Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

To inspire future generations to take up the fight against gravity, Babson paid for stone monuments to be erected at thirteen prominent American colleges. Colby College’s “antigravity stone,” as it became known, states its goal as follows: “To remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents.” The students were differently inspired: In what became a joyous progravity rite, the antigravity stone was knocked over so many times that the college eventually relocated it to a less prominent spot. Along with the stones, Babson left the colleges small grants but did not explicitly state that the money must go toward antigravity research. Loath to sponsor “Mickey Mouse” science, Colby used the money to erect a skyway connecting two science buildings. “At least,” noted a college spokesperson, “it’s off the ground.”

The V-2’s directional system was notoriously erratic. In May 1947, a V-2 launched from White Sands Proving Ground headed south instead of north, missing downtown Juarez, Mexico, by 3 miles. The Mexican government’s response to the American bombing was admirably laid back. General Enrique Diaz Gonzales and Consul General Raul Michel met with United States officials, who issued apologies and an invitation to come to “the next rocket shoot” at White Sands. The Mexican citizenry was similarly nonchalant. “Bomb Blast Fails to Halt Spring Fiesta,” said the El Paso Times headline, noting that “many thought the explosion was a cannon fired for the opening of the fiesta.”

Some months after I visited, the flights were outsourced to the Zero G Corporation, which uses a 727. Most people just call the plane the Vomit Comet. Though NASA would like them to stop. They asked us to refer to it as the Weightless Wonder. Which pretty much makes you vomit.

I mentioned this to an Oregon Air Guardsman I met a few weeks later. He replied that this had happened to a guy he knew. “I saw pictures,” he told me, leaning forward in his seat. “He was basically leaking out the back.” If you do a Google search on “Human FOD” (Human Foreign Object Damage), you will find footage of a young airman being pulled into the intake of an A-6 jet, causing sparks to shoot out the other side but not the airman himself. He appears in footage shot later that day, awake and chatting, his head bandaged but otherwise okay. A flight surgeon told me that the trick to surviving is to have your flash-light or socket wrench precede you into the maw. The object will be chewed to pieces, shutting down the engine before your head arrives on the scene. One site recommends buying neck cords for eyeglasses, lest they be pulled off one’s face. It goes on to say that jet intake suction can be strong enough to “pull the person’s eyeballs out,” but does not recommend a product for that.

That would be a NASA Type A Mishap, as it would likely entail “injury or illness resulting in a fatality.” A “mishap” as you or I might define it (say, something involving a slippery floor), is not a mishap, not even a Type D Mishap. It is a Close Call. Nonetheless, there is paperwork: the JSC Form 1257 Close Call Report Form.

They migrate up under your ribcage, reducing your waistline in a way no diet can. One NASA researcher called it the Space Beauty Treatment. Without gravity, your hair has more body. Your breasts don’t sag. More of your body fluid migrates to your head and plumps your crow’s feet. Because blood volume sensors are in the upper body only, your system thinks you are retaining too much fluid and dumps 10 to 15 percent of your water weight. (Then again, I have also heard it called Puffy-Face Chicken-Leg Syndrome.)

A journalist’s ride in Tom Cruise’s two-seat biplane. Cruise piloted us through a run of aerobatic stunts, the last of which, a “hammerhead,” did me in. The plane had an open cockpit, and I was in the front seat, meaning that anything that might escape the “Sic Sac” that flapped in the breeze at my elbow would blow back onto Mr. Cruise’s tanned and flawless face. Cruise is a cleanly man. Disaster loomed. I managed to keep my tacos down, though barely.

Aerospace medicine cannot take credit for this one. Nineteenth-century insane asylums often prescribed a whirl in the Cox’s chair for their more turbulent patients. Wrote one physician in an 1834 report on novel psychiatric techniques: “After having committed some irrational and spiteful act, the patient is forthwith placed on the rotating chair and revolved…until he becomes quiet, apologizes, and promises improvement, or until he starts to vomit.” These were trying times for the mad. Alternate “treatments” included “surprise plunges into icy water.”

Intestinal activity has also been looked into as a warning bell for incipient nausea. One Space Shuttle astronaut wore a “bowel sound monitor” on his belly for the duration of the mission. Don’t feel bad for him; feel bad for the Air Force security guy assigned to listen to two weeks of bowel sounds to be sure no conversations including classified information had been inadvertently recorded.

Hanging around upside down is inconsiderate to your crewmates for another reason. It’s hard to understand what someone is saying when his mouth is upside down. We rely on lip-reading more than we think in everyday conversation. Astronaut Lee Morin told me that it’s very hard to read someone’s lips if he or she is tilted more than 45 degrees. Plus, he added, “you get the chin thing.” Chins look like noses. Very distracting.

On a parabolic flight, evasive maneuvers are critical. Joe McMann, who used to run NASA’s EVA Management Office, told me he was once flying with a man who threw up very abruptly. “I realized that in about three seconds, that vomit is going to come down on me in 2 G’s. I was doing all kind of motions to get out of the way.” One NASA employee I met swears double gravity makes it harder to throw up.

NASA didn’t invent Tang, but their Gemini and Apollo astronauts made it famous. (Kraft Foods invented it, in 1957.) NASA still uses Tang, despite periodic bouts of bad publicity. In 2006, terrorists mixed Tang into a homemade liquid explosive intended for use on a transatlantic flight. In the 1970s, Tang was mixed with methadone to discourage rehabbing heroin addicts from injecting it to get high. They did anyway. Consumed intravenously, Tang causes joint pain and jaundice, though fewer cavities.

Annoying, but probably less so than when the condom piece of his urine containment device slipped off, just before liftoff from the moon. Duke shrugged it off: “You know, warm stream down the left leg… and a boot full of urine.”

And how sick is that? Depends on the dog, and how he’s traveling. According to research done at McGill University in the 1940s, 19 percent of dogs cannot be made sick at all. In one experiment, sixteen dogs were taken out on a lake in rough weather. Two vomited in the truck on the way to the lake. Seven vomited in the boat, and one vomited both in the truck and again in the boat. Though the boat trip rendered these dogs “dejected and obviously miserable”—though perhaps no more so than the owners of the truck and boat—a later experiment with dogs on a large swing elicited much vomiting but “little subjective evidence that the dog finds the experience unpleasant.” Dogs are used to study human motion sickness because the two species are about equally susceptible. Guinea pigs are not used because they, along with rabbits, are among the only mammals thought to be immune to motion sickness.