Saturday, May 23, 2015

Packing for Mars

"Is Mars worth it?" That is the question author Mary Roach takes on in the closing chapter of her funny and inquiring book Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Joyfully titled "Eating Your Pants," this chapter opens with the line

I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. (p. 309)

NASA Ames is on the vanguard of solving the hydra-headed problem of a manned journey to the Red Planet. One problem, of course, is quenching the thirst of Mars-bound spacefarers.  Ms. Roach's report blasts off with humor, rendezvous with the comic and, in the final chapter, splashes down, as you see, with a wee-wee bit of potty humor. Other wing-nut ideas at Ames were known to include eating discarded parts of the spacecraft on the return trip as well as hydrolyzed dirty laundry. Don't forget about those feces burgers! The recycled urine doesn't sound that bad in context. Even if the context is getting fat by eating your own leg.

In answer to her own question, Ms Roach concludes that perhaps the money could be better spent here on earth, but wonders: would it? Her closing chapter stands proudly on its own.  If you have a long reading list, you could just read this one chapter, standing with it like a cheapskate  at the stacks in your favorite bookstore, but I suggest taking it to the checkout line so you can take it home and devour the whole thing at your leisure from page one.

NASA Ames is located in the greater San Franciso Bay area, where Mary Roach resides. She is probably the only writer of popular science worth reading these days. The genre is almost exclusively rubbish and I generally refuse to read it. But Ms. Roach is the shining exception - an oblast in that desolate nation that is pop sci today and most of yesterday (alas, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan have long since abandoned us for other decompositions.)

 "Mary Roach is one of an endangered species," wrote the DENVER POST, "a science writer with a sense of humor." Her other credits include Stiff, Spook, and Bonk. How we got from those titles to the polysyllabic Packing for Mars I haven't heard her explain.

Here's another sample of her delightful sciency prose:

Space toilets operate like shop vacs; "contributions," to use Broyen's [her host on a space shuttle toilet tour] word, are guided along, or "entrained," by flowing air rather than by water and gravity, two things in short-to-nonexistent supply in an orbiting spacecraft. Plugged air holes can disable the toilet. Additionally, if you gum up the holes, it is then your responsibility to clean them out - a task Broyan understates as "arduous." (p. 268)

A spacecraft is a confining environment. Ms. Roach gives us the grand tour of isolation experiments, Mars simulators, and bed confinement, in which paid volunteers lounge in bed for months at a time so that physiologists can watch their muscles and skeletons atrophy from disuse. No autopsies are mentioned, so it seems okay to laugh. The topic of sex also comes up in these chapters, as does the menage a moi. As bluntly as NASA engineers and scientists confront peeing, pooping, and vomiting, it turns out that when it comes to the DIY, you really are pretty much on your own.  Even NASA has boundaries of embarrassment.

We learn that the greatest annoyances in space are these: other people. Human psychology hands NASA the facts in the bag that may be the hardest dots to connect all the way to Mars and back (a round trip of about three years.) You can train an astronaut to pee in diaper, and even eat it after it's steeped in that special diaper pail for the proscribed time. It may be harder to keep him from killing his snoring shipmate just three days before arrival back at the Blue Marble.

No pretend space trip would be complete without vomit. Everyone who will have the good taste to read My Irrefutable Opinion, will surely have heard about the Vomit Comet. That's the transport plane (there's actually been more than one model, as Ms. Roach explains) that flies parabolic trajectories to simulate "weightlessness." The best VC stories involve close calls with upchuck. The best of the best stories are about close calls with someone else's upchuck. The other way this airplane can make you vomit is by making you watch it suck an innocent bystander into its giant jet engine intake and spew his blood and bones all over you and the tarmac. Isn't science great!

Well, it is. We now know, Ms. Roach reports, that motion sickness is caused by sensory conflict.

"Several Spacelab crew described sudden vomiting episodes after seeing a nearby crew member floating upside down." Nothing personal. (p. 114)

She is quoting Charles Oman, a moton sickness expert at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute. Sometimes it is necessary to simulate the vomitus. The material of choice: Progresso Vegetable Soup (p. 120). That's for adults. If for some reason you need to simulate a juvenile's vomit, I suppose you use Campbell's CHUNKY Vegetable Soup.

Can we talk? Hygiene is a huge issue for space travelers. Here's Jim Lovell (p. 196) describing the reactions of Apollo hatch-openers at Pacific Ocean splashdowns:

"They'd get a whiff of the inside of that spacecraft and it smelled different than the fresh open breezes outside."

It is very important that NASA understand our odor profile. I sent them an unsolicited sample of my duckbutter for analysis, but I haven't got my results back yet, even though I included a SASE. Nevertheless, Ms. Roach gives me an idea of what to expect.

Should I stop bathing today, which I in fact I have, I will fully ripen in about two or three weeks. At that point, I will reach a sort of steady state of maximum offensiveness, but it won't get noticeably worse. How does that work? Ms. Roach refers us to Weber's Law (follow the link or, better yet, read her book.)

It actually wouldn't be so bad if you could run around naked, which I do. But your clothing becomes a bit smudged too if you can't change them five times a day as my friend's six year old daughter is wont to do. The combination of oily skin and cloth sticking to the crevices in your body can and does make an astronaut miserable.

It turns out that the actual mechanics of physically propelling a crew to Mars isn't really the hard part. One sensible solution to the lift weight problem is to send a bunch of stuff to Mars in advance of our explorers, so that they don't really have to bring all that much with them. It is all of these other bugaboos that NASA scientists fret over.

Is it worth it? NASA is always bragging of "spin-offs" from the space program; you know, like Tang, Meals Ready to Eat, GPS, and so on. Their best spin-off to date is Mary Roach. We've spent billions of dollars to get Mary, so we should treasure her. The least you could do is buy her book.

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