These are the themes of the best new science fantasy and also the working problems of the new generation of scientists. The first set of answers will derive, it seems, from studies now being made of man’s chances for surviving out in space.
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MAN IN SPACE
by Daniel Lang
In the welter of wordage published during 1958 about the prospects of manned space flight, very little was at once comprehending, comprehensive, and comprehensible. Mr. Lang’s article combines these virtues with the authoritative documentation and stylistic excellence for which his reportage and the pages of The New Yorker are both known—and a certain skepticism of viewpoint is, I expect, a healthy thing.
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In spite of all the serious investigation that our scientists and engineers are devoting to the possibilities of space travel, the would-be voyager to Mars or Venus need not pack his bags quite yet—or so I have gathered after looking into the progress of what is known to researchers, in and out of the government, as “the man-in-space program.” One thing that is holding up the program is the machine; engineers have been turning out better and better experimental rocket planes, but they are by no means ready to launch a really spaceworthy ship—a passenger-carrying vehicle capable of making its way through the earth’s atmosphere into outer space and coming back to terra firma, itself and its cargo reasonably intact. Formidable as this part of the job is, however, most of the experts assume that, sooner or later, it will be accomplished; all that is required is technological improvement. Many scientists are a good deal more puzzled, I have discovered, over what to do about the one element in space travel that is technologically unimprovable. This element is none other than the space traveler—man.
Man’s age-old physical and psychological needs and frailties, it seems—”the human factors,” as man-in-space experts call them—make him a rather poor risk for space voyaging, and some of the scientists I have talked to, or whose treatises I have read, have expressed mild disappointment with man for not coming up to the astronautical mark. “Man’s functional system cannot be fooled by gimmicks and gadgets,” a comprehensive report on space flight got up for the Air University Command and Staff School, in Alabama, remarks. “He cannot be altered dimensionally, biologically or chemically. None of the conditions necessary to sustain his life-cycle functions can be compromised to any great extent.” Wherever man is and whatever his circumstances, the report says, in effect, he simply must have many of the things that sustain him here below—air, food, and a certain amount of intellectual and physical activity. “Encapsulated atmosphere is what we’re after,” one scientist told me, and went on to explain that the space traveler— whether wearing a space suit in an airless cabin or, as most scientists would prefer, wearing ordinary clothes in a pressurized cabin—would have to have enough of the familiar earthly environment to see him through his voyage. “A spaceship,” this scientist said, “must, you see, be a ‘terrella,’ a little earth.”
The human factors in space travel are being studied on a broad front, and at every level from the immediately practical to the highly theoretical, by special groups set up within our armed services, universities, and private aircraft companies—groups like the Space Biology Branch of the Air Force Aero Medical Field Laboratory, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the Human Factors Engineering Group of the Convair Division of General Dynamics Corporation, in San Diego, California. The assignments these groups have taken on are myriad, and practically every one of them necessarily involves guesswork, or what one man calls “the vagueness of imagination,” to a degree that most scientists abhor. Nonetheless, the job is being tackled, in its various aspects, by biochemists (who are concerned with the space traveler’s physical care and feeding), radiobiologists (who worry about the effects of cosmic rays in outer space), sanitary engineers (who are figuring out how to dispose of wastes and insure the cleanliness of the terrella), anthropometrists (who measure the functional capacities of man), astrobotanists (who are attempting to discover what sort of food, if any, the space man might find on other celestial bodies), and psychologists (who tend to doubt whether a man can roam extraterrestrially for years, months, or even weeks without going batty). Physiologists, chemists, pharmacologists, physicists, and astronomers are also making contributions to the man-in-space program, as are sociologists, whose responsibilities would seem to be remote at the moment but who foresee all kinds of catastrophic dilemmas in the future. “What will happen to a man’s wife and children when he embarks on a prolonged space trip, perhaps for years, with every chance of not returning?” one scholar asked not long ago, in a symposium called “Man in Space: A Tool and Program for the Study of Social Change,” which was held in the sober halls of the New York Academy of Sciences. “How long a separation in space would justify divorce, and if he should return, how will the [possible] Enoch Arden triangle be handled?” At the same symposium, Professor Harold D. Lasswell, of the Yale Department of Political Science, envisioned an even more drastic jolting of the status quo. He asked his learned audience to imagine what might happen if a spaceship’s crew landed on a celestial body whose inhabitants were not only more than a match for us technologically but had created a more peaceable political and social order. “Assume,” he said, “that the explorers are convinced of the stability and decency of the . . . system of public order that exists alongside superlative achievements in science and engineering. Suppose that they are convinced of the militaristic disunity and scientific backwardness of earth. Is it not conceivable that the members of the expedition will voluntarily assist in a police action to conquer and unify earth as a probationary colony of the new order?”
Before the space traveler can return to earth, with or without a police force at his back, he must go into space, and psychologists are now engaged in a sharp debate as to just what type of person would be best suited to embark on a long extraterrestrial trip. Addressing a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Indianapolis a few months ago, Dr. Donald N. Michael, a psychologist who has been doing research on the effects of automation, estimated that a journey to Mars might take about two and a half years, and concluded that our culture was unlikely to produce anyone with that much patience; good space men, he said, might be found in “cultures less time-oriented and more sedentary”—in a Buddhist monastery, perhaps, or among the Eskimos. Reasoning along other lines, Dr. Philip Solomon, chief psychiatrist at the Boston City Hospital, has come out for extrovert space voyagers. Like other medical men in all parts of the country, Dr. Solomon has been conducting what are called “sensory-deprivation experiments”—specifically, confining volunteers of various personality types in iron lungs to see how they bear up in isolation—and in a recent issue of Research Reviews, a monthly put out by the Office of Naval Research, he writes: “It appears that the self-centered introvert, whom you might expect to be quite content in the respirator, holed up in his own little world, so to speak, is precisely the one who breaks down soonest; whereas the extrovert, who is more strongly oriented to people and the outside world, can stand being shut off, if he has to, more readily. Sensory deprivation places a strain on the individual’s hold on external reality, and it may be that those who are jeopardized most by it are those whose ties to reality are weakest.”
Women have notoriously strong ties to reality, and for this reason, among others, some experts are convinced that they would fare better than men on a pioneering journey through space in cramped quarters. Another reason is that women live longer than men, and some of the envisioned journeys would take an extended period of time; still another is that women could probably weather long periods of loneliness better, because they are more content to while away the hours dwelling on trivia. Writing in the American Psychologist a couple of months ago, Dr. Harold B. Pepinsky, a psychology professor at Ohio State University, came up with the notion that the ideal space voyager would be a female midget with a Ph.D. in physics
. When I asked a physiologist what he thought of this idea, he not only supported it heartily but embellished it. “It would be good if this midget woman Ph.D. came from the Andes,” he said. “We’re going to have to duplicate the traveler’s normal atmosphere in the ship, and it’s easier to duplicate a rarefied fourteen-thousand-foot atmosphere than a dense sea-level atmosphere.” The cards, though, seem to be stacked against any woman’s blasting off ahead of a man. One important officer, Lieutenant Colonel George R. Steinkamp, of the Space Medicine Division at the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, in San Antonio, Texas, said recently, “It’s just plain not American. We put women on a pedestal, and they belong there.” The pedestal apparently should be anchored firmly to the ground.
As for the Ph.D. in physics, I gathered that while it would definitely be an asset, some of the experts are worried lest a physicist might not know all he should about astronomy. An astronomer, on the other hand, might be weak in meteorology, and a meteorologist might well bungle some vital engineering problem. An engineer might know how to operate and maintain his ship but would probably not be able to cope with any illness that happened to befall him. The possibility of illness in outer space is receiving its share of attention, to judge by a paper that Drs. Donald W. Conover and Eugenia Kemp, of Convair’s Human Factors Engineering Group, submitted to the American Rocket Society several months ago, in Los Angeles. “Space men and women must have almost perfect health in order to avoid bringing disaster on the flight by physical incapacity,” they declared, and went on to say that even these paragons of fitness should “be trained in self-medication and, particularly, the use of antibiotics.” From that point of view, the ideal traveler would seem to be a physician, but Professor Lasswell, the Yale political scientist, has a different idea. An anthropologist-linguist, he feels, would make a good space traveler, especially when it came to communicating with the inhabitants of remote celestial bodies; other candidates the Professor has nominated include individuals gifted with extrasensory perception—perhaps members of the Society for Psychical Research, Western parapsychologists, or Eastern mystics.
Naturally, all these difficulties would be cleared up if the vehicle carried a physicist, an astronomer, a meteorologist, an engineer, a physician, and the rest, but at the moment it seems likely that the first spaceships will carry a crew of only one, because present computations show that half a ton of fuel and metal must be provided for every pound of cargo. Still, some farsighted psychologists are pondering the intangibles that would make a large spaceship a happy one. The crew members, living close to disaster at all times and needing all their resources to forestall it, will have to be able to get along with one another, and various experts have told me that this state of affairs will not be as easy to achieve as it might sound. One question they are mulling over is what size crew would prove most efficient and congenial, and the question, I learned, has its facets. A group of five or six, research discloses, would be better in some ways, and worse in others, than a smaller one. Studies now in progress at various universities, though their results are anything but definitive, seem to show that half a dozen men thrown together in close confinement tend to form a highly standardized, if miniature, community, taking on and retaining social patterns through a desire to conform. The members of a smaller group, being less concerned about neighborliness and conformity, are apt to attack the business at hand, whatever it may be, with greater zest and intelligence. “It’s something of a dilemma,” I was told by Luigi Petrullo, who heads up the Group Psychology Branch of the Office of Naval Research, an agency that has for many years observed the behavior of submarine crews. “The factors that make for harmony—a nice clubby atmosphere, if you will—won’t necessarily make for efficiency, will probably lead to jangled nerves. The particular character of a mission, I suspect, will have a lot to do with determining the size of the crew.”
Whatever the crew’s size, its members will have no escape from one another’s likes, dislikes, normalities, abnormalities, and day-to-day moods for weeks, months, or years, in which long stretches of boredom will be interrupted only by moments of stark terror. Such a situation, as the military services have discovered from observing the behavior of men assigned to long-drawn-out perilous missions, does not ordinarily make for camaraderie; indeed, familiarity may breed feelings even stronger than contempt. One of the psychologists who pointed this out to me referred to a passage from “Kabloona,” in which the author, Gontran de Poncins, a French anthropologist and explorer, describes his change of attitude toward a trader, Paddy Gibson, with whom he spent part of an arctic winter:
I liked Gibson as soon as I saw him, and from the moment of my arrival we got on exceedingly well. He was a man of poise and order; he took life calmly and philosophically; he had an endless budget of good stories. In the beginning we would sit for hours . . . discussing with warmth and friendliness every topic that suggested itself, and I soon felt a real affection for him.
Now as winter closed in round us, and week after week our world narrowed until it was reduced—in my mind, at any rate—to the dimensions of a trap, I went from impatience to restlessness, and from restlessness finally to monomania. I began to rage inwardly and the very traits in my friend .. . which had struck me at the beginning as admirable, ultimately seemed to me detestable.
The time came when I could no longer bear the sight of this man who was unfailingly kind to me.
In an effort to learn more about the way groups of men react to prolonged togetherness, the military services, some universities, and various aircraft companies have been incarcerating crews in mockup space gondolas right here on earth, and the findings, though inevitably sketchy, have, on the whole, been illuminating. After a day or two, most of the subjects—even pilots with considerable flight experience —begin to show signs of listlessness and frayed nerves. Several experiments of the sort have been conducted by the Air Force Aero Medical Laboratory, in Dayton, Ohio, each involving the isolation of a five-man crew for five days, and as the time wore on, the crews, whose talk was recorded, revealed a preoccupation with food that eventually bordered on the obsessive. I was told about these experiments by Charles Dempsey, the head of the laboratory’s Escape Division, which is studying the habitation of space vehicles and emergency escapes from them. “The men seemed to be living to eat rather than eating to live,” he said. “Their schedule provided for fifteen minutes of work each hour for sixteen hours, with the remaining forty-five minutes spent sitting around, after which they had eight hours off duty, eighty per cent of this time spent in sleeping. At the start, they discussed everything under the sun. In due course, though, they just about talked themselves out, and then there seemed to be only one subject that still interested them—food. Each man had his own five-day supply of food to eat when he wished, and, as things turned out, practically every one of the men soon started watching what his companions were doing with their food. Each seemed uncertain whether he was using good judgment about his own supply —whether he was eating too much of it at once or too little. Living on the kind of schedule they did, their stomachs became confused, and they kept debating whether it was breakfast time or suppertime or what. Yes, food got to be quite a deal. I’d say it was on their minds three-quarters of the time they were awake.”
The food that the earth-bound astronauts were given at the Aero Medical Laboratory was familiar, varied, and tasty, including such items as brownies and salted peanuts. In space, the voyager would be unlikely to have such interesting fare. In fact, no one knows at this point what he would have in the way of food. On the assumption that the spaceship would have automatic controls, Dr. John Lyman, associate professor of engineering at the University of California, has gone so far as to suggest that if a space man were bound for Mars, say, he might be given a still undeveloped drug that would lower his body temperature and put him to sleep until he got there; such a hibernating man, with his breathing and heart action slowed, would require relatively little food and water, and wh
at he did need could be automatically injected into his veins. In an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dr. James B. Edson, assistant to the director of Research and Development of the Department of the Army, goes even further, envisioning a synthetic nutrient that could make breathing as well as eating and drinking unnecessary. After speculating for a time on how the nutrient might work, Dr. Edson does relent a bit. “It may, however, prove necessary,” his article says, “to breath at least a little, so as not to get out of the habit.”
In contrast to Dr. Lyman and Dr. Edson, some of the Navy’s scientists take a decidedly old-fashioned view. With a conscious, lively space crew in mind, these men insist on a normal terrestrial diet, including all possible trimmings. “We do not completely understand why,” Captain C. P. Phoebus, a physician assigned to the Naval War College, in Newport; has written, “but we have found in dealing with submariners that the mere provision of enough calories, bulk, vitamins and minerals, and other essentials is not enough to keep a man physically and mentally healthy. It is very important that some of these needs be supplied in the form of fresh food, that the types of food and cooking techniques be varied, that the diet be balanced, and that the food be as tasty as that served at home. If it is not, the crew’s performance and morale are not at their best.” And that, these Navy men seem to think, would be just as true in outer space as under water.
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