generates heat tends to overheat, because there are no convection currents in the air. Normally, hot air rises—because it’s thinner and lighter; the livelier molecules are all bouncing off each other and spreading out more than they do in cooler air. When hot air rises, cooler air flows in to fill the vacuum left behind. Without gravity, nothing is any lighter than anything else. It’s all weightless. The heated air just sits where it is, getting hotter and hotter and eventually causing damage to the equipment.
Human machinery tends to overheat for the same reason. Without fans, all the heat that exercising astronauts generate would hang around their body in a tropical miasma. As would exhaled breath. Crew members who hang their sleeping sacks in poorly ventilated spots get carbon dioxide headaches.
In the case of the Space Weld Team, it is the human machinery that’s most notably out of commission. It’s not something you can fix with a fan.
Packing for Mars
THROWING UP AND DOWN
The Astronaut’s Secret Misery
On the ceiling of the C-9 is a red numerical display of the type you see at deli counters, telling patrons which number is being served. This one is counting parabolas, twenty-seven so far. Three more and it’s over. We were told not to “go Supermanning around the cabin,” but I have to break the rules. As gravity fades out on the twenty-eighth parabola, I pull up my legs, crouch on the windowpane, and then gently uncoil, launching myself across the cabin of the plane. It’s like pushing off from the wall of a swimming pool, but the pool is empty and it’s air you’re gliding through. It’s probably the coolest moment of my entire life. But not of Pat Zerkel’s life. The Missouri space welder has been belted down in the front row of seats. Though weightless, he appears heavily burdened. A white bag hovers near his face. It is held open with both hands, like a hat carried through a crowd for tips.
“OOOooulllrr-aaghchkkk, khkkk.” Pat has been ill since the fourth parabola. At parabola number 7, the flight surgeon came over to hold him steady during the weightlessness, hoping it would help. (And to keep him, as he told me later, from “floating away helpless and vomiting everywhere.”) At parabola number 12, men in blue flight suits gave Pat a shot and helped him to the back of the plane, where he would remain for the rest of the flight.
The special evil of motion sickness, the genius of its cruelty, is that, generally speaking, it hits you when you’re up. A sunset sail on the San Francisco Bay, a child’s first roller-coaster ride, a rookie astronaut’s first trip to space.* There is no faster route from joy to misery, from yee-ha to oooulllrr-aaghchkkk.
In space, motion sickness is more than an unpleasant embarrassment. An incapacitated crew member makes for the most costly sick day in the world. An entire Soviet mission, Soyuz 10, was aborted due to motion sickness. You’d think science would have it licked by now. It’s not for want of trying.
TO FIGURE OUT how best to prevent motion sickness, you first need to figure out how best to bring it on. Aerospace research has excelled at the latter, if not the former, and perhaps nowhere more triumphantly than at the U.S. Naval Aerospace Medical Institute in Pensacola, Florida: the birthplace of the human disorientation device. In a 1962 NASA-funded study, twenty cadets agreed to be harnessed to a chair mounted on its side on a horizontal pole. Thus affixed, the men were rotated, rotisserie style, at up to thirty revolutions per minute. As a reference point, a chicken on a motorized spit typically turns at five revolutions per minute. Only eight of the twenty made it to the end of the experiment.
The motion sickness inducer of choice these days is the rotating chair.* Here the rider sits upright upon the seat, as if preparing to take dictation. A small motor causes the chair to spin on its base, conferring, at first glance, a
Human machinery tends to overheat for the same reason. Without fans, all the heat that exercising astronauts generate would hang around their body in a tropical miasma. As would exhaled breath. Crew members who hang their sleeping sacks in poorly ventilated spots get carbon dioxide headaches.
In the case of the Space Weld Team, it is the human machinery that’s most notably out of commission. It’s not something you can fix with a fan.
Packing for Mars
THROWING UP AND DOWN
The Astronaut’s Secret Misery
On the ceiling of the C-9 is a red numerical display of the type you see at deli counters, telling patrons which number is being served. This one is counting parabolas, twenty-seven so far. Three more and it’s over. We were told not to “go Supermanning around the cabin,” but I have to break the rules. As gravity fades out on the twenty-eighth parabola, I pull up my legs, crouch on the windowpane, and then gently uncoil, launching myself across the cabin of the plane. It’s like pushing off from the wall of a swimming pool, but the pool is empty and it’s air you’re gliding through. It’s probably the coolest moment of my entire life. But not of Pat Zerkel’s life. The Missouri space welder has been belted down in the front row of seats. Though weightless, he appears heavily burdened. A white bag hovers near his face. It is held open with both hands, like a hat carried through a crowd for tips.
“OOOooulllrr-aaghchkkk, khkkk.” Pat has been ill since the fourth parabola. At parabola number 7, the flight surgeon came over to hold him steady during the weightlessness, hoping it would help. (And to keep him, as he told me later, from “floating away helpless and vomiting everywhere.”) At parabola number 12, men in blue flight suits gave Pat a shot and helped him to the back of the plane, where he would remain for the rest of the flight.
The special evil of motion sickness, the genius of its cruelty, is that, generally speaking, it hits you when you’re up. A sunset sail on the San Francisco Bay, a child’s first roller-coaster ride, a rookie astronaut’s first trip to space.* There is no faster route from joy to misery, from yee-ha to oooulllrr-aaghchkkk.
In space, motion sickness is more than an unpleasant embarrassment. An incapacitated crew member makes for the most costly sick day in the world. An entire Soviet mission, Soyuz 10, was aborted due to motion sickness. You’d think science would have it licked by now. It’s not for want of trying.
TO FIGURE OUT how best to prevent motion sickness, you first need to figure out how best to bring it on. Aerospace research has excelled at the latter, if not the former, and perhaps nowhere more triumphantly than at the U.S. Naval Aerospace Medical Institute in Pensacola, Florida: the birthplace of the human disorientation device. In a 1962 NASA-funded study, twenty cadets agreed to be harnessed to a chair mounted on its side on a horizontal pole. Thus affixed, the men were rotated, rotisserie style, at up to thirty revolutions per minute. As a reference point, a chicken on a motorized spit typically turns at five revolutions per minute. Only eight of the twenty made it to the end of the experiment.
The motion sickness inducer of choice these days is the rotating chair.* Here the rider sits upright upon the seat, as if preparing to take dictation. A small motor causes the chair to spin on its base, conferring, at first glance, a
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