Mary Roach - Packing for Mars

In this case, to keep the island more Mars/moon–like. (Biowaste encourages plant growth.) Fourteen 50-gallon drums of urine are flown off the island each season. Men go directly into the drum via a funnel. Women squat over a pitcher first. It’s one of those clear plastic pitchers they use for beer at campus pubs. Pouring it out was like an entire Saturday night of drinking condensed in a single gesture. Solid waste happens on a toilet seat mounted over a plastic bag that you then take away and drop in the trash. You are your own dog.

Borman could be a bit crusty. As Lovell put it, “Two weeks with Frank Borman anyplace is a trial.”

That is why some deodorant and antiperspirant efficacy tests include an “emotional collection.” A group of subjects sit with pads under their arms to absorb secretions while being forced to sing karaoke or speak in front of a group. The pads are then weighed and the armpit smells rated by professional odor judges. I was once, as part of an article on body odor, invited to be a guest judge. “Take little bunny sniffs,” I was told.

Because of all the sweat and dead skin (calluses), the bottoms of the feet and the spaces between the toes are a Mecca for bacteria—high numbers, much more variety. One class of dead-skin-eating bacteria, L. brevis , excretes compounds that smell like ripe cheese. Though it may be technically more accurate to say that certain ripe cheeses smell like feet: Cheesemakers routinely inoculate certain of their creations with L. brevis .

And possibly deer. A 1994 issue of Crop Protection details the failed but entertaining efforts of botanists at the University of Pennsylvania to deter white-tailed deer by dousing an assortment of ornamental shrubbery with 3-methyl-2-hexanoic acid. Which raises the unusual marketing question, Will a homeowner abide a rhododendron that smells like BO?

A.k.a., shed skin. Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defines scurf as “a branny substance of epidermic origin”—an evocative pairing of dander and breakfast cereal. Try new Kellogg’s Dandruff Flakes!

Roughly 4.2 milliliters per day, according to a table in a paper by Mattoni and Sullivan, entitled “Synopsis of Weight and Volume of Waste Product Generation from All Sources in the Closed Environment of a High Performance Manned Space Vehicle.” That is just under a teaspoon of skin oil, an equivalency made with the help of a recipe conversion table. Employed in tandem, the two tables would enable the deranged or geographically isolated baker to substitute sebum for vegetable shortening or calculate the equivalent of a cup of flour in desquamated epithelium.

Astronauts’ families take turns picking it. In the Gemini era, Mission Control would pipe in music, not always in a pleasing manner, as this Gemini VII exchange suggests:

CAP COM [capsule communicator]: …How do you like the music?

COMMAND PILOT FRANK BORMAN: We turned it off. We got a little busy there and we turned if off for a while.

CAP COM: Okay. They’ve got some good Hawaiian stuff coming up to you.

An unusual display of syllabic restraint in journal naming. Only Gut earns my higher praise. Take note, American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics , Official Publication of the American Association of Orthodontists, Its Constituent Societies, and the American Board of Orthodontics .

I had to look up BAMF on Google. It stands for Bad Ass Motherfucker, but don’t tell that to the Berkeley Avenue Mennonite Fellowship or the Builders’ Association of Metropolitan Flint.

Like all astronaut activities, interviews are exactingly planned and timed. They are like tiny space missions. Whitson’s and mine was aborted and rescheduled twice. When the moment finally arrived, my call was relayed via an operator to a booth where Whitson would be sitting. Time passed. “I’m not getting an answer,” the operator said. “What time are you scheduled for?” I told her 12:30. “Okay, you’re calling early,” she said. “I’ve got 12:28 P.M.” You’ll hear the NASA TV commentator say things like “The sleep shift is scheduled to start at 1:59 A.M. Central Time. Crew due to awaken at 9:58 A.M. Central Time.” Sleeping pills? You betcha.

You often read that astronauts’ skulls get thicker in zero G. I assumed that this was because the extra fluid in the top half of the body plumps the brain, and that the body responds to the increased pressure by thickening the cranium—just as it responds to increased blood pressure by thickening the arteries. “Interesting hypothesis,” said NASA physiologist John Charles. Then he told me it’s not true that living in space makes astronauts’ skulls thicker. Or not literally anyway. Charles says they do routinely develop the “space stupids”—cognitive impairment brought on by “sleep deprivation, over-scheduled time-lines, and all the other indignities we heap onto astronauts.”

How often do research subjects cheat? From skimming the posts on Guinea Pig Zero, I’d say pretty often. “Everyone cracks open their pills to see if they’re cornstarch,” says one drug study subject on the topic of supposedly blind control groups.

You would be too if your foreplay included “creaky door vocalizations” and coming to the surface to “maintain eye contact as they breathe heavily into each other’s faces.”

Further evidence of the difficulties of reduced-gravity sex comes from the sea otter. To help hold the female in place, the male will typically pull the female’s head back and grab onto her nose with his teeth. “Our vets have had to do rhinoplasties on some of the females,” says Michelle Staedler, sea otter research coordinator at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. (Sex can also be traumatic for the male otter, who endures aerial pecking attacks by seagulls mistaking his erect penis for a novel ocean delicacy.)

This is no doubt the reason that even Steven “the Hunter” Hunt, the man whose pictures and video feed comprise underwatersex.net, chose to opt out of neutral buoyancy and “drop down about 30 feet to a sand bar” for his “Nude Scuba” encounter with an unnamed “bored, lonely housewife.” Says Steve: “Can you imagine all the positions you can do while weightless?” You’ll have to, because Steve runs through the same old positions you’d see back in the dive shack, only with unattractive, face-distorting scuba gear.

They can literally grasp things—including, on occasion, people who have paid to swim with the dolphins. “There have been cases in captivity when males…have gripped the person around the ankle with their penis,” said dolphin researcher Janet Mann. Mann said male dolphins have quietly been eliminated from most of the programs for this reason. If the Web site Sex with Dolphins is to be believed, females do it too. “She suddenly decided to grab my foot with her genital slit,” writes the author, going on to explain that females not only have muscular vaginal orifices but can use these muscles to “manipulate objects and carry them.” What a boon for the limbless! I wanted to ask Mann what objects dolphins have been seen to carry with their genitals, but she had by this point begun dodging my emails.