Packing For Mars by Mary Roach Page A

Air Force School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas commandeered an F-94C fighter plane and fifteen volunteers and undertook a project to answer these simple questions. Though they were phrased less simply for the journal paper, which came out under the title “Physiologic Response to Subgravity: Mechanics of Nourishment and Deglutition of Solids and Liquids.”
    The captains were not reassured by what they found. New and never-before-encountered dangers presented themselves. Water in a cup became “an amoeboid mass” that would levitate from the cup and “envelop” the face. “The fluid flowed into the…sinuses as the subjects attempted to breathe. Choking—virtually a sense of drowning—was a common occurrence.” Eating was deemed equally perilous. “A number of subjects reported that pieces of food hung suspended in the oropharynx and several reported that bits of food floated up over the soft palate into the nasal passages.” Chewed food, they claimed, was drifting up the esophagus into the mouth, where it “caused the subjects to vomit and feel ill.” I would have assumed that the vomiting was due to the plane’s insane trajectory, or perhaps something having to do with zero gravity’s effect on the vestibular system, but the researchers stuck to their loopy guns and coined a new, utterly nonexistent phenomenon: Weightless Flight Regurgitation Phenomenon.
    Fast-forward five months. The three captains are now majors. They commandeer yet another F-94C and begin “Physiologic Response to Subgravity: Initiation of Micturition.” The concern was legitimate. If you counteract the pull of gravity, will the bladder still empty correctly? Based on their zero-gravity experiences with glasses of water (“exceedingly messy”), the researchers knew better than to have the men urinate into an open container. Using scrap hosing from oxygen masks and small weather balloons, they fashioned enclosed urine receptacles. To make sure everyone needed to go, the subjects were, with characteristic Air Force zeal, told to drink eight glasses of water over the course of the two hours leading up to flight time. Severe discomfort resulted, such that several of the men had to visit the head well before the plane took off. In the end, everything worked fine, and the urine flowed normally.
    Kittinger has a name for the researchers: weenies. “There were scientific papers put out all over the place by the experts that said that [zero gravity] was going to be the limit to putting man into space,” says Kittinger in his oral history. “And I just sat there and laughed my butt off, because I loved it! I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
    You can’t really blame the weenies. You have to put their concerns in the context of the times. Space and zero gravity were uncharted territory where none of the familiar rules could be assumed to apply. Over the course of history, the same sort of anxiety has appeared every time a newer, faster form of transport has come along. “When technical perfection of the steam engine made the development of railways possible, scientists were afraid that the velocity of the trains would exert harmful effects upon the human body.” The quote comes from an aviation medicine text published in 1943. (Locomotives at that time could not exceed fifteen miles per hour.) In the early 1950s, as commercial flights became available, doctors feared that flying might harm the heart and adversely affect the circulation. When a Dr. John Marbarger showed that it did not, United Airlines gratefully awarded him its Arnold D. Tuttle Award.
    Parabolic flights are still being flown by space agencies, but these days it’s not human beings they’re testing—it’s equipment. Every time NASA develops a new piece of hardware—be it a pump or a heating element or a toilet—someone has to haul it up on a plane out of Ellington Field near Houston to see what sort of problems might develop in zero gravity. Twice a