Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

Ham and Enos traveled in pressurized compartments and thus didn’t need pressurized spacesuits and helmets. Nonetheless, some prototype chimp suits had been developed, including the “SPCA Suit”—certified humane by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “To prove that a suit was safe for a man, we were going to test it on a chimp, but to prove the suit was safe for a chimp, we had to test it on a man,” U.S. Spacesuits coauthor Joe McMann said in an email. “That was a mind boggler.”

A lasting fixation for young Caroline. Three months earlier, around the time of Enos’s flight, Jackie Kennedy rented a monkey for her daughter’s first birthday party in the White House, an event widely covered by the wire services at the time. In addition to a live monkey, the party featured “jelly sandwiches,” whistles, tricycles going “up and down the ground floor of the White House,” and, hopefully, sedatives for Jackie. Caroline no doubt wanted her very own space chimp. It was a reasonable expectation, given that Nikita Khrushchev had presented her mom with one of the puppies of space dog Strelka. The puppy was a gift, but also a nose-thumb: Strelka had beaten Enos into orbit by over a year. According to Animals in Space , White House staff had the pup searched and X-rayed “to check for bugs or a possible doomsday device.”

Curiously, also situated in New Mexico. The Smokey plot does not contain the remains of the Forest Service mascot, who is a cartoon, but of a black bear cub burned in a New Mexico fire and named after the mascot. Confusion surrounds the official mascot name, which is Smokey Bear, not Smokey the Bear. Just as the official slogan of New Mexico is Land of Enchantment, not Land of Pants-Wearing-Animal Memorials.

Not that Stapp was unsentimental. The colonel composed sonnets and love poems for his wife Lillian, a ballerina with the American Ballet Theatre. They’re included in a collection of Stapp’s verse, on sale for $5 in the New Mexico Museum of Space History gift shop. Stapp didn’t read from his oeuvre at Ham’s service, though one line in particular would have fit the occasion: “If chimpanzees could talk, we would soon wish they wouldn’t.”

Ham is entered twice, initially as “Chang,” and later as “Ham” (an acronym of Holloman Aeromedical). Once the animal had been chosen as a finalist to fly, government officials rethought the name, worrying that an ape named Chang might offend the Chinese. To be on the safe side, chimps were thereafter named for Holloman staff or, in the case of Double Ugly, Miss Priss, Big Mean, and Big Ears, themselves.

Holloman moved away from this term after receiving letters from irritated etymologists. The suffix “naut” comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests “a sailor in space.” Chimponaut suggests “a chimpanzee in sailor pants.”

According to space historian Asif Siddiqi, the Soviets preferred to train dogs for space travel, because apes were too excitable, too prone to catching colds, and “more difficult to dress.” And because Soviet space program bigwig Sergei Korolev loved dogs. Both the United States and the Soviet Union built a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but only Russia has a Tomb of the Unknown Dog (outside St. Petersburg), honoring the contributions of canine research subjects.

These were not great papers. Headlines proclaimed absurdities like “Black Label Was Elected a Fine Beer” and “Science Cures Piles!”—advertisements misleadingly typeset to look like news. Not to mention the very confusing “Thieves Get Ham.” In what I first took to be an astrochimp kidnapping plot, two men pried open the rear door of a supermarket and made off with a dozen three-pound canned Rath Blackhawk hams and a half-dozen canned Wilson (clearly the inferior ham) half-pounders.

Contrary to popular lore, an astronaut’s blood does not boil if his spacesuit tears or his craft depressurizes. And though he would swell, he would not burst. The body functions as a sort of pressure suit for the blood, keeping dissolved gases in their liquid state. Only body fluids directly exposed to a vacuum actually boil. (As happened to a 1965 NASA test subject in a leaky spacesuit in an altitude chamber. The last thing he recalled before losing consciousness was the sensation of his saliva bubbling on his tongue.) Also, current EVA suits are designed to compensate for tears or leaks by blasting in air at far greater pressure. Bottom line: Provided he has an oxygen supply, an astronaut in a spacecraft depressurization has about two minutes to figure out what’s wrong and set it right. Beyond that he’s in trouble. This is known from experiments in vacuum chambers that would, if you knew the details, make your blood boil.

Or not at all, if the 2010 NASA budget passes as is.

Up until Obama’s first NASA budget appeared, in February 2010, the moon base was slated to be built sometime in the 2020s. That program (Constellation) has been cut, and now we’re headed to a near-Earth asteroid and on to Mars. Then again, Congress has yet to approve the budget plan, so it’s hard to know for sure, at the time of this writing, just where we’ll end up hauling our rovers next.

Six months after our traverse, NASA, recognizing a public relations opportunity, will change the name Small Pressurized Rover to Lunar Electric Rover. It was originally called the Flexible Roving Expedition Device, or FRED, until NASA Headquarters nixed it. They nixed it for the same reason they took the word Excursion out of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module—it sounded frivolous. A larger mobile lunar habitat prototype called the All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer (ATHLETE) recently squeaked past the NASA fun censor. Whoever he is, he’s very thorough. I skimmed the entire 53-page NASA acronym list and failed to find anything amusing. (Business Manager came closest.)

A meteoroid is a bit of debris, usually planetary, hurtling through the solar system. If it’s bigger than a boulder, then it’s an asteroid. If any part of a meteoroid makes it to Earth intact rather than burning up as it barrels through Earth’s atmosphere, then it’s a meteorite. A meteoroid’s visible path through the atmosphere is a meteor. An astronaut struck by a meteoroid is a goner. A meteoroid the size of a tomato seed can pierce a spacesuit.

NASA buys it by the ton, but you can buy it by the kilogram ($28). Go to the eNasco educational products Web site, but not if you’re squeamish. “Save on Lab Time!” says the promo copy for skinned cats. The eNasco dissection specimen section offers ten different skinned cat products, proving that there is, in fact, more than one way.

And you will wear a diaper. These days it’s called a maximum absorbent garment. The MAG replaces the DACT (disposable absorbent containment trunk), which had less (not enough) capacity. In the Apollo era, astronauts wore both a pull-up fecal containment device (FCD) and a condom-attached urine containment device. Let’s let astronaut Charlie Duke, providing commentary for NASA’s Apollo 16 Lunar Surface Journal, explain the system: “[The FCD] was like a ladies’ girdle you pulled on and it cut out in the front so that your penis could hang out so you could get on the UCD… I think there was maybe a jockstrap that went on, also, and it had a hole for your penis, and then you rolled on your UCD and then you buttoned that or snapped it to the jockstrap.”