Packing For Mars by Mary Roach Page B

year, something even more problematic gets hauled up there: college students and journalists.

Packing for Mars
    UNSTOWED
    Escaping Gravity on Board NASA’s C-9
     
    If you stumbled onto Building 993 at Ellington Field airport, you would have to stop and wonder about the things inside. The sign on the front is as evocative and preposterous as the engraved brass one that says Ministry of Silly Walks in the Monty Python sketch of the same name. This sign says REDUCED GRAVITY OFFICE. I know what is in there, but even so, I have to stand for a moment and indulge my imagination, through which coffeepots are floating and secretaries drift here and there like paper airplanes. Or better still, an organization devoted to the taking of absolutely nothing seriously.
    The real Reduced Gravity Office oversees a program whereby college and high school students compete for the chance to carry out zero-gravity research projects during a parabolic flight on a McDonnell Douglas C-9 military transport jet.* It is run by NASA with, if anything, an excess of gravity.
    I have arrived late for the safety briefing. I am signed on as the journalist for a Missouri University of Science and Technology team that is studying zero-and reduced-gravity welding. (“Reduced-gravity” refers to the situation on, say, the moon, where there is one-sixth as much gravity as on Earth, or Mars, where there’s one-third. It is NASA’s fondest dream to one day be welding on both.)
    The safety lecturer is pointing to the wing of the C-9, now parked in the middle of the hangar where we are meeting. She has long, lank brown hair and wears a maternity blouse. “There are documented instances,” she is saying, “where grown men have been pulled into the engine intake from over six feet away.”† I already know this because it’s in the Participant Handbook. The handbook uses the word ingested, as though the plane had played an active, sinister role in the event.
    Mounted on the wall behind her is a long-handled tool reminiscent of the hooks whalers used to maneuver rafts of blubber alongside the ship. A sign identifies it as a BODY RESCUE HOOK. It is for rescuing someone who is being electrocuted in such a manner that the electricity has contracted his hand muscles, making him grip the very object that is killing him. If you try to pull him away by grabbing his arm, then your hand muscles too will contract, and now you both need rescuing. The pole is nonconductive, enabling the savvy rescuer to save a life without joining the growing conga line of electrocution victims. On this same wall, a hazard sign lists the many things that can trigger accidental discharge of the building’s firefighting foam. (I once saw a video of such an event. It was like Paul Bunyan drawing a bubble bath.) Unsettlingly, “welding” is on this list.
    The dangers go on and on. Hearing protection must be worn on the tarmac. We are not allowed to wear flip-flops or sandals. “Horse-play” is forbidden.
    In my press materials, there’s a photograph of the C-9 powering through the upward climb of the parabolic arch. It is flying at an absurd angle, the way a child moves a toy plane through the air. It seems odd to be talking about the dangers of fire-retarding suds and open-toed shoes rather than the dangers of riding a jet that repeatedly pulls out of a kamikaze dive into a climb so steep that the engines shudder.
    This mix of extremes—workaday paranoia and aeronautic abandon—seems to typify the world of government-funded space travel. NASA’s buildings are plastered with warning signs for the most Tinkerbell dangers. SLIP, TRIP, AND FALL hazard signs are everywhere. Honestly: everywhere. Inside the stalls in the Johnson Space Center cafeteria bathroom, the toilet paper speaks to you from a dialogue bubble printed on the dispenser: “Ladies, don’t drop me on the floor. There, I could become a slip, trip, and fall hazard!” Wet-umbrella bag dispensers are installed at building