by Mary Roach
Volynov orders tea with lemon. Lena tells him I am interested in hearing about Salyut 5—what happened? Why did he and Zholobov come down early?
“On the forty-second day,” Volynov begins, “it was an accident. Electricity switched off. No light, everything stopped, all engines, all pumps. Dark side of orbit. No light from the windows. Weightlessness. We don’t know where is floor or ceiling or maybe it’s a wall. No new oxygen coming. So you may count only on the volume in the station. Nobody from Earth could hear us, and we didn’t have any connection with them. Many problems. Hair like this.” With both hands, Lena mimes pulling her hair out. “What to do? Finally we start to fly over transmitters and we could talk to ground. They told us…” Volynov laughs at the memory. “They told us to open the instruction book to page number such and such. Of course this is of no help. We restored the station with our heads and hands. It took us one hour and half.
“After that, Vitaly couldn’t sleep anymore. He started to have headache, terrible headaches. Stress. We’ve eaten all the medicine. On the ground, they were worried about him. They ordered us to come down.” Volynov says he worked on his own for thirty-six hours without sleep, readying the descent module. It would seem that Zholobov suffered some sort of breakdown.
Later in the afternoon, Lena and I go for a walk through the pines with the psychologist to the cosmonauts, Rostislov Bogdashevsky. He has been at Star City for forty-seven years. Much of what he tells me is abstract and opaque. My notes say things like, “self-organization of dynamic structures of interpersonal relations in human society.” But what he had to say about Volynov and Zholobov was clear and simple. “They were exhausted by overwork. The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm. Who out of us can work nonstop for seventy-two hours? They made them sick people.”
Neither Volynov nor Bogdashevsky spoke of interpersonal difficulties on board Salyut 5. If anything, the mission seems to have brought the men closer, in the way that disaster and near-death will do. Volynov recalls the rescue helicopter’s approach. “Vitaly heard it first. He tells me: ‘Boris, there are people who are your relatives due to blood connection. But there are also people who are your relatives due to things you do together. Now you are closer to me than your brother or sister. We landed. We are alive. The prize is life.’”
When Volynov hears that Lena and I have been to the Star City museum, he tells us that on a later mission, he returned to Earth in a Soyuz capsule identical to the one on display. “I can still fit,” he says. I try to picture it—Volynov in his business suit, squeezing himself inside the placental confines of a Soyuz seat.
His own capsule, Soyuz 5, isn’t displayed because it was badly damaged. It did not separate properly from the rest of the Soyuz spacecraft, began to tumble, and reentered the atmosphere backward. Volynov, traveling alone, bounced around “like a ping-pong ball.” Only one side of the capsule has a heat-resistant coating, so the outside charred and the inside began to bake. Rubber on the hatch seal was burning. “You could see big balloons because of the heat.”
“Balloons?”
Lena consults Volynov, then turns back to me. “When you bake potatoes in an open fire, you see the same things on the potatoes. Foam? Bubbles.”
“Blisters!”
“Da, da, da. Blisters.”
Volynov waits for us to finish. “My spaceship looked like these potatoes.” There was a noise like a train, he says. “I thought the floor was opening under my feet, and I had no pressure suit; there is not room for it. And I thought, ‘That’s it. It’s the end.’” If the capsule hadn’t eventually broken free and stabilized in the proper position, Volynov would have been killed.
“When the helicopter arrived, I ask the crew, ‘Is my hair white?’”
To the first space travelers and the men responsible for their survival, mental health was low on the fret list. There was too much else to worry about.
The Hero of the Soviet Union takes a comb from his pocket. He raises his arms and sets them, like a conductor poised to cue the overture. He pulls the comb through the glorious hair (which was not then but is now white), and bends to pick up his groceries. “And now I must run away. People are waiting for me.”
YOU GO FIRST
The Alarming Prospect of Life Without Gravity
The world’s first rocket was built by Nazis to deliver bombs without leaving home. For all its fire-breathing bluster, a rocket is simply a means of delivering something—very fast and very far. The rocket was called the V-2. The first payload was the evil sleet of warheads that came down on London and other Allied cities during World War II.
The second was Albert.
Albert was a nine-pound rhesus monkey in a gauze diaper. In 1948, more than a decade before the world had heard of Yuri Gagarin or John Glenn or Ham the astrochimp, Albert became the first living creature to be launched on a rocket to space. As part of the spoils of war, the United States had taken possession of three hundred train carloads of V-2 rocket parts. They were by and large the playthings of generals, but the V-2s caught the imagination of a handful of scientists and dreamers, men more interested in the going-up than the coming-down.
One of them was David Simons. In his oral history, Simons describes a conversation with his boss, James Henry, at the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force Base, near White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. The conversation is classic 1940s, an era when people regularly began their sentences with “Why,…” and “Boy,…”
Dr. Henry starts it off. “Dave, do you think man will ever go to the moon?” I like to picture him in a lab coat, pensively poking his chin with the eraser end of a No. 2 pencil.
Simons replies without hesitating. “Why, of course. It’s just a matter of engineering design and time to work out the problems—”
Henry cuts him off. “Well, what would you think of having an opportunity to help us put a monkey in a captured V-2 rocket that would be exposed to about two minutes of weightlessness and measure the physiological responses to weightlessness?” It was a very long question.
“Oh! What a wonderful opportunity! When do we start?”
It is a moment that, to me anyway, signals the birth of American space exploration. It captures both the geeky excitement and the hand-wringing uncertainty over what might befall a human organism shot to the edges of the known world. Space was an environment in which no one and nothing on Earth had evolved, or, for all the scientists then knew, could survive.
Henry put Simons in charge of Project Albert. I’m looking at a book with photographs from the project. There is the V-2 poised for flight, 50-plus feet tall. There is Albert, with his rhesus monkey muttonchops and delicate eyelids cast down like a doll’s. Below this, a shot of Albert strapped to a tiny stretcher, being slid inside a makeshift aluminum capsule that will fit into the nose cone where warheads were meant to go. You can’t see the face of the enlisted man who holds him, just his midsection: the fly of his khaki pants and the cuff of a too-short shirtsleeve. His nails are dirty. There is his wedding ring. What does his wife think? What does he think? Does it strike him as odd: launching this towering rocket, the world’s first ballistic missile, with nothing on board but a doped-up monkey?
Probably not. Aerospace professionals at the time were gripped with almost universal foreboding at the prospect of cutting loose from gravity’s hold. What if man’s organs depended on gravity to function? What if the pumping of his heart failed to push his blood through his veins, and instead merely churned it in place? What if his eyeballs changed shape and compromised his visual acuity? If he cut himself, would his blood still coagulate? They worried about pneumonia, heart failure, debilitating muscle cramps. Some fretted that without gravity, signals from floating inner-ear bones and other cues to the body’s position would be absent or contradictory—and that this might cause perturbations that would, to quote aerospace medicine pioneers Otto Gauer and Heinz Haber, “deeply affect the au
tonomic nervous functions and ultimately produce a very severe sensation of succumbence associated with an absolute incapacity to act.” I queried an online dictionary about succumbence. It said, “Did you mean succulents?”
The only way to know was to send a “simulated pilot” up there—to launch an animal in the nose of a thundering V-2 rocket. The last attempt at something similar took place in 1783. That time the experimenters were Joseph and Étienne de Montgolfier, the inventors of the hot-air balloon. It was like something from a children’s book. A duck, a sheep, and a rooster went for a ride beneath a beautiful balloon, in the skies over Versailles on a summer afternoon. On they sailed, over the king’s palace and the courtyard filled with waving, cheering men and women. In fact, it was an ingenious, controlled inquiry into the effects of “high” (1,500 feet) altitude on a living organism. The duck was the control. Since ducks are accustomed to such altitudes, the brothers could assume that any harm that befell one was likely to have been caused by something else. The balloon landed uneventfully after a two-mile voyage. “The animals were fine,” reads Étienne de Montgolfier’s report of the flight, “and the sheep had pissed in the cage.”
Gravity turned out to be the least of the Alberts’ concerns. There were six Alberts, told apart, like kings or movie sequels, by the Roman numeral after their name. It was Albert II who made history. (Albert I suffocated while awaiting liftoff.) The excellent volume Animals in Space reproduced the historic printout from the recorder that monitored Albert II’s heart beats and the breaths he took during the zero-gravity portion of the flight, 83 miles high. They did not stray far from normal. (He had, like all the Alberts, been anesthetized.) They were also among his last. The nose cone tore loose from its parachute and fell to the desert floor. At worst, a lethal scenario. At best, a very severe sensation of succulents. The National Archives has footage of Albert II’s launch and flight. I didn’t order a copy. The shot list was enough.
CU [CLOSE-UP]:…Several scenes of little monkey being prepared for flight in V-2, being placed in box with head sticking out, given hypodermic…
Night shot, launching of V-2.
CU: Parachute rolled up into ball on ground.
CU: Smashed instruments and equipment in warhead.
CU: Remains of the section containing the monkey.
AT FIRST BLUSH, Project Albert is difficult to fathom. Here are men contemplating sending a human being into space atop a tank carload of explosive chemicals, and they’re worried he might be harmed by gravity?
To understand the Project Albert mind-set, you need to spend a few moments pondering the forces of gravitation. If you are like me, you have tended to think of gravity in terms of minor personal annoyances: broken glassware and sagging body parts. Until this week, I failed to appreciate the gravitas of gravity. Along with electromagnetism and strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity is one of the “fundamental forces” that power the universe. It was reasonable to assume that gravity might have something darker up its sleeve that mankind was yet unaware of.
A quick refresher: Gravity is the pull, measurable* and predictable, that one mass exerts on another. The more mass involved, and the shorter the distance between the masses, the stronger the pull. The moon is more than 200,000 miles away, yet it is massive enough that without any conscious effort, without plugging anything in, it pulls the Earth’s water and even its tectonic plates moonward, causing ocean and (very, very small) land tides. (Earth exerts similar forces on the moon.)
Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God. In the beginning, the cosmos was nothing but empty space and vast clouds of gases. Eventually the gases cooled to the point where tiny grains coalesced. These grains would have spent eternity moving through space, ignoring each other, had gravitational attraction not brought them together. Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos. As more particles joined the orgy, these celestial blobs grew in size. The bigger they became, the bigger the pull they exerted. Soon (in a thousands-of-centuries sort of way) they could lure larger and more distant particles into the tar pit of their gravitational influence. Eventually stars were born, objects big enough to pull passing planets and asteroids into orbit. Hello, solar system.
Gravity is the prime reason there’s life on Earth. Yes, you need water for life, but without gravity, water wouldn’t hang around. Nor would air. It is Earth’s gravity that holds the gas molecules of our atmosphere—which we need not only to breathe but to be protected from solar radiation—in place around the planet. Without gravity, the molecules would fly off into space along with the water in the oceans and the cars on the roads and you and me and Larry King and the dumpster in the In-N-Out Burger parking lot.
The term “zero gravity” is misleading when applied to most rocket flights. Astronauts orbiting Earth remain well within the pull of the planet’s gravitational field. Spacecraft like the International Space Station orbit at an altitude of around 250 miles, where the Earth’s gravitational pull is only 10 percent weaker than it is on the planet’s surface. Here’s why they’re floating: When you launch something into orbit, whether it’s a spacecraft or a communications satellite or Timothy Leary’s remains, you have launched it, via rocket thrust, so powerfully fast and high and far that when gravity’s pull finally slows the object’s forward progress enough that it starts to fall back down, it misses the Earth. It keeps on falling around the Earth rather than to it. As it falls, the Earth’s gravity keeps up its tug, so it’s both constantly falling and constantly being pulled earthward. The resulting path is a repeating loop around the planet. (It is not endlessly repeating, though. In low Earth orbit, where spacecraft roam, there’s still a trace of atmosphere, enough air molecules to create a teeny amount of drag and—after a couple years—slow a spacecraft* down enough that without a rocket engine blast it falls out of orbit.) In order to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull completely, an object must be hurtling at Earth’s escape velocity: 25,000 miles per hour. The more massive a celestial entity, the harder it is to break its hold. To escape the monstrous gravity of a black hole (a huge collapsed star), you’d need to travel faster than the speed of light (about 670 million miles per hour). In other words, even light can’t escape a black hole. That’s why it’s black.
Getting back to weightlessness. Weight is a bit of a mind-bender. I had always thought of my weight, on any given day, as a constant, a physical trait like my height or my eye color. It’s not. I weigh 127 pounds on Earth, but on the much smaller moon, whose gravitational pull is one sixth of Earth’s, I weigh about as much as a beagle. Neither weight is my real weight. There is no such thing as a real weight, only real mass. Weight is determined by gravity. It’s a measure of how fast you’ll accelerate if you happen to be dropping through the air like Newton’s apple. (Here on Earth, were there no atmospheric drag to slow you down, gravity would accelerate you at the rate of 22 miles per hour faster for each second that you fall.) If you’re standing on the ground, you obviously don’t speed up, but the pull is still there. You’re not falling, just pressing. The acceleration reads as weight on a bathroom scale. When there’s nothing to press against, as in the free fall of orbit, then you are weightless. The “zero gravity” that astronauts experience aboard an orbiting spacecraft is simply a continuous state of falling around the Earth.
If something provides a supplemental source of acceleration—something added to the acceleration prompted by Earth’s gravity—now your weight will change. Take your bathroom scale into an elevator and watch the readout as you take off. You will briefly gain weight, and perhaps a minor reputation around the building. The elevator’s acceleration has added an extra earthward pull to the earthward pull of gravity. Contrariwise, when the elevator approaches the top floor and slows down, the deceleration renders you briefly lighter; it has accelerated you skyward, counteracting some of the Earth’s downward pull.
Why is there this force, this pull between objects? Poking around on the Web for a suitably patient en
tity to ask, I came upon the Gravity Research Foundation, founded by multimillionaire businessman and fire alarm magnate Roger Babson. After gravity pulled Babson’s sister toward the bottom of a river and she drowned, he became history’s most voluble antigravity activist, publishing screeds like Gravity: Our Enemy No. 1. If I were Babson, I might have nominated water or currents for the number-one spot, but the man was unshakable in his ire.*
Babson is dead, but the foundation lives on. It no longer characterizes its efforts as antigravity, a term that has come to connote “crackpot.” “We are neither ‘pro-gravity’ nor ‘anti-gravity,’” director George Rideout, Jr., told a journalist who profiled the organization in 2001. They are, he said, just trying to learn as much as possible about it. I contacted Rideout seeking an explanation of why gravity exists. He told me to go ask a physicist.
I did. I made a hobby of it. But why are two masses drawn together, I’d say. “Mary, Mary, Mary,” was the kind of response I tended to get. “Because space-time exists,” said one physicist. “What does ‘why’ mean?” said another. Perhaps gravity is a mystery even to those who understand it. I can well imagine that the prospect of messing with it must have been daunting to the pioneers of aerospace medicine out in the desert in 1948.
DISMAYED BUT UNDETERRED, Simons and his crew launched four more Alberts. Albert III’s rocket exploded. Alberts IV and V were, like Albert II, victims of malfunctioning parachute systems. Albert VI made it to the ground with his vital signs little changed, but died of heat prostration while rescuers searched for the nose cone. Eventually the Air Force—and you do wonder what took them so long—stopped naming their ill-fated gravity monkeys Albert. More importantly, they began to move away from the V-2s in favor of a smaller, less problematic* rocket called the Aerobee.