Mary
Roach does it again. An endorsement from the back cover of her book Packing for Mars sums up my sentiments. Not
only does she deliver the science in detail, “she’s given us the funny stuff,
the weird stuff, and the human stuff. In space, no one can hear you cackle like
an insane person, which is what I did while reading this book.” I heartily
agree!
The
book is subtitled “The Curious Science of Life in the Void”. This is what the
book is all about. Mars does make an appearance but only towards the very end.
This is appropriate because you, dear reader, would want to know exactly what
you’d be up against for a mission to Mars. The opening lines are a fantastic
preview to what the book has in store. I can do no better than quote Roach.
To the rocket scientist, you
are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will
ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory,
your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are
unpredictable. You’re inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry
about the water and oxygen and food you’ll need in space, about how much extra
fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A
solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete
or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its
structural elements don’t start to break down without gravity, and it works
just fine without sleep.
To me, you are the best thing
to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the
whole endeavor so endless intriguing…
And
intriguing it is. I have learned so many and interesting new things, that if I
were to list them all, I would have to plagiarize the entire book. Instead I
will just highlight some choice morsels that jumped out at me or made me cackle
insanely. My advice is to go read the book for yourself!
You
don’t know how much you need gravity until it isn’t there. Yes, the feeling of weightlessness
might be cool for more than a few moments, but then it gets really problematic.
While I’d previously known about issues affecting the human body (which Roach
covers in great detail), I hadn’t thought about the non-living stuff.
Interviewing astronaut Chris Hadfield, Roach learns that “even something as
simple as a fuse” has problems working in zero gravity. Also, a common problem
is overheating equipment. Without air currents and therefore no convection, “anything
that generates heat tends to overheat”. And if an astronaut doesn’t hang his or
her sleeping sack where there is good ventilation, carbon dioxide headaches
await.
Some
astronauts feel “sick as a dog” due to motion sickness, and interestingly dogs
are used in studies because they have roughly the same susceptibility as humans.
I also learned that guinea pigs and rabbits are immune to motion sickness. For
a very long time, folks thought that motion sickness was due to “lurching
stomach contents and oscillating air pressure in the gut.” It was only in 1896
that a sick-as-a-dog physician realized that it was the deaf-mutes on a
particularly rocky sea voyage who did not get seasick. We now know that a
functioning inner ear is crucial to how your body interprets balance or lack
thereof. But before this was discovered, and people thought this was all about
your stomach… well, here’s a Roach passage that got me cackling.
A variety of girdles and
belts were prescribed in Lancet articles around the time. Readers responded
with their own stomach-stabilizing activities: Singing, holding one’s breath as
the boat crests the swells, and eating pickled onions freely. The rationale
behind the last one being that it produces gas, which inflates the stomach and
steadies abdominal pressure. The singing and flatulence perhaps explain the
preponderance of deaf-mutes on ocean voyages around that time.
I
learned more than I ever wanted to know about sebum and how oily your skin is
when you don’t bathe. Yes, before they launched people into more extended trips
in space, there were “restricted-hygiene” experiments. I also learned that
apparently some people cannot smell 3-methyl-2-hexanoic acid and androsterone,
also known as the two body odor “heavies”. Roach asks a question many of us
have wondered: “Have you ever been on an elevator with someone and wondered, ‘How
can he come on here smelling like that?’ Well, he may be anosmic to odor”. I also
learned that anosmic means “genetically unable to smell”.
Roach
does not shy away from detailed discussions of body odor. Her curiosity, and
perhaps limits of being grossed out, far exceed the rest of the humankind. She
asks questions of astronauts and scientists that likely no other journalist
would ask. But the questions she asks are very important. Is having sex in zero
gravity problematic? How do you deal with personally excreting your liquid and
solid waste when there’s no gravity. It’s much harder and messier than you
think. Not only that, even the timing that signals an urge to urinate or
defecate gets messed up in weightlessness. Small wonder that a number of the
more outspoken astronauts willingly conceded strategies to reduce answering
nature’s call. Um, okay. If you’ve pondered any of these questions, and
secretly want to know the answers, Roach is your go-to.
How
do you prevent bone loss? Maybe studying hibernating bears will provide
scientists with a clue. Apparently, there are some hormones, bear parathyroid
hormone being the leading candidate, that could help the growth of new bone.
Why not the human version? Apparently in tests on rats, injecting high doses
leads to bone cancer, but the bear version “doesn’t appear to have any adverse
side effects, so keep your claws crossed that it pans out.” The other problem
has to do with where that bone loss occurs, and why even exercise still leaves
the astronaut highly vulnerable to fractures upon returning to Earth after a
long sojourn in outer space.
I
end with a stitching together of several paragraphs where Roach writes about
astronaut food (a common complaint!), and flatulence (clearly a problem in
close quarters).
[The scientist] reported on
research he had done using an “experimental bean meal” fed to volunteers who
had been rigged, via a rectal catheter, to outgas into a measurement device. He
was interested in individual differences – not just in the overall volume of
flatus but in the differing percentages of constituent gases. Owing to
differences in intestinal bacteria, half the population produces no methane.
This makes them attractive as astronauts, not because methane stinks (its
odorless), but because it’s highly flammable… [His] unique suggestion for the
NASA astronaut selection committee: “The astronaut may be selected from that
part of our population producing little or no methane or hydrogen” – hydrogen is
also explosive – “and a very low level of hydrogen sulfide and other malodorous
trace flatus constituents not yet identified…”
And,
no, the zero-gravity fart does not provide sufficient “propellant” to launch an
astronaut forward. And, yes, Roach doesn’t just do orbital flights to
experience weightlessness, she also drinks reprocessed urine in the name of
science. I can’t think of another science journalist so dedicated to her craft.
Previous
blog posts reviewing Roach books:
·
Gulp
·
Stiff
No comments:
Post a Comment