All the dirty little details of space trips
By M.G. Lord |
August 8, 2010, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
ANYONE who thinks astronauts ply a glamorous trade would do well to read Mary Roach's "Packing for Mars." The book is an often hilarious, sometimes queasy-making catalog of the strange stuff devised to permit people to survive in an environment for which their bodies are stupendously unsuited. Roach eases us into the story, with an anecdote that reveals the cultural differences among spacefaring nations. In Japan, psychologists evaluate astronaut candidates by, among other things, their ability to fold origami cranes swiftly under stress.
Soon, however, Roach has left all decorum behind. With an unflinching eye for repellent details, she launches readers into the thick of spaceflight's grossest engineering challenges: disposing of human waste, controlling body odor without washing, and containing nausea -- or, if containment fails, surviving a spacewalk with a helmet full of perilously acidic upchuck.
In a wry account, Roach herself braves motion sickness on NASA's "Vomit Comet," a C-9 transport plane modified to fly in parabolas -- the only means of experiencing weightlessness outside of orbit. Its cabin is padded, and on its upward path, passengers are pressed against the floor with a force of roughly twice their body weight. But over the parabola's crest and during the half-minute journey downward, fliers "rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave." Having taken Scop-Dex, NASA's anti-motion-sickness drug, Roach is euphoric. Other passengers -- NASA regulars call them "kills" -- are not so fortunate. Violently ill, they have had to be belted into their seats. "It's like the Rapture in here every 30 seconds," Roach declares. "Weightlessness is like heroin, or how I imagine heroin must be."
The heroin imagery, I suspect, has as much to do with the motion-sickness meds as with the microgravity. They are a potent combination of scopolamine (an anti-emetic sedative) and dextroamphetamine (a stimulant).
Quoting the astronaut Jim Lovell, Roach exposes NASA's untold sanitation woes. The Gemini 7 mission, he says, was "like spending two weeks in a latrine." Roach appears to have combed every mission transcript from the 1960s and 1970s for scatological references. The astronauts in "Packing for Mars" don't say prim things like "Houston, we have a problem." While on the moon, sitting inside the Apollo 16 lunar module with the astronaut Charlie Duke, John Young blurts: "I got the farts again. I got 'em again, Charlie. I don't know what the hell gives them to me." Roach devotes careful attention to the design of Apollo's "fecal bag," a clumsy receptacle into which germicide had to be manually massaged. In contrast, she portrays the space shuttle's suction toilet as a technological triumph, although docking with its tiny aperture can be a challenge -- requiring ground-based practice on a "Positional Trainer."
Admirers of "Stiff," Roach's droll report on the ways that science has used cadavers, will be pleased that "Packing for Mars" also contains post-mortem high jinks. The engineering team for the Orion spacecraft (a project scaled back by President Obama) couldn't gather adequate collision data from mere crash dummies, so the team used dead people. In a wonderfully slapstick scene, Roach describes the engineers' efforts to insert a freshly thawed cadaver into a spacecraft mock-up: "Think of wrestling a comatose drunk into a taxicab."
Likewise, fans of "Bonk," her look at the science of sex, will enjoy her relentless inquiry into off-planet mating. When it comes to graphic details, Roach elicits amazing confidences. NASA, she learns, doesn't expect a celibate Mars crew, but one that will "mix and match or what-ever." Roach persuades a Russian astronaut to explain ground control's reason for nixing his request for a blowup sex doll: "We would need to put it in your schedule for the day." And a bone-loss-study participant, forced to lie in bed for three months to simulate the effect of weightlessness on his skeleton, divulges where and how study participants conduct their auto-erotic lives.
As she debunks the romance of space flight, it seems there's no question Roach wouldn't ask and no subject she wouldn't broach. But Roach plays down spaceflight's greatest danger: radiation, for which no cost-efficient shielding has yet been engineered.
The strongest parts of "Packing for Mars" chart the American space effort during the cold war. Roach deals less knowingly with the situation today.
Soon, however, Roach has left all decorum behind. With an unflinching eye for repellent details, she launches readers into the thick of spaceflight's grossest engineering challenges: disposing of human waste, controlling body odor without washing, and containing nausea -- or, if containment fails, surviving a spacewalk with a helmet full of perilously acidic upchuck.
In a wry account, Roach herself braves motion sickness on NASA's "Vomit Comet," a C-9 transport plane modified to fly in parabolas -- the only means of experiencing weightlessness outside of orbit. Its cabin is padded, and on its upward path, passengers are pressed against the floor with a force of roughly twice their body weight. But over the parabola's crest and during the half-minute journey downward, fliers "rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave." Having taken Scop-Dex, NASA's anti-motion-sickness drug, Roach is euphoric. Other passengers -- NASA regulars call them "kills" -- are not so fortunate. Violently ill, they have had to be belted into their seats. "It's like the Rapture in here every 30 seconds," Roach declares. "Weightlessness is like heroin, or how I imagine heroin must be."
The heroin imagery, I suspect, has as much to do with the motion-sickness meds as with the microgravity. They are a potent combination of scopolamine (an anti-emetic sedative) and dextroamphetamine (a stimulant).
Quoting the astronaut Jim Lovell, Roach exposes NASA's untold sanitation woes. The Gemini 7 mission, he says, was "like spending two weeks in a latrine." Roach appears to have combed every mission transcript from the 1960s and 1970s for scatological references. The astronauts in "Packing for Mars" don't say prim things like "Houston, we have a problem." While on the moon, sitting inside the Apollo 16 lunar module with the astronaut Charlie Duke, John Young blurts: "I got the farts again. I got 'em again, Charlie. I don't know what the hell gives them to me." Roach devotes careful attention to the design of Apollo's "fecal bag," a clumsy receptacle into which germicide had to be manually massaged. In contrast, she portrays the space shuttle's suction toilet as a technological triumph, although docking with its tiny aperture can be a challenge -- requiring ground-based practice on a "Positional Trainer."
Admirers of "Stiff," Roach's droll report on the ways that science has used cadavers, will be pleased that "Packing for Mars" also contains post-mortem high jinks. The engineering team for the Orion spacecraft (a project scaled back by President Obama) couldn't gather adequate collision data from mere crash dummies, so the team used dead people. In a wonderfully slapstick scene, Roach describes the engineers' efforts to insert a freshly thawed cadaver into a spacecraft mock-up: "Think of wrestling a comatose drunk into a taxicab."
Likewise, fans of "Bonk," her look at the science of sex, will enjoy her relentless inquiry into off-planet mating. When it comes to graphic details, Roach elicits amazing confidences. NASA, she learns, doesn't expect a celibate Mars crew, but one that will "mix and match or what-ever." Roach persuades a Russian astronaut to explain ground control's reason for nixing his request for a blowup sex doll: "We would need to put it in your schedule for the day." And a bone-loss-study participant, forced to lie in bed for three months to simulate the effect of weightlessness on his skeleton, divulges where and how study participants conduct their auto-erotic lives.
As she debunks the romance of space flight, it seems there's no question Roach wouldn't ask and no subject she wouldn't broach. But Roach plays down spaceflight's greatest danger: radiation, for which no cost-efficient shielding has yet been engineered.
The strongest parts of "Packing for Mars" chart the American space effort during the cold war. Roach deals less knowingly with the situation today.
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