Packing For Mars (18 page)

Milton added that he didn’t care for Bergman. “He won a lot of awards, but nobody was looking at his movies. He’s just depressing. There’s no joy.”

I mentioned Fanny and Alexander.

“Okay, that’s probably the only one that you could watch the whole movie. The rest are terrible.”

I have to admit that I felt more joy while watching The Uranus Experiment 1 than I did watching The Seventh Seal. The film opens with a cosmonaut sitting naked on an examining table at the Russian space agency. A white adhesive EKG electrode is stuck to his chest like a nicotine patch. It is an odd touch, given that he’s there to deliver a semen sample. In the next room, jowly Russian space agency men discuss a top-secret experiment “to find out how zero G affects the sperm production.” Cut to a blonde in a snug white lab coat, a test tube dangling from her manicured fingertips. “Hello,” she says. “What a beautiful organ you have there.”

I fast-forwarded through this scene and the one at NASA (here pronounced Nassau) headquarters, wherein we learn how the agency chooses its female interns. (An aerospace degree appears unnecessary.) I stopped fast-forwarding at the point where the action moves to zero gravity. Two orbiting space shuttles, one Russian and one American, have commenced a belly-to-belly docking maneuver. Even the spacecraft are having sex.

The hatch between the two craft is barely opened and the two crews have their flight suits off. Silvia Saint is holding vertical, bobbing up and down as though taking a dip in a mild chop. Hang on. Hold the phone. Her ponytail is hanging down her back, and other things are hanging down her front. Without gravity, there should be no hangy-downy. This wasn’t shot in zero G! The actors’ lower legs are hidden behind a console; they’re just rising up and down on their toes and waving their arms in the air.

A press release for the trilogy, I note, makes reference to just a single shot “in total weightlessness,” and it’s in The Uranus Experiment 3. I get up off the couch to eject No. 2, but I can’t just now. An astronaut orgy, led by a Commander Wilson, has gone live on the giant wall screen at Mission Control. It’s being broadcast around the world. Scandal and chaos! NASA is shut down. The American president is on the phone. His suit is too big for him and he’s working from a cheap motel room. “This is the work of the KGB! I can smell it.”

Commander Wilson and Silvia Saint continue to flaunt the NASA Crew Code of Conduct in installment 3. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but Commander Wilson appears better endowed than he did in 1 and 2. Could this be the effects of weightlessness? Without gravity pulling the blood down into the lower half of the body, more of it remains in the upper half. Breasts are larger, and anecdotal information suggests penises enjoy the same plumping effect. “I had an erection so intense it was painful,” writes astronaut Mike Mullane in Riding Rockets. “I could have drilled through kryptonite.”

“I have heard others say exactly the opposite,” astronaut Roger Crouch told me, craftily leaving his own drill bit out of it. I called upon NASA physiologist John Charles to referee. Charles said that according to Buzz Aldrin, the Mercury and Gemini astronauts reported a definite lack of activity in that region. “They were going to give an award to the first man who demonstrated a response. Though how to prove it?” Charles mused. He sided with Aldrin and Crouch. And John Charles has medical science on his side. The dividing line between the part of the body that gets more fluid in zero gravity and the part that gets less is right around the diaphragm. It’s called the hydrostatic indifference point. “The male jumblies are below that point,” says Charles, “and so would seem to be drained, not engorged.”

This could have posed a challenge for The Uranus Experiment’s male cast. But it didn’t, because guess what. Nothing was shot in zero gravity. The cameraman simply filmed the ejaculating commander on his back and then flipped the image upside down so he appears to be floating. I happen to know what a “cum shot in total weightlessness” would look like. I know because I’ve read the 1972 NASA study “Some Flow Properties of Foods in Null Gravity,” and those foods included butterscotch pudding and potato soup. The paper includes the dietician’s rendition of the zero-gravity cum shot: a demonstration of how a stream of milk “rapidly forms a perfect sphere.” Commander Wilson’s butterscotch pudding does not do this.

A fond but accusatory email to Berth Milton earned no reply.

THOUGH A BIOASTRONAUTICS researcher is unlikely to use a hand job to extract a sperm sample—or to preface it with the line “Hello, what a beautiful organ you have there”—the notion of a space agency studying the effects of weightlessness on sperm is a sound one. If the point of manned space exploration is to prepare us for ever-longer missions off Earth, then space agencies will need to fund research on the effects of zero gravity on human reproduction—not intercourse, but its consequences. One legitimate reason for space agencies to be uncomfortable with astronaut sex is that no one knows what biological perils await an embryo conceived in space. Beyond the protection of Earth’s atmosphere, cosmic and solar radiation levels rise significantly. Dividing cells are extremely sensitive to irradiation, thus the risk of mutations and miscarriages rises too.

Radiation is a concern even before cells start dividing. There have been official discussions at NASA about whether female astronauts should consider cryopreserving eggs before long flights. One paper suggested lining male astronauts’ flight pants with “organ-shielding…for the testes.” (John Charles says NASA has not embraced the “extraterrestrial codpiece,” or not yet anyway.) Studies of the victims of radioactive fallout from atomic bombs in Japan during World War II suggest that short trips into space shouldn’t cause infertility. Astronauts returning from six-month missions don’t appear to have had difficulties conceiving back on Earth. But radiation risks are cumulative. The longer you’re out there, the greater the dangers. That’s why astronauts selected for a two-to-three-year Mars mission would likely be, as John Charles puts it, older folks. “They’ve already had their kids, and they’ll be dead naturally before they really develop a whole lot of cancer.”

Is mammalian conception even possible in zero gravity? Not known. In 1988, bull sperm rode a European Space Agency rocket into orbit to see how weightlessness affected their motility. The sperm moved faster and more easily in zero gravity, which seemed to suggest that weightlessness might enhance fertility. Then along came Joseph Tash and his sea urchin splooge. Tash discovered that one of the enzymes that affects sperm motility—the one that tells them to stop wriggling their tails—was activated unusually slowly. In and of itself, not a big deal. But if weightlessness delayed one enzyme’s activation, Tash cautioned, it might delay others—including, say, the enzyme that readies the sperm to deposit their DNA packets. Eggs could be tripped up, as well. British sexologist Roy Levin has speculated that, without gravity, it could be difficult or impossible for the ovum to enter and make its way along the fallopian tube.

Why not send some rats into orbit and see what happens? The Soviet space agency did. In 1979, a group of rats was launched in an unmanned biosatellite. After launch, a compartment separator automatically pulled out, allowing male rats to do the opposite. None of the females came back to earth pregnant, though there were signs that conception had taken place. “What the study suggests is that certain early phases go awry,” says April Ronca, an obstetrician/gynecologist who studied mammalian pregnancy and birth in zero gravity at NASA Ames before leaving to take a post at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. “Maybe the placenta can’t form. Maybe the uterus can’t have proper implantation. Any step along the way could be compromised by zero gravity in ways that we haven’t foreseen. We know nothing.”

Setting aside the radiation dangers, a zero-gravity pregnancy would seem, simply on an intuitive level, to be less problematic. Given that pregnant women are sometimes confined to bed rest—a popular zero-gravity analog, as we’ve seen—and that fetuses float in fluid (another zero-gravity analog), weightlessness would not, on the face of it, appear to pose a threat to the developing fetus. Ronca sent pregnant rats into space* for the final two weeks of gestation. Two days after landing, the females gave birth. (NASA stopped short of allowing birth in space, largely because of logistics. Someone would have had to build a birthing support for the females, and a nursing structure to keep the babies from floating away from the teat.) Other than some mild vestibular issues, the babies were essentially normal.

What wasn’t normal was the birth itself—even though the rats had come down from space by then. Rats who’d spent two weeks in space had fewer, and weaker, uterine contractions. In Ronca’s view, this is a dangerous difference. Contractions play an important role in a newborn’s adjustment to life outside the womb. The compressions of vaginal birth cause a huge release of stress hormones in the fetus; these are the same fight-or-flight hormones that fuel feats of extreme strength in adults. “This hormonal surge appears to be very important for getting physiological systems moving. All of a sudden a newborn has to breathe on its own, it has to figure out how to suckle from a nipple. If there aren’t enough contractions, the hormone release is smaller and the fetus has a harder time.” Studies have shown that infants born via planned C-section, with no contractions—as compared to those delivered vaginally—have a higher risk of respiratory distress and high blood pressure, a harder time expelling lung fluids, and delayed neurodevelopment. In other words, stressing an infant appears to be part of nature’s plan. (For this reason, Ronca is also not an advocate of water births.)

It surprised me that in thirty-plus years of orbiting science labs, so little work has been done. Is it institutional conservatism? Male squeamishness over obstetrical issues? Ronca thought it was more a case of priority than prudery. “We don’t know much about the effects of weightlessness on any of the body’s basic systems—bone, muscle, cardiovascular. We know even less about the brain. Reproduction just has not been high on the list.”

And now the funding is gone. NASA’s life sciences program has been pretty well gutted. I almost wrote “is dead in the water,” then caught myself. The last significant NASA mammalian biology study flew aboard Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003. The rats perished along with the crew. There was nothing anyone could do to save them, though the same cannot necessarily be said for the astronauts.

Bailing Out from Space

The Perris SkyVenture vertical wind tunnel is a hurricane in a can. Air rushes at 100-plus miles per hour through the core of a cylindrical building that resembles an air-traffic control tower. It’s probably not the tallest building in Perris—a sprawl of malls and tract homes a couple hours out from Los Angeles—but it feels like it. Up near the top, where the controllers would be sitting, a set of doors open onto the column of wind. Customers lean into the air, open their arms and legs as they fall, and are lifted off their feet. It’s the sensation of free fall with no danger or rush: skydiving with its balls removed. If it is your first visit, a staff person helps steady you in case you drift upward and panic and bounce off the walls like an air-popped kernel.

Today is Felix Baumgartner’s first visit to SkyVenture, but no one is holding on to him. Baumgartner, a photogenic forty-one-year-old Austrian, is a high-profile skydiver and BASE* jumper. You can go on YouTube and watch Baumgartner jump off the outstretched right arm of the enormous Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro or, more prosaically, the roof of the Warsaw Marriott. For most of his jumps he wears a skydiver’s jumpsuit. In the Marriott video, he’s dressed in business casual. He’s done this to pass through the lobby without arousing suspicion, but the impression it gives, as you watch him walk to the edge of the roof in his tie and dress shirt, is that jumping off buildings is just another day on the job for Felix Baumgartner.

This evening finds Baumgartner dressed like an astronaut. He has traveled to Perris this week as part of the Red Bull Stratos Mission. The mission’s aims are twofold. I’m mainly interested in the aeromedical side of it. Baumgartner is testing a modified emergency escape suit made by the David Clark Company, makers of spacesuits since the days of the Mercury space program.† Since 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 72 seconds after launch, astronauts have worn pressure suits not just while spacewalking, but during launch, reentry, and landing—the chanciest parts of a flight. Baumgartner will wear it to keep himself alive during a “space dive” from 23 miles (120,000 feet) up. (It’s not technically space—space begins at 62 miles—but it’s close; atmospheric pressure at that altitude is less than one one-hundredth of what it is at sea level.) The jump—slated for summer or fall 2010 in an undisclosed locale—will provide escape-system engineers with hard-to-come-by information about the behavior of a falling body in a pressurized suit in extremely thin air and the reactions of that body to transonic and supersonic speeds. Because there’s so little air resistance up there, Baumgartner is expected to reach 690 miles per hour, rather than the 120-miles-per-hour terminal velocity of a typical free fall at lower altitude. No one has ever bailed out in a spaceflight emergency, and it isn’t clear how best to do it safely in all phases of flight.

Baumgartner says he’s proud of the contributions he’ll be making to safer space travel, but he’s primarily interested in breaking records. The current skydiving altitude record is 102,800 feet. That record was also set by a man testing high-altitude survival gear. In 1960, in a project called Excelsior, Air Force captain Joe Kittinger stepped from an open-top steel gondola carried by a helium balloon and skydived, in a partial pressure suit, 19 miles to the ground. He was testing a multistage parachute system. In his oral history transcript on file at the New Mexico Museum of Space History, Kittinger says he broke the sound barrier while free-falling, but he did not carry the equipment needed to make the record official. Thus Baumgartner will likely also make the record books as the first human to reach supersonic speed without a jet or other conveyance.

The Stratos Mission is funded in large part by Baumgartner’s corporate sponsor, Red Bull. Sponsoring extreme athletes is Red Bull’s way of telling the world that the brand stands not just for caffeinated pop, but for, as the press releases say, “pushing limits” and “making the impossible happen.” Teenage boys with little hope of becoming pro skateboarders or record-breaking BASE jumpers can nonetheless drink the drink and feel the feeling. NASA might do well to adopt the Red Bull approach to branding and astronautics. Suddenly the man in the spacesuit is not an underpaid civil servant; he’s the ultimate extreme athlete. Red Bull knows how to make space hip.

Baumgartner looks the part. To quote an industrial cutting materials pamphlet I saw not long ago, he has very good bulk and edge-line toughness. He looks like Mark Wahlberg and sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he’s cooler than either. He’s in the wind tunnel now, holding facedown in the classic spread-eagle free-fall position. The spacesuit has been pressurized. I count ten charging red bulls. The logos appear vertically on the suit’s arms and legs, making some of the bulls appear to be executing a skydiving move called the sit-fly. Baumgartner reaches around to his front to get a feel for the placement of the ripcord. (He can’t see it, because the spacesuit prevents him from bending his neck.) Now he straightens his legs, assessing the suit’s flexibility. This adds surface area for the wind to push against, and he shoots up ten feet, and then stops, hovering above a group of onlookers like a Thanksgiving parade balloon.

Not since Joe Kittinger’s day have escape suits and emergency parachute systems been tested in high-altitude skydives. (It’s too expensive. Baumgartner will ascend in a pressurized capsule suspended below a huge—26 million cubic feet—helium balloon.) They probably should be. With so little air resistance, it’s hard to control one’s body position. Imagine holding your hand in the wind outside a car window at 60 miles per hour. By angling it slightly to present more or less surface to the wind, you can feel obvious shifts in direction and pressure. If the car were traveling 23 miles in the air, you’d feel none of that. It’s harder for skydivers—or astronauts or space tourists ejecting at high altitude—to stop a spin, and a poorly designed suit could make the situation worse. Baumgartner will need to free-fall for about 30 seconds before he gains enough speed to generate the wind force needed to control his position—or to benefit from the emergency stabilization chute he’ll carry.

The dangers of spinning were explained to me by retired Air Force colonel and master parachutist Dan Fulgham. Fulgham was Joe Kittinger’s backup for the record-setting Project Excelsior jump and a veteran escape-system tester for the U.S. Air Force and NASA. During a test of the X-20 “space plane” ejection system, Fulgham went into a flat spin and experienced centrifugal forces so strong that he could not bend his arms to his chest to pull the ripcord. “It was like I was encased in iron,” he told me. His chute opened automatically, but he came close to dying even so. Sensors clocked him spinning at 177 revolutions per minute (rpm). “We ran some monkeys on the centrifuge at Wright-Pat,” he said, referring to the Wright-Patterson Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories,, “where the force was outward on the head at about 144 rpm. The brain compressed enough into the top of the skull that it separated from the spinal cord. That should have happened to me.” He could also have died from redout, wherein blood is spun into the brain with enough force to rupture vessels. Did you see figure skater Mirai Nagasu with a bloody nose at the end of her 2010 Olympic routine? Same sort of thing. Centrifugal force spun the blood in her head outward like water in a salad spinner.

One thing Baumgartner and the Stratos team want to check today is whether the suit allows him to get into “tracking” posture: angled downward with his arms extended Superman-style in front of him. Tracking position causes the skydiver to move laterally as he falls. This is explained to me by Art Thompson, the technical director of the Red Bull Stratos Mission, who is overseeing tonight’s tests. Thompson uses a pair of folded reading glasses to demonstrate. By shifting the center of rotation, the tracking position changes a tight, level turntable spin into a larger, slower three-dimensional spiral. Thompson’s glasses track out away from his chest and arc around to the left. If that doesn’t work, the forces of the spin will trigger the release of a stabilizing chute called a drogue. The drogue will pull Baumgartner’s head upright and keep him from spinning into a redout scenario and, hopefully, save his life. (Unless it deploys prematurely, winds around his neck, and chokes him until he passes out, as Joe Kittinger’s did in an Excelsior dress rehearsal jump from 76,400 feet.)

There is no way, down on Earth, to simulate free fall in a near vacuum. The Project Excelsior team used to try by dropping anthropomorphic dummies out of high-altitude balloons. The results were worrisome. On a side note, civilians would sometimes be passing through the drop zone and head over to see what was going on. Because the project was operated in secrecy and the recovery teams behaved in a furtive, scurrying manner—and because the dummies had fused fingers and no ears or noses—rumors began to spread that a UFO carrying aliens had crashed in the scrubland outside Roswell,* and that the military was trying to cover it up.

On one occasion, the “alien” that people were sure they’d seen was Dan Fulgham. Fulgham and Kittinger crashed one Saturday morning as their balloon came down in a field on the outskirts of Roswell. The 800-pound gondola was freed from the balloon too early and began to tumble, coming to a stop on Fulgham’s head. When Fulgham took off his helmet, his head swelled so severely that Kittinger was moved to describe his face as “just a big blob.” Fulgham was taken to the hospital at Walker Air Force Base, which was staffed in part by civilians. I asked Fulgham if he recalls people pointing and staring as though they’d seen an alien. “I don’t know,” he said, “because the only way I could see was to put my fingers up and pry my eyelids open.” When Kittinger led Fulgham down the steps of a plane to his waiting wife, the woman asked Kittinger where her husband was. “I replied, ‘This is your husband,’ and she screamed and began to cry,” wrote Kittinger in his witness statement in the Air Force publication The Roswell Report. I saw photographs of Fulgham taken after the crash. It was weeks before he looked human again.

Thompson thinks the dummy results were misleading and that high-altitude spinning is unlikely to be a serious problem for Baumgartner. I brought up Fulgham’s near-lethal spin and Kittinger’s drogue-chute cravat. Thompson pointed out that back then people didn’t skydive for sport the way they do now. “They weren’t used to the idea of controlling body position in flight. There’s been so much advancement.” This is evident to anyone who’s spent time watching the SkyVenture staff hover and dart like hummingbirds.

But astronauts aren’t experienced skydivers like these guys. And while Baumgartner will begin his descent at zero miles per hour, jumping from a balloon that’s drifting on air currents, a person ejecting from a spacecraft during reentry would be traveling in the neighborhood of 12,000 miles per hour. It’s not a neighborhood you’d want to spend any time in.

THE RED BULL STRATOS MISSION medical director is well qualified for his post. Jon Clark was a high-altitude parachutist for the U.S. Special Forces. He’s been a flight surgeon for NASA Space Shuttle crews, and he was involved in the Columbia investigation. (Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry in February 2003; a piece of foam insulation had broken off the external tank and knocked a hole in the left wing during launch, damaging the thermal protection that the craft needed to reenter the atmosphere safely.) Clark’s team examined the remains of the crew to determine at what point in the disaster’s unfolding they had perished and how, and whether anything might have been done to save them.

Clark isn’t here in Perris today. I met him more than a year ago, up on Devon Island, where I’d gone for the lunar expedition simulations at the HMP Research Station. I heard him before I saw him. His tent was pitched next to mine, and each evening around eleven, I’d hear the pained exhalations of a middle-aged human trying to get comfortable on hard-frozen ground. The night I finally met Clark, he showed me a PowerPoint presentation about the technologies that air forces and space agencies and, lately, private companies have come up with to keep fliers and astronauts alive when things go wrong. It also covered the things that happen when those technologies fail—as Clark put it, “all the things that can kill ya.”

We sat at his desk in the medical tent. No one else was around. A wind turbine outside made a haunted droning sound. At one point, without comment, Clark handed me an STS-107 mission patch, like the one the Columbia astronauts had worn on their suits. I thanked him and set it down on the desk. It seemed like a good time to ask about his work on the Columbia investigation.

I knew from reading the Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report that the astronauts had not had their visors down when the crew compartment lost pressure. I wondered whether they might have survived had their suits been pressurized and had they been equipped with self-deploying parachutes. The closest thing to a precedent was the crash of Air Force test pilot Bill Weaver. On January 25, 1966, Weaver survived when his SR-71 Blackbird broke up around him while traveling Mach 3.2—more than three times the speed of sound. His pressure suit—and the fact that he was flying at 78,000 feet, where the air is about 3 percent as dense as the air at sea level—protected him from the friction heating and windblast that would, at lower altitudes, handily kill a person moving that fast. Columbia was traveling at Mach 17, but given the negligible density of the atmosphere at 40 miles up, the windblast was about the equivalent of a 400-miles-per-hour blast at sea level. (More on windblast shortly.) It presented what Art Thompson describes as a manageable risk. “It’s survivable,” said Clark.

But the Columbia astronauts faced crueler threats than windblast and thermal burns. “We had some very unusual injury patterns that were not explainable by anything that we are accustomed to,” Clark said. By “we,” he meant flight surgeons: people accustomed to brains spun off their stems and limbs snapped by windblast.

“We know how people break apart,” Clark continued. “They break on joint lines.” Like chicken. Like anyone with bones. “But this wasn’t like that. It was like they were severed, but it wasn’t from some structure cutting them up.” He spoke in a flat, quiet manner that reminded me of Agent Mulder from The X-Files. “And it couldn’t have been a blast injury, because you have to have an atmosphere to propagate a blast.”