Packing For Mars by Mary Roach

dive and heads back up and repeats the process, over and over until his fuel runs low, science will have an accumulation of several minutes of weightlessness to work with—at a fraction of the cost of building and launching rockets. These roller-coaster zero-gravity flights are still flown today by space agencies to test equipment or train astronauts or humor authors who have pestered them ceaselessly for months (more on this shortly).
    Here the scene shifts to South America. The Habers had a colleague named Harald von Beckh, who lived in Buenos Aires after the war. Von Beckh knew from the V-2 and Aerobee rocket flights that weightlessness posed no grave threat to survival, but he wondered whether it would disorient a pilot or otherwise compromise his ability to fly a craft. So naturally, von Beckh went out and got some snake-necked turtles. Hydromedusa tectifera are, like post-war Nazis, native to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. These are turtles that hunt like snakes, coiling their overlong necks into an S and then unwinding in bullet-fast strikes that rarely miss. That is what von Beckh planned to test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved “slowly and insecurely” and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an “ovoid cupola.” Who could eat?
    Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading “Experiments with Human Subjects”—a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased—von Beckh reports on the efforts of the pilots to mark X’s inside small boxes during regular and weightless flight. During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles.
    The following year, von Beckh was recruited by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force Base—home of Dave Simons and Project Albert. Simons was keen to continue his zero-gravity research using the newfangled parabolic flight technique. All he needed was a willing pilot. Only one man volunteered. Joe Kittinger “made a career” out of volunteering. “You can’t get any real fun things unless you volunteer,” says Kittinger in an oral history on file at the New Mexico Museum of Space History. (Kittinger has a unique sense of fun. In 1960, he volunteered to make a parachute jump into the near-airless void 19 miles above the Earth, to test survival equipment for extremely high-altitude bailouts. More on this in chapter 13.)
    Kittinger would take the plane up at a 45-degree angle, and then arc it over and plunge back down, all the while watching a golf ball suspended on a string from the cockpit ceiling. “That was our instrumentation!” Kittinger told me. When the plane achieved zero gravity, the golf ball started floating. So did Kittinger, of course, but he was strapped in his seat. Meanwhile, back behind the cockpit, a Salvador Dali photo had come to life. Von Beckh and Simons were studying, among other things, cats’ ability to right themselves in zero gravity. “The guys would take them and just let them float,” recalled Kittinger. “Here would come a cat and I would push the cat back. A couple of times we had a monkey come floating up to the cockpit. And I would take the monkey and I would push it back.”
    When it became clear that a few seconds of weightlessness was more entertaining than it was troublesome, the aerospace medicine crowd began to apply their boundless nervous energy to the scenario of longer-duration missions. Would an astronaut on a three-or four-day orbit of Earth or a trip to the moon be able to eat, or did he need gravity to help the food along? How would he drink water? Does a straw work in zero gravity? Late in 1958, three captains at the U.S.