by Kurt Caswell
Before flight, the medical team had fitted Enos with an internal balloon catheter to prevent him from playing with his penis. In training, they had first tried an external catheter, but Enos quickly and easily removed it. Then they tried an internal catheter, but Enos pulled it out. So for his big flight, they inserted a balloon catheter, in which the catheter tube extends from a plastic balloon inside the bladder, inflated with water, the tube of which runs down through the urethra and out the penis end. To pull that out when the balloon was inflated would not only require a great deal of strength; it would also be very painful. Enos left it alone, but certainly he didn’t like it. And why did the team go to such trouble to prevent Enos from masturbating anyway? Was there some danger to masturbating in space? Would it interfere with his tasks onboard the spacecraft, or was it rather that the ground crew found it unsightly?
In flight, Enos worked the control panel, pulling this lever and then that lever in sequence, as he was trained to do. He did everything just right, but the wiring malfunction kept the shocks coming into the bottom of his feet. Zap. Zap. Zap. He worked the levers faster to get those shocks to stop. They always stopped, those shocks, when he worked the levers properly. And he was working the levers properly. It was the only thing he knew how to do, but the shocks kept coming. Zap. Zap. Zap. He hammered away at the panel. Zap. Zap. Zap. He hammered away. And then, his frustration rising, he came into awareness of another awful problem: what was this thing down his shorts? Enos reached into the folds of his flight suit, grasped the lead end of the bubble catheter, and pulled it out. The pain must have been unsurvivable, drawn deep from the middle of his body as the bubble, still inflated with water and the long tube attached, came sliding out. But then it was over, and Enos was likely filled with a pleasant sensation of relief and ease. As that feeling of pleasure overtook him, Enos did the only sensible thing he could do: he reached down to dandle himself. We know this because it was all caught on film. What we will never know for certain is whether Enos was merely rubbing the source of his pain after pulling the catheter out or on his way to finishing off the world’s first space jack.
Enos completed his first revolution of the Earth, and on the second trip around, somewhere over western Australia, the spacecraft began to tumble. The thrusters were not all working properly, and later the team would find that a stray piece of metal had clogged a fuel line. But in the moment they knew only that the spacecraft was tumbling, burning fuel erratically, and the problem was getting worse. If they let the ship make its third orbit, it might not have enough fuel to power the thrusters, stabilize the ship’s attitude, and drop it out of orbit and back into Earth’s atmosphere. With only twelve seconds remaining before Enos was committed to a third orbit, the team aborted the mission. They brought the Mercury spacecraft down, Enos still working the levers as he fell through the atmosphere, the spacecraft and capsule heating in its speed until it splashed down in the south Atlantic near Bermuda. The crew of the USS Stormes pulled it from the sea. When the hatch opened, Enos leaped into Dittmer’s arms.
The flight had lasted 3 hours, 21 minutes, and Enos had lived and worked in microgravity for 181 minutes. The team discovered that the temperature inside his capsule had peaked at 106 degrees. Enos would not have been able to tolerate that kind of heat for a third trip around. Still the mission proved that the US was ready to put its first man into orbit, and on February 20, 1962, the great John Glenn achieved that feat.
What became of Enos, the chimp who tested the hardware to make Glenn’s flight possible? He retired to the Holloman chimp colony, where about a year later he died of dysentery. As Burgess and Dubbs note in their research, there is no memorial to Enos, and after a routine necropsy his remains were probably thrown out.
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The year before American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon, the Soviet Union sent two Horsfield’s tortoises around it. In their Zond 5 spacecraft, the tortoises, along with some mealworms, wine flies, plants, seeds, and bacteria, were the first living things to make a circumlunar voyage. In the pilot seat rode a 154-pound mannequin with radiation detectors inside.
Soviet chief designer Sergei Korolev had been more interested in a crewed mission to Mars and was working on his gargantuan N-1 rocket to achieve that dream, but his government steered him to the moon. Why? Likely because in 1961 President Kennedy publicly announced America’s commitment to putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The USSR had already racked up a string of firsts in the Space Race, but its leaders wanted to bag the moon first too. Like most everything the Soviets did in those days, their moon program was a state secret. They denied working on the project until 1990, when glasnost pulled back the curtain from a great many Soviet secrets.
Korolev was charged with leading two moon programs, one to take a crewed spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth, and the other to land a crew on the surface of the moon. His death in 1966 was a major setback in those efforts, but his two teams kept on with their work. Trial after trial of Korolev’s N-1 rocket resulted in explosion and catastrophe on the launchpad or just above it. By using a smaller rocket to launch the Zond 5, the circumlunar project was going along rather well. The US would not equal that flight for another three months with Apollo 8, which flew a crew of three astronauts around the moon.
The Horsfield’s tortoise, sometimes called the Russian tortoise, makes a great aquarium pet because it is small (between five and ten inches long) and requires little food. The male Horsfield’s is known for its wild courtship display, shucking and diving with his head and biting the front legs of the female, little tortoise kisses, to get her in the mood. If she accepts him, he will mount her from behind and sound a series of high-pitched barbaric squeaks.
On the night of September 14, 1968, the tortoises went up from Baikonur, the Soviet Union’s massive spaceport in Kazakhstan. Temperatures were mild, not too hot and not too cold, and the vast and empty desert was lit by the afterglow of the cosmos. The rocket blasted off and rose into the starry sky above the desert, an upside-down candle ascending into the heavens. At the time of launch, the tortoises had already been in the spacecraft for twelve days with no food. Once in Earth orbit, the team parked the Zond 5 for a while as they made a series of system checks, then the third-stage engine fired, and the spacecraft moved onward to the moon.
On September 18 the spacecraft rounded the moon, flying 1,200 miles above its surface, and headed straight back. It did not enter orbit. An attitude control sensor had failed on the flight out, and now on the return a second sensor failed, resulting in difficulty guiding the spacecraft as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere. It would have to make what NASA called “a direct ballistic entry,” like a bullet breaking through. The ground team would not know precisely where the capsule was going to land until it came very near to landing. It splashed down in the Indian Ocean on September 21. A Soviet Academy of Sciences ship, the Borovichi, located the capsule bobbing in heavy seas and recovered it while a US Navy patrol looked on. Just what were the Soviets up to? Oh, probably just beating the Americans in the Space Race again.
The capsule arrived in Moscow on October 7. It had been a good month now since the tortoises were sealed inside without food. When the Soviet team finally opened the capsule on October 11, they found that the tortoises had lost 10 percent of their body weight, but they were generally healthy and had powerful appetites.
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In 1972 five pocket mice flew to the moon on Apollo 17, the final moon mission. Because pocket mice are desert dwellers and do not require water (they take in all the water they need from their food), they make excellent space travelers. These mice, one female and four males—affectionately called Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey by the astronauts who flew that mission—were to test the effects of high-energy radiation on the body, especially on the retina of the eyes and on the brain and skin. Each mouse had a radiation detector surgically implanted into its brain. You can imagine these de
vices like little hats on the top of their heads, transforming the mice into cyborgs.
High-energy radiation, or cosmic radiation, strikes the Earth without cease. These particles are mostly hydrogen nuclei traveling at near the speed of light. Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere slow these particles down, and they give their energy to them, so that we are perfectly safe down here on the surface. Life would not have evolved and flourished here without shielding from cosmic radiation. Outside this shield, these particles penetrate living tissue and damage or destroy it. As the Apollo moon missions were operating outside Earth’s protective shielding, they were ideal for research on the effects of cosmic radiation on travelers from Earth.
Apollo 17 (and the other Apollo flights) consisted of a three-man crew: commander Eugene Cernan and pilot and geologist Harrison Schmitt would descend to the moon’s surface, while pilot Ronald Evans would remain with the mice in the command module in orbit around the moon. The mice required nothing from the astronauts. They were set up in a sealed aluminum canister, inside of which were individual tubes, one for each mouse and one empty tube to help with ventilation. The tubes protected the mice from tumbling about too severely, but they were free to move inside the tube, where they feasted on a prepared seed mixture (about thirty grams per day each). An identical canister with five other mice would remain at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California as a control study.
Apollo 17 launched at night from Cape Canaveral on December 7, 1972, the first night launch in the US carrying astronauts. Half a million people turned out to watch as the massive Saturn V rose into the dark sky, lighting up the Indian and Banana Rivers. Designed and developed by Werner von Braun, Arthur Rudolph, and their team in Huntsville, the Saturn V is the largest, most powerful rocket ever to fly; it had to be to lift and deliver the hardware required for the moon missions. It stood taller than the Statue of Liberty, weighed 6.5 million pounds when fueled, and lifted 310,000 pounds of payload into Earth orbit. The payload alone is the equivalent of about thirty-one elephants, and pretty big ones too. Most everyone watching on-site and on television knew that Cernan, Schmitt, and Evans were on board, but few likely knew about Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey, those little four-legged beasts riding that great energy into the heavens.
Cernan and Schmitt spent three days on the moon in a region known as the Taurus-Littrow valley. They lived and worked out of the lander, Challenger, as if on a long weekend camping trip in a remote location with no atmosphere. Their primary mission was to sample lunar highland material (the lighter spots on the surface of the moon when you look at it from Earth) and investigate possible new volcanic activity (less than three billion years old). Each day they ventured out for about seven hours, driving their Lunar Roving Vehicle (which is still up there) to various locations to take measurements, collect rocks, and deploy explosive packages that, when detonated, would generate data useful in mapping the top few kilometers of the moon’s crust. On the first day Cernan caught the hammer attached to his space suit on the right rear fender of the rover and broke it. He and Schmitt fashioned a new fender out of a lunar map, duct tape, and clamps from a telescope. The mission broke a number of records that still stand, including longest duration moon landing, longest duration in lunar orbit, and largest lunar sample returned to Earth.
What were the mice doing during all this time in the command module with Evans? Eating seeds and absorbing cosmic radiation. Crew members of the previous Apollo missions had reported seeing flashes of light when they closed their eyes, usually when they put the lights out in the spacecraft for a sleep period. These flashes, or streaks of light, occurred about once every thirty seconds. The flashes were not observed on the surface of the moon but during the journey to the moon, in orbit around it, and in orbit around the Earth. While the mice collected data with the radiation detectors (dosimeters) implanted into their heads, Evans wore a specialized helmet to track cosmic rays (the Apollo Light Flash Moving Emulsion Detector). The result was that, yes, the flashes were indeed caused by cosmic rays. The next question was, were these cosmic rays harmful, especially to the retina of the eyes and to the brain? When the mice returned to Earth, researchers might find out.
After splashdown on December 19, the mice were transported aboard the USS Ticonderoga to a medical facility in Pago Pago, the territorial capital of American Samoa. In a letter to Colin Burgess, co-author of Animals in Space, Delbert Philpott, the principal investigator for the pocket mice experiment, tells the story of transporting the mice to his lab. Philpott knew that in the moist tropical air of the Pacific islands the canister might heat up and kill Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey. He would have to hurry to get them from the ship at dockside to the lab facility at Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital. Speed limits on the island were painfully slow and rigorously enforced, and in a moment of roguish genius, Philpott realized that the only vehicle on the island that could push beyond these limits was an ambulance. So off he went in an ambulance to pick up the canister. He found a note from one of the astronauts attached: “For what it’s worth, I think I hear scratching on the inside.” So they were still alive, but they wouldn’t be for long if he tarried. The ambulance took off, breaking the speed limit to get the mice to the lab where they could crack open the canister and let them out, give them water and food and air-conditioning, whatever they needed.
Later Philpott got a phone call from the press. What’s wrong with the mice? they wanted to know. They had heard the mice were transported by ambulance to a hospital. Well, nothing in fact, Philpott responded, nothing out of the ordinary. The mice were always going to end up at the hospital, because that’s where the lab is.
But the press was not too far off in their concern, because when Philpott opened the canister, he found two of the mice in good condition, two others in a weakened state, and Phooey, little Phooey, was dead. But then, Phooey, Fe, Fi, Fo, and Fum were always going to end up dead, because following examination the four remaining mice were euthanized for further study. Their bodies were preserved and flown to the Ames Center in California, where researchers concluded that high-energy radiation did damage the retinas of the mice but only minimally. The spacecraft had protected them fairly well. These findings gave Apollo astronauts a little peace of mind. In 2016, however, Florida State University physiologist Michael Delp and his team published a paper supporting findings that astronauts who flew in the Apollo missions outside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field had an increased rate of cardiovascular disease mortality of four to five times that of astronauts who did not fly at all, or who flew only into low-Earth orbit. Mice were again used in some of this research. Cosmic rays, then, are a danger to astronauts (and to mice) and will remain a major challenge for future deep-space travelers.
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Skylab (1973–79), America’s first space station, rose into orbit on a Saturn V rocket repurposed from the Apollo moon missions, the final mission of the Apollo hardware. It had been just twenty-five years since Laika became the Earth’s first space traveler, and now humans and animals were living and working in space for weeks at a time. At the end of its life, Skylab fell out of orbit and burned up in the atmosphere. It was an international event. Some people feared it would rain debris down on top of them; others wanted it to, or at least wanted to find debris scattered in their backyards. Some people wore Skylab T-shirts with a bull’s-eye as an attractant; others wore hard hats as a repellant. Skylab broke up somewhere over western Australia, and a seventeen-year-old named Stan found twenty-four pieces near his hometown of Esperance. Then the town fined NASA four hundred dollars for littering. But before all that Skylab was an orbital laboratory, the next step in America’s space program after the beauty and power of Apollo. What made Skylab really sing was the NASA Skylab Student Experiment Competition wherein a panel of National Science Teacher Association judges selected science projects to carry into space, proposed by students from all over the US.
One of the best experiments was “Web Formation in Zero Gravity,” propos
ed by seventeen-year-old Judith Miles of Lexington, Massachusetts. It was the first arachnid study in space and featured two female crowned orb-weaver spiders that became known as Arabella and Anita. The experiment tested motor response in the spiders to better understand how their central nervous systems operated in microgravity. The orb-weaver spider wants to spin webs, as without a web there is no food, and without food there is only death. So the orb-weaver spins webs, beautiful, geometrically balanced webs. If Arabella and Anita could spin such webs in space, it would indicate that their central nervous systems were operating normally. And if their nervous systems were operating normally, perhaps American astronauts’ nervous systems were too. The experiment would also say something about the role of gravity in a spider’s ability to spin webs and help determine whether spiders, and other Earth creatures, could adapt to life in space. In his analysis of the experiment, “Spider Web-building in Outer Space,” published in the Journal of Arachnology, Peter Witt and his co-authors write that the fact that “spiders always run on the underside of a web or a bridge thread, hanging down as they move, makes one aware of the important role which the use of the animal’s own weight plays in locomotion and silk production.” What would happen to a spider’s locomotion and silk production in an environment with limited gravity?
The orb-weaver is a hardy spider that can live for up to three weeks without food, as long as it gets plenty of water. It bears a distinct pattern of mottled white over its abdomen that looks a bit like a cross, hence it is sometimes called a cross spider. The female is larger than the male, and as these things sometimes go, she will eat him just after mating. She bites him, wraps him in her white silk, waits. When he is dead, she liquefies his body with her vomit and then consumes him. She will consume her web too, daily, the sticky part where her prey is caught and rendered, and then spin another to await the next good catch. She hangs head-down in the center of the web or hides in nearby foliage with one of her clawed legs resting on a signal line, and when that line jitters, she kills and feeds.