guessing they were fairly, as they say, “provocative,” for no astronautical beanie-wearing ensued. Oman did manage to get astronauts on one mission to agree to try out padded collars designed to discourage extraneous head movements, which they promptly removed. “It was perceived as an irritant,” Oman said ruefully.
Astronauts have to deal with the mother of all sensory conflicts: the visual reorientation illusion. This is where up, without warning, becomes down. “You were working on a task…and apparently reorienting your ‘down’ without thinking about it, and then turning away and finding that the whole room was completely cattywampus to what you thought it was,” recalls a Spacelab astronaut quoted in one of Oman’s papers. (This may have been Pat Zerkel’s problem; he told me he’d had “the distinct feeling of losing any sense of up or down.”) It happens most readily in spaces with no obvious visual clues as to which is the floor and which the ceiling or wall. The Spacelab tunnel was notorious. One astronaut found traveling through it so reliably nauseating that, he told Oman, he’d sometimes pay a visit simply to make himself “get better by vomiting.” Even just a glimpse of a fellow astronaut oriented differently from oneself could bring it on. “Several Spacelab crew described sudden vomiting episodes after seeing a nearby crew member floating upside down.”* Nothing personal.
Experts like Oman keep changing their minds about whether drugs are a good idea. In space, as at sea, recovery is a process of adaptation; if you’re under the covers in the fetal position, you’re not exposing your vestibular system to the new reality. Overdoing it, on the other hand, can mean crossing the threshold and making yourself sick. Drugs help keep astronauts out of bed, moving and going about their work. But they also confer a false sense of immunity, encouraging one to overdo it. Motion sickness drugs don’t make you immune; they simply raise the threshold for sickness.
For anyone taking a short trip, across the Channel or on the C-9, drugs are the answer. NASA gave us Scop-Dex (the dextroamphetamine counteracting the sedating effects of the scopolamine). Even then, most flights have at least one or two “kills,” as the blue flight suits call the stricken. Pat looked queasy before the parabolas even began. It’s possible he’s someone who developed a conditioned response to the sight of a vehicle—in his case, a plane—that once upon a time made him horrifically ill. People who say they “get sick just looking at a boat” are not always exaggerating. (Relaxation and counterconditioning techniques can help in these cases.) People also develop conditioned responses to the smell of vomit. “This is why motion sickness can seem contagious,” says Oman.
One thing the Pensacola research proved is that it helps to focus on something other than how you are feeling. The eight who finished rotisserating on the human disorientation device were those who had been given “constant mental arithmetic” tasks or timed button-pushing sequences to complete. Mental as opposed to written, because the last thing you want to be doing when you’re fighting off motion sickness is reading. In particular, avoid reading papers such as “Analysis of Vomitus and Contents of Gastrointestinal Tract.”
RUSTY SCHWEICKART DID everything wrong. Schweickart was an astronaut on Apollo 9, charged with testing the life-support backpack that the Apollo 11 crew would wear on their history-making stroll on the moon. Schweickart was to put it on, power it up, and head into the depressurized Lunar Module. Because he’d been sick during parabolic-training flights, he’d been exceedingly cautious the three days leading up to the spacewalk. “My whole modus operandi…” he said in his NASA oral history, “was to keep my head as still as possible and not to move around a lot.” There’s the first problem: He delayed his
Astronauts have to deal with the mother of all sensory conflicts: the visual reorientation illusion. This is where up, without warning, becomes down. “You were working on a task…and apparently reorienting your ‘down’ without thinking about it, and then turning away and finding that the whole room was completely cattywampus to what you thought it was,” recalls a Spacelab astronaut quoted in one of Oman’s papers. (This may have been Pat Zerkel’s problem; he told me he’d had “the distinct feeling of losing any sense of up or down.”) It happens most readily in spaces with no obvious visual clues as to which is the floor and which the ceiling or wall. The Spacelab tunnel was notorious. One astronaut found traveling through it so reliably nauseating that, he told Oman, he’d sometimes pay a visit simply to make himself “get better by vomiting.” Even just a glimpse of a fellow astronaut oriented differently from oneself could bring it on. “Several Spacelab crew described sudden vomiting episodes after seeing a nearby crew member floating upside down.”* Nothing personal.
Experts like Oman keep changing their minds about whether drugs are a good idea. In space, as at sea, recovery is a process of adaptation; if you’re under the covers in the fetal position, you’re not exposing your vestibular system to the new reality. Overdoing it, on the other hand, can mean crossing the threshold and making yourself sick. Drugs help keep astronauts out of bed, moving and going about their work. But they also confer a false sense of immunity, encouraging one to overdo it. Motion sickness drugs don’t make you immune; they simply raise the threshold for sickness.
For anyone taking a short trip, across the Channel or on the C-9, drugs are the answer. NASA gave us Scop-Dex (the dextroamphetamine counteracting the sedating effects of the scopolamine). Even then, most flights have at least one or two “kills,” as the blue flight suits call the stricken. Pat looked queasy before the parabolas even began. It’s possible he’s someone who developed a conditioned response to the sight of a vehicle—in his case, a plane—that once upon a time made him horrifically ill. People who say they “get sick just looking at a boat” are not always exaggerating. (Relaxation and counterconditioning techniques can help in these cases.) People also develop conditioned responses to the smell of vomit. “This is why motion sickness can seem contagious,” says Oman.
One thing the Pensacola research proved is that it helps to focus on something other than how you are feeling. The eight who finished rotisserating on the human disorientation device were those who had been given “constant mental arithmetic” tasks or timed button-pushing sequences to complete. Mental as opposed to written, because the last thing you want to be doing when you’re fighting off motion sickness is reading. In particular, avoid reading papers such as “Analysis of Vomitus and Contents of Gastrointestinal Tract.”
RUSTY SCHWEICKART DID everything wrong. Schweickart was an astronaut on Apollo 9, charged with testing the life-support backpack that the Apollo 11 crew would wear on their history-making stroll on the moon. Schweickart was to put it on, power it up, and head into the depressurized Lunar Module. Because he’d been sick during parabolic-training flights, he’d been exceedingly cautious the three days leading up to the spacewalk. “My whole modus operandi…” he said in his NASA oral history, “was to keep my head as still as possible and not to move around a lot.” There’s the first problem: He delayed his
Similar Books
