Earth.) The camera was trained on Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was standing-room with engineers and managers, people who’d spent years working on heat shields and parachute systems and thrusters, all of which, in this final hour, could fail in a hundred different ways, each of those failures having been planned for with backup hardware and contingency software. One man stared at his computer with the fingers of both hands crossed. The touchdown signal arrived, and everyone was up on their feet making noise. Engineers bear-hugged each other so enthusiastically that they knocked their glasses crooked. Someone began passing out cigars. We all yelled too and some of us got a little choked up. It was inspiring, what these men and women had done. They flew a delicate scientific instrument more than 400 million miles to Mars and set it down as gently as a baby, exactly where they wanted it.