HOUSTON: It sounds like the set-up for a new reality TV show – or the beginning of a bad joke. What happens when you put five Russians, a Canadian and a Japanese in isolation in a mock space station for three months?
When Moscow’s Institute of Biomedical Problems tried it, the Russians watched porn and their commander pushed the Canadian woman out of camera range to stick his tongue in her mouth. Two of the Russians got into a bloody fistfight – possibly aided by the alcohol they smuggled in. The Japanese man quit.
When Mary Roach, author of Packing for Mars: The Curious |Science of Life in the Void visited the institute, another batch of aspiring astronauts was emerging from isolation. Unfortunately, the six men had been coached not to reveal anything about their time inside.
In her new book, Roach, author of the bestsellers Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, again takes a mysterious and exotic topic and explores the nitty-gritty stuff we all wonder about but PR people don’t mention.
Obviously, Roach didn’t go to space but she got pretty close: She experienced weightlessness in parabolic flight, travelled in a simulated lunar rover in Canada’s High Arctic and drank filtered urine, declaring it “a restorative and surprisingly drinkable lunchtime beverage”. She also tested the Johnson Space Centre’s “potty cam”.
The camera is used to train astronauts to master the strangeness of waste expulsion in space, where toilets are 10cm across and the lack of gravity makes your position hard to gauge.
Urinating in zero gravity is more challenging for women than men, which is one reason the first Mercury mission was all male.
“We knew women were as good as men,” retired Air Force Colonel Dan Fulgham told Roach. The problem was that women couldn’t use the “condom-ended, in-suit urine collection device”.
As for the men, Roach reassures us that “no one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size”. To avoid embarrassment, the collection devices come in three sizes: L, XL and XXL.
In addition to poring over spaceflight transcripts, interviewing astronauts and pestering space experts, Roach got hands-on in her research. She ventured into Nasa’s altitude chamber, which simulates various levels of oxygen to study their effects on cognitive function.
After experiencing the level of oxygen available at 7.6km – where you have “two to five minutes of useful consciousness” – Roach tried to complete a list of mental tasks.
“One of the last questions was: ‘What does Nasa stand for?’ I obviously know this, but my answer reads, ‘N’.” – Bloomberg News