by Mary Roach
Only one Apollo astronaut, Harrison Schmitt, was a geologist. The rest were pilots who had been given a crash course in lunar geology to help them know what to look for and how to read the land. The training included time in a NASA geology lab with Earth basalts and breccias, painted Styrofoam moon rock mock-ups, and, after Apollo 11, actual lunar samples. Field trips took them out to the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, where the Atomic Energy Commission tested nuclear bombs in the fifties, leaving craters up and down the desert floor. Because the rocks were still radioactive, the astronauts couldn’t pick them up and examine them. No one seemed to care, as they were, recalls Jim Irwin in the astronaut commentary of the Apollo 15 Lunar Surface Journal, “anxious to get back into Las Vegas.”
One focus of today’s traverse is timing. How closely are the rovers able to stick to the time line? How often should they check in with ground control, and how do you update the plan on the fly, if one group falls behind? The teams have been asked to keep track of the start and stop times for each phase of the traverse, to see whether things are taking longer than predicted, and if so, what’s slowing them up. At some point, intern Jonathan Nelson will deliver a “productivity metrics” report that will make some NASA manager feel calmer about the $200,000 budget he or she authorized for Arctic analog projects this summer. For now, it means lots of conversations like this one:
NELSON: What do you want, suit time?
LEE: No. Basically, when we started to suit up…
NELSON: So you want suit time.
LEE: That’s what suit time is?
NELSON: There’s a difference between prep and suit.
ABERCROMBY: So what was our boots-on-the-ground time?
Timing is critical to an astronaut wandering around on an extraterrestrial surface. Without knowing how long it takes to walk or drive a given distance on a certain kind of terrain, it’s hard to know how much oxygen or battery life one will need. Apollo astronauts had to conform to “walkback constraints.” These were, and are, first figured out by driving someone out on some lunar analog terrain, say, 3 miles from base, putting a suit simulator on him, marking the start time, and letting him walk back. Apollo astronauts were not allowed to drive farther from the safety of the Lunar Module than the distance they could walk without running out of oxygen, in case the rover broke down. (This is a rationale for having two rovers; if one malfunctions, the other can come pick up the stranded crew.)
Walkback constraints were a source of worry for Apollo mission planners and frustration for astronauts. Without trees or buildings to give a sense of scale, it was difficult to accurately estimate distances. For safety’s sake, estimates were conservative, sometimes maddeningly so. On the way back from an Apollo 15 EVA, astronaut Dave Scott spied an unusual black rock sitting out on its own. He knew that if he asked Mission Control for permission to go get it, they’d tell him to keep driving, as the EVA was already behind schedule. Since Mission Control could hear their conversations, Scott fabricated a seatbelt malfunction. The rock would become known as “the seatbelt basalt.”
SCOTT: Oh, there’s some vesicular basalt right there, boy. Oh, Man! Hey, how about…Let’s just hold on one second, we’ve got to have…
IRWIN: Okay, we’re stopping.
SCOTT: Let me get my seatbelt…. It keeps coming off.
IRWIN [picking up on the ruse right away]: Why don’t you hand me your seatbelt?
SCOTT: Just a minute…If I can find it. [pause] There it is. [pause] If you’ll hang on to it here for a second.
IRWIN: Okay, I’ve got it. [long pause]
It’s late afternoon now. We’ve reached the end-of-the-day rendezvous point. Lee and Abercromby will overnight here, on primitive bunks in the back of the Humvee, while the rest of the team drives back to camp and then rejoins them in the morning. Bravo Party is nowhere in sight, so we wander over and take pictures of each other standing on the lip of a ravine. Later, I’ll look at these photographs and it will appear that I was visiting a strip mine. It’s hard to say why I find Devon Island beautiful. But there are these moments when you’re tromping along, head lowered against the wind, and your eye lands on a hump of moss with tiny red flowers like cupcake sprinkles, and you’re just walloped by the sight. Maybe it’s the unlikely heroics of something so delicate surviving in a place so stingy and hard. Maybe it’s just the surprise of color. At one point yesterday, on a hike through yet another grey and beige canyon, a bumblebee flew past. The yellow seemed like a hallucination, something colorized in a black and white photograph. “Whoa, buddy,” someone said. “Where’d you take a wrong turn?”
It’s starting to rain, so we head back to the Humvee. Lee and Abercromby are in high spirits, having completed day one of NASA’s very first pressurized roverlike traverse. “Just terrific,” Abercromby is saying. “There can’t be many places in the world where the terrain and the scale so closely approximate lunar—”
“Ground, this is Bravo Party.” It’s the radio. NASA geophysicist Brian Glass, the SPR-Bravo traverse leader, reads out his GPS coordinates and a weather update. Read is the wrong verb. It’s something between shout and spit. It’s raining hard where they are. Their visibility is down to 300 feet. Bravo Party isn’t in a Humvee. Their rover simulator is a Kawasaki Mule, a larger ATV with a short pickup bed. Their spark plugs got wet crossing streams that had appeared shallower in satellite photographs. One of the spare plugs was the wrong size. At one point, they were almost two hours behind.
Weaver flips his hood over his head. “Sounds like the other guys aren’t havin’ as much joy.”
MORNING AT HMP begins with the sound of tent zippers. The sleeping accommodations are thirty nylon tents, hunkered on a hill, breaking rank with the island’s color scheme. Everyone gets up around the same time, because every morning begins with a meeting. This morning’s is being held in the main office tent. Along with the NASA meeting mentality, an actual NASA phone system has been set up on Devon Island. Staff at NASA Ames, in California, can dial a four-digit extension and reach Lee, a couple hundred miles from the magnetic North Pole, on an in-house call. (HMP is one of those odd but surprisingly common Internet-age locales with VoIP coverage but no flush toilets.)*
An HMP webcam is set up on a tripod in one corner, enabling people all over the world to look on as Andrew Abercromby attempts to maintain order and civility at the posttraverse Lessons Learned Review. One of HMP’s ancillary research goals is the study of “human dynamics which result from extended contact in close quarters.” Hopefully someone other than myself is taking notes this morning.
“No one told us we were behind after the first EVA,” Glass is complaining. “According to the paper time line we were ten minutes early.” Something about Glass’s receding red hair and the cut of his mustache and beard make me think of Sir Walter Raleigh. It’s easy to picture him with an Elizabethan collar atop the polar fleece. Glass says ground control made them wait nearly two hours while they mapped a quicker route. “I…” He exhales. “I had the impression we were being jerked around just so Alpha Party could get back in time for dinner.”
Lee insists that Alpha Party had had no idea any of this was happening.
“Well, yes,” Glass says, “because…” He turns to Abercromby. “Pascal had his iridium phone set to Ignore.”
“It was on Vibrate!”
“Can we,” says Abercromby, “try to drive toward lessons learned?”
Glass has moved on to “the seemingly incessant” calls from ground control to check in on what they were doing. “Every time, I had to stop, get to a place with no wind noise and no motor noise, take off the helmet…”
Lesson learned: Explorers appreciate a little autonomy. The rigidly scheduled time lines that typify shorter planetary surface EVAs will have to loosen if NASA pushes ahead to two-week EVAs and trips to Mars. Autonomy is the topic of the moment among space psychologists. Astronauts often complain to flight surgeons about not being allowed to make their own schedul
es and decisions about their work. Like Glass, some find Mission Control’s micro-management frustrating and demoralizing. Space psychiatrist Nick Kanas, of the University of California, San Francisco, has studied the psychological effects of high and low autonomy on personnel in three different space simulations. The men and women Kanas studied were generally happier and more creative in the high-autonomy scenario. The exception was the guys in Mission Control, who “reported some confusion about their work role.”
The meeting shows no sign of abating. Weaver is in presleep mode. The HMP field guide, known for his laissez-faire shower regimen, is scratching his back on the doorframe like a molting grizzly. Glass isn’t quite done. “…We had no lunch other than candy bars. Alpha Party had taken multiple items that—”
“No way,” says Lee. “We had a total of two sandwiches.”
“Lessons learned,” Abercromby says flatly. “Order more bread.”
Mike the cook speaks up. “Some bread got stolen in Resolute.” (Flights to Devon Island leave from the Inuit hamlet of Resolute.) Mike had three days to singlehandedly plan meals and buy supplies for thirty-some people over a six-week field season. The NASA traverse planning office should probably hire Mike the cook. One of the problems with expedition planning today, versus forty years ago, is that NASA is so much larger. Too many cooks take forever to agree on how to make the broth. Or as Apollo mastermind Wernher von Braun is said to have commented on the moon landing, “If we’d been more people, we’d have failed.”
Gene Cernan, in the astronaut commentary for the Apollo 17 Lunar Surface Journal, bemoans the endless prepping and whatiffing that typifies today’s NASA. “I don’t know if we…have the mentality—I don’t want to say ‘guts’—to take the kind of risks we did when we [went to the moon] the first time…. And that’s a sad commentary.” After all, no matter how much you plan and how carefully you engineer things, there will always be problems. The safety manager of the eighth Apollo mission once famously pointed out: “Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts…. Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.”
On the other hand, as they say, failing to plan is planning to fail.
Years ago, I interviewed astronaut Chris Hadfield for an article about how crews train for spacewalks (EVAs wherein astronauts float outside the spacecraft, usually to make repairs or add new hardware). I asked him if he thought NASA overdid it with their protracted rehearsing and planning. Hadfield would spend 250 hours in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory practicing for a six-hour EVA. (The NBL is a huge indoor pool containing ISS mock-up pieces; floating in a spacesuit in water is a passable approximation of spacewalking.) “Yeah, there’s lots of options,” Hadfield said. “You could do nothing and hope for the best, or you could spend billions of dollars on each flight and try to nail down every last detail.” NASA, he says, aims for somewhere in the middle. “The prep is what matters,” he added. “That’s what we do for a living. We don’t fly in space for a living. We have meetings, plan, prepare, train. I’ve been an astronaut for six years, and I’ve been in space for eight days.”
Hadfield told me that the famous Apollo 13 incident—the explosion on the way to the moon and the solution Jim Lovell and his crewmates undertook—had actually been “simmed” by NASA at least once. Apparently everything Lovell did in space had been simmed on the ground. Including not taking a bath for two weeks.
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A FUNGUS
Space Hygiene and the Men Who Stopped Bathing for Science
Jim Lovell is best known as the commander of Apollo 13, the astronaut with the problem. As anyone who’s seen the Tom Hanks movie knows, an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the moon, knocking out power in the Command Module and forcing Lovell and his two crewmates to hunker down in the Lunar Module for four days with limited oxygen, water, and heat. For forty years, people have been coming up to Lovell saying, “My god, what an ordeal.” I said that to him too, but not in reference to Apollo 13. I was talking about Gemini VII: two men, two weeks, no bathing, same underwear. Inside a pressure suit, inside a capsule so cramped that Lovell could not straighten his legs.
Gemini VII, launched on December 4, 1965, was a medical dress rehearsal for the Apollo lunar program. A round-trip moon mission takes two weeks, and no astronaut had spent that much time in zero gravity. (NASA’s record at that point was eight days.) If a medical emergency was going to develop on, say, the thirteenth day, the flight surgeons wanted to learn about it when the astronauts were 200 miles from Earth, not 200,000.
There was concern that wearing a spacesuit for two weeks in a space the size of the front seat of a VW Beetle might be unendurable. The ever-heedful NASA proposed to Lovell and his crewmate Frank Borman that they undertake a real-time simulation of Gemini VII inside a mock-up of the capsule—a rehearsal rehearsal. “Fourteen days sitting in a straight-up ejection seat on Earth?” says Borman in his NASA oral history. “We were able to get that nonsense kicked out in a hurry.”*
In fact, there was no need for the nonsense, because similar nonsense was already underway out at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. From January 1964 to November 1965, a series of nine experiments on “minimal personal hygiene”—including a two-week Gemini VII simulation—had been taking place in an aluminum space capsule simulator inside Building 824 of the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories. The AMRL people did not mess around. Minimal was defined as “no bathing or sponging of the body, no shaving, no hair and nail grooming…, no changing clothes and bed linen, the use of substandard oral hygiene, and minimal use of wipes” for, depending on the experiment, anywhere from two to six weeks. One team of subjects lived and slept in spacesuits and helmets for four weeks. Their under-clothes and socks deteriorated so completely that they had to be replaced. “Subject C became so nauseated by body odor that he was forced to remove his helmet after wearing it for less than ten hours. Subjects A and B had already removed their helmets by that time.” It didn’t help. With the helmet off, body odors were “forced out around the neck of the pressure suit,” a situation described by B, on day four, as “absolutely horrible.” This explains why Frank Borman, in the mission transcript for the second day of Gemini VII, asks Lovell if he has a clothespin. He’s about to unzip his suit.
(“For your nose,” he tells the perplexed Lovell.)
For a different set of subjects, the heat was turned up to 92 degrees Fahrenheit. The Gemini VII simulated crew not only spent two weeks, day and night, in a spacesuit, but had to struggle with the same waste collection systems that would soon bedevil Lovell and Borman.
To quantify the squalor, the Air Force scientists would usher the men—most of them students from the nearby University of Dayton—into a portable shower, one by one, and collect the runoff for analysis. John Brown was the officer in charge of the simulated space capsule, formally known as the Life Support Systems Evaluator and casually known as “the chamber.” Oddly, the showers were the part Brown recalls the men complaining about. Because the water was unheated. “They didn’t want the hot water cooking the skin flakes,” he said, speaking four words together that have no business being so.
As unsavory as this project must have been for the subjects, it was no bowl of rose petals for the researchers. It was their meandering sniffs that made possible the conclusion: “Body odor strongest in axilla, groin, feet.”
Axilla (armpits) and groin occupy the top two slots because that’s where the body’s apocrine sweat glands are. Unlike the body-cooling eccrine sweat glands, which secrete mainly water, the apocrine glands produce a cloudy, viscous secretion that, when broken down by bacteria, creates the hallmark BO punch. I don’t know quite how to phrase this or what it reveals about me, but I have never detected BO in the pubic region. O, for sure, but not BO. I asked University of Pennsylvania dermatologist and body odor researcher Jim Leyden about this. He verified the apocrine presence in the groin, and insisted there’s a similar smell. “It’s just not that easily appreciated,” he said
, “because the sensing device is farther away.” I decided to let it ride.
The apocrine glands are hooked up to the autonomic nervous system; fear, anger, and nervousness prompt an upswing in secretions. (Companies that test deodorants call it “emotional sweat,” to distinguish it from the temperature-triggered kind.)* You would think that being strapped to a launching rocket would be a situation in which a man would be, to quote Leyden, “milking those glands for everything they’re worth.” I asked Jim Lovell, in a telephone conversation, if he could recall the comments made by the frogmen who opened the Gemini VII hatch after splashdown.
“You’re investigating a rather unusual aspect of spaceflight,” he said. He didn’t remember, but he did recall comments made by some of the Apollo hatch-openers. “They’d get a whiff of the inside of that spacecraft and it smelled…”—Lovell’s gentlemanly instincts intervened—“different than the fresh ocean breezes outside.”
Underarm sweat supplies both food and lodging for bacteria. Eccrine sweat is mostly water; it provides the moisture bacteria need to thrive. Protein-rich apocrine secretions are the twenty-four-hour diner. (Though eccrine sweat does contribute edible elements whose breakdown products are, as Leyden says, “part of the overall bouquet, if you will.” It’s a milder, lockerroomy smell.)
The armpit is not entirely the bacterial paradise it would seem to be. Sweat has natural antimicrobial properties. Though they don’t by any means render the skin sterile, there are limitations to what can grow there. That may be one reason why the Air Force boys’ odors hit a plateau, rather than growing ever worse as the weeks wore on. The technical report states that the men’s body odor reached its “maximum height” at seven to ten days, and then began to subside. Height is an odd attribute for smell, but it’s possible to imagine how in this case the odor could seem to be taking on physical proportions, growing taller, sprouting heads, limbs, quills.