Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

Chapter 5 covers Roach’s experience on a C-9 microgravity aircraft as part of NASA’s Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program. Roach participated in the flight as a journalist covering a student research team from Missouri University of Science and Technology. She opens the chapter with several puns on the name of Ellington Field’s “Reduced Gravity Office”—the nondescript word “office” contrasts comically with the extreme levels of precaution at the facility. Signage and safety tips about toilet paper, blind corners, and wet umbrellas plaster the building walls; Roach surmises that this level of attention to preventing minor accidents is a projection of the real fear of serious injuries.

Roach has dreamed of experiencing weightlessness, and her excitement outweighs any fears of taking a parabolic flight. The student researchers that she accompanies are testing the strength of materials welded in space. As students secure their equipment inside the hollowed-out aircraft, one of the welded table legs ironically breaks before they have even left the ground. The mishap briefly dampens Roach’s spirit, but the entire team are soon in the air after a repair.

The parabolic flight simulates zero gravity and doubled gravity, and Roach experiences alternating sensations of floating freely and not being able to lift her head from the ground. She describes the feeling of weightlessness as freeing and euphoric—as an absence of something that she didn’t realize was even there. She compares the exhilaration to what she imagines heroin to be like, jotting down “WOO” and “yippee” in her notebook instead of substantial notes. However, some astronauts find that the thrill of weightlessness eventually wanes and morphs into annoyance. Items easily get lost, everything needs Velcro, and overheating and power surges are common reasons for equipment failure.

Recalling that one student from the C-9 parabolic flight needed sedation after bouts of nausea, Roach details NASA’s attempts to solve the problems of motion sickness and vomiting in space.

To study the cause of motion sickness, in 1962 NASA funded a disorientation experiment in which scientists strapped test subjects to chairs and rotated them on their side—a position Roach compares to that of a high-speed rotisserie chicken. Another experiment involved tilting one’s head from side to side on a rotating chair. The scientists learned that motion sickness occurs when the inner ear’s otoliths (tiny calcium carbonate particles that balance on cilia) detect movements that the eyes do not—the conflict creates nausea. The phenomenon is more pronounced in weightlessness, as otoliths float about and bounce around with every head turn. The discovery of the cause of motion sickness led NASA to investigate possible solutions. Some studies recorded bowel sounds and measured sweat levels as indicators of impending nausea, while other failed trials used padded collars or beanies with alarms to keep the head from unnecessary jostling. In addition to motion sickness, astronauts must contend with the corollary experience of “visual reorientation illusion” (113), where the mind confuses up and down positions. Experts debate the effectiveness of drugs to treat motion sickness, since medication suppresses the body’s ability to detect thresholds.

In the event an astronaut does vomit inside the helmet, the spacesuit has a system of vents that would prevent blockage, though aspirating vomit or getting it in one’s eyes presents a health hazard. Roach comments that vomiting is a natural reaction and no cause for embarrassment. She claims that among those in the field, it is general knowledge that some 50 to 70 percent of astronauts get motion sickness, yet astronauts are reluctant to admit when they experience nausea due to a stigma that associates vomiting with weakness. For instance, the first civilian astronaut, a senator, declined learning biofeedback to regulate motion sickness and disregarded the technique as “California meditation stuff” (121).

At the end of the chapter, Roach adds that astronauts may also struggle with landing vertigo when they return to Earth, as their inner ear adjusts to the change in gravity. Additionally, the prolonged excess gravity astronauts experience during liftoff and reentry also poses a danger to the body by jeopardizing breathing and blood circulation.