For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by space travel.
I can still vividly recall being riveted to our old black and white Dumont TV watching Disney’s 1956 animated special “Man in Space” that envisioned what manned space travel would someday look like. The images turned out to be remarkably accurate and I think the show contained the first ever “3, 2, 1” countdown to blastoff.
What a gift we've been handed to be alive now and be allowed to be eyewitnesses to the birth of manned space travel and be among the first to peek at the almost daily new discoveries that will surely be important clues that will lead to the deciphering of the the secrets of the universe. Those who care can watch the evidence be unveiled on websites like NASA’s brilliant "Astronomy Picture of the Day." The site’s extensive archive of images is a virtual encyclopedia of mankind's ever-expanding knowledge of his universe. They are also more beautiful than anything he had previously imagined.
But almost 50 years since man first reached outer space, we still know very little about how to live there. The topic fascinates me and it’s frustrating how little has been written about it. But that now appears to be changing, thanks to a generation of astronauts who have actually experienced living there and are now retired and free to speak about it.
I’ve just read 20 pages – most of them hysterically funny – about how to difficult it is to go to the bathroom in space. Remember the detailed instructions on the wall of the zero-gravity toilet in Kubrick’s brilliant “2001: A Space Odyessy?” Well, reality is a lot more complicated than that. It’s so complicated that we’re not even close to solving the problem.
Alright, you can stop laughing now – and thinking how hopelessly juvenile I am -- because it just so happens that having a bowel movement (BM) without the aid of gravity is a mysterious and very dangerous problem. Even after hundreds of hours of intensive training, it’s still damned hard to do it right. You don’t really want to know the consequences of even the slightest error. And there have been plenty of errors.
Astronauts take this part of their space experience with spooky seriousness. The honest ones usually describe their moments spent going to the bathroom as the scariest part of their missions.
The zero gravity bowel movement has been a problem for as long as men have experienced weightlessness. The first Mercury astronauts didn’t worry about it much – and as a consequence, America’s first man in space, Alan Shepard, rode his Redstone rocket bathed in his own urine. After waiting hours sitting on his back in his space suit waiting for liftoff, he pleaded with his bosses for permission to relieve himself. His comment after he finally got the okay is kind of famous since it was first published in “The Right Stuff.” In his best Jose Jimenez impression (anyone too young to know what I’m talking about , watch the comedy classic bit on “You Tube”) he said: “Well I’m a wetback now… Now let’s light this candle.”
The problem remained an afterthought through the Apollo moon missions. The worst experience was during the last Gemini flight. The mission had two astronauts spend two weeks living in a space the size of a phone booth. The quarters were so cramped that the men could not get up from their seats -- even to take off their spacesuits. Normal bodily functions were almost impossible. At the end of the mission, their clothing, especially their underwear, literally disintegrated on their bodies and both crew members described the other’s smell with the vilest descriptions imaginable.
The history of space men with problems making sissy also goes back to the very beginnings of men leaving earth. Yuri Gagarin, the very first man to orbit the planet, realized he had "to go" when he reached the Soviet launch pad just before he was to get into the elevator to take him up to his capsule. So he did what he knew he had to do -- he turned his back to the photographers, pulled down his fly and pissed on the tire of the truck that carried him to the pad. Then he zipped himself up and made history.
The moment actually officially became part of the once-mighty Soviet space program. For decades – at least until Russian launches began to be televised live – it was tradition for male cosmonauts to relieve themselves just before they took that elevator trip. And no, I don’t know what female cosmonauts did. I researched it, but as far as I know, that answer is still classified as “Top Secret” somewhere in the Kremlin archives.
After all these years, I still find this,stuff -- all of it -- compelling. It speaks to how much we still have to learn about living in space. Those guys living in the International Space Station (ISS) for six months at a time -- trying to learn how to stay there for the three years its going to take to go to Mars and back -- are real heros to me. I can’t figure out why they’re not allowed to talk about the real human stuff – the interesting stuff to us regular earthlings because it's the stuff we can relate to..
It seems that being weightless while orbiting the earth makes the basic human processes of going to the bathroom extremely difficult. Almost everything people do: moving, eating, belching, farting, sleeping, having sex, giving birth – you get the point -- has to be relearned. Those early attempts resulted in hundreds of great anecdotal stories. Some of them are funny but some can be dangerous. Deadly dangerous. And after almost 50 years experience doing it, we haven't learned very much. (Fifty years after the Wright Brothers, aviation had advanced so rapidly that the sound barriers had been broken and
Just to be part of the astronaut corps is the dream of millions of Americans of all ages (most definitely including me, who once made the first cut to be the first journalist in space). But few realize that after they finally make the “astronaut candidate” list. the odds are still extremely slim that they will actually ever be chosen to rocket 50 miles up to earn the right to pin their gold astronauts wings (they still have to personally pay the $400 the wings cost) and claim the right to call themselves an astronaut. They spend most of their time waiting, studying hard, kissing up to the bureaucrats who ultimately make crew assignments and praying for a flight assignment.
As far their bosses in NASA are concerned, the most important lesson they must learn is to avoid journalists. How many interviews have you read with astronauts that deliver a taste of what it's really like to be in space? NASA may be the most anal (no pun intended) government agency there is about controlling press coverage.. It's convinced that stories about astronauts doing things like taking a dump might upset American taxpayers enough to stop the flow of the billions of dollars needed to send human joy riders 200 miles up at 17,500 mph. So reporters are scarier to astronauts than the thought of riding rockets that tend to blow up at the worst possible times for the most preventable of reasons.
I was blessed to be a newspaper reporter covering the birth of space shuttle program in the 1980’s. (I went through an intensive selection process to land the job. One day I found myself next to the legendary Steve Dunleavy, the paper’s metropolitan editor, in the bathroom off the city room. Without really thinking, I impulsively blurted out: “Hey Steve, if you need someone to cover the space shuttle program, I’ll do it.” Always one to obey men’s room etiquette, Steve stared straight ahead as he answered: “Okay mate, you got the job.”) It was a great assignment, after all, the shuttle was going to be the first manned space ship to fly without ever having a unmanned rehearsal.
I covered the shuttle program from the first flight to the horrible Challenger disaster. I’ve witnessed shuttles blasting off from Florida and shuttles landing in the California desert and back at KSC. I learned about the shuttle, its astronauts and ultimately that the multi-billion dollar program was basically ill-conceived and fatally flawed.
[A momentary detour here for a brief explanation of the shuttle's economics, which eventually doomed the program. Originally, the system was supposed to provide a cheap, reliable method of sending cargo and crew into orbit aboard a mosly reusable spaceships. But NASA discovered the hard way that the numbers showed that the job was more efficiently accomplished with much less money by using reliable unmanned rockets to lift cargo and saving manned missions for a different system that incorporated all the necessary -- and expensive -- safety systems that are required to protect the lives of crews. But even that program was recently canceled by the White House as a budget buster. This means American crews will be taken to the ISS by Russian rockets for the foreseeable future while NASA privatizes the job and passes the effort over to American industry.]
[A momentary detour here for a brief explanation of the shuttle's economics, which eventually doomed the program. Originally, the system was supposed to provide a cheap, reliable method of sending cargo and crew into orbit aboard a mosly reusable spaceships. But NASA discovered the hard way that the numbers showed that the job was more efficiently accomplished with much less money by using reliable unmanned rockets to lift cargo and saving manned missions for a different system that incorporated all the necessary -- and expensive -- safety systems that are required to protect the lives of crews. But even that program was recently canceled by the White House as a budget buster. This means American crews will be taken to the ISS by Russian rockets for the foreseeable future while NASA privatizes the job and passes the effort over to American industry.]
It wasn’t until I befriended astronauts that I finally learned a little about what living in space is really about. The hard-won knowledge made me – a least for a few years – the rightful self-proclaimed expert on the zero gravity toilet program. It also had something to do that there were no other reporters interested in the subject.
Luck had a big hand in getting those two sources. It happened when I, and about 20 other journalists covering the space program, was invited to the White House to meet President Ronald Reagan and listen to him make an important announcement about America’s future in space. I remember being briefed about Presidential etiquette (which is much stricter than the rules governing conduct in men’s rooms) before we were quickly ushered into the Oval Office for a few minutes with the man. I don’t remember anything about what the President announced but I will never forget what he looked like up close. His cheeks were very red, his hair didn’t have even a hint of grey and he looked more like a wax figure than a real person. I thought he looked just like Howdy Doody. (Younger readers can go back to You Tube.)
Then we were rushed out of the West Wing, put on buses and shuttled to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum for lunch and a sneak peak at an IMAX film taken aboard the latest shuttle mission at great cost. Lunch was magical -- we journalists sharing tables with real astronauts directly under the actual “Spirit of St. Louis,” the Wright Brothers’ heavier than air glider and other historic aircraft and space capsules. We got to touch real moon rocks – watched very closely by four uniformed guards. To the anger of hundreds of non-VIP visitors, the museum remained closed to the public until we were seated in the museum’s IMAX theater and the remains of our lunch were cleared away.
I went in to watch the film with the two astronauts seated at my table, both of whom had been on board the mission where the pictures we were about to see was taken. It had been the first flight of the shuttle Discovery.
By then I had started to figure out the two rules you need to follow to get an astronaut to ever speak to you. Number 1 was to absolutely swear on everything sacred to never quote him by name or ever use his name in a story. The second rule was never, but never, treat him as a hero. Every astronaut I have ever met considers what he does as “just his job.” They are just regular guys going to work. It’s what they do for a living. The possibility of a horrible death was “part of the job” to an astronaut. If you insisted otherwise, you got a quick goodbye.
Astronaut Mike Mullane sat to my left as we watched the short film, which contained some breath-taking views of the earth and a lot of footage of astronauts floating through the shuttle’s cluttered compartments. Mullane kept up his own whispered commentary into my ear about the film as a NASA flak on stage explained what he could and told us that more film would have to be taken on a future mission – at a cost to IMAX of millions -- because the company’s camera had inexplicably jammed during Discovery mission, resulting in the scheduled film opportunities to be severely cut back. I tried to remember the best material Mullane was feeding me – it was too dark in the theater to take notes – but I was contantly distracted by someone sitting directly behind me who apparently had a terrible cold and was making the usual and unavoidable rude noises a nose makes under the circumstances. After a few minutes it was obvious Mullane was also annoyed by the sniffler
.
When the lights came up, the first thing we both did was turn around to get a look at this virus-spreading joker. But the joke was on us. We both immediately realized that that the noisy nose belonged to Apollo 11 command capsule pilot Michael Collins. If Collins was major hero to me, he was a demi-god to Mullane. Embarrassed, we quickly faced forward, smirked at each other and never said a word to the first man to circle the moon alone while his two crewmates frolicked on the surface and collected moon rocks -- and most of the glory.
The incident proved to be a big break for me. After the film, Mullane introduced me to his mission colleague, Judy Resnik. He wanted her to confirm the space secret he had just told me The story served as the punch line to a brief description of some of the problems plaguing the $50 million and growing zero-gravity toilet, a device that 25 years later still doesn’t work right.
Slightly annoyed, Resnik confirmed the payoff -- that the favorite time for shuttle crews happened every 90 minutes. That was when they all secretly left what they were doing and went to a window to see the moment that had been dubbed the shuttle “urine dump at sunrise.”
Mullane explained that NASA freeze-dries and saves astronaut solid waste matter (for further study?), but shoots their collected liquid urine into space for disposal. (In the new ISS, the urine is recycled and serves as drinking water.) It didn’t take long for crews to learn that once exposed to the zero-gravity vacuum of space, the urine broke up into micro-droplets, instantly froze into countless tiny perfect spheres which spread out in an equally-perfect circular pattern. Done with the spectacular backdrop of a sunrise seen from 200-mile high above the earth, the kaleidoscopic picture was so consistently beautiful that astronauts found it impossible to find the words that could adequately describe the scene.
Mullane had two more shuttle missions before he retired from the program. His memoir, “Riding Rockets,” is one of the best accounts written by an astronaut I have ever come across. I highly recommend it. It’s highly informative -- as well as hysterically funny.
I bet you didn’t know that NASA’s training program for astronauts includes an multi-credit course on using the zero-gravity toilet? A large part of this program includes many hours of practice sitting on a mock up of the potty installed on all the shuttles. The practice commode isn’t a working model but instead has a TV camera planted inside on the bottom pointing up at the astronauts’ butts. Its purpose is to teach crew members how to position themselves directly over the spot where their waste matter is supposed to go. Any bit of feces that misses the bull’s eye ends up a disgusting mess so it’s very important to learn how to do this right because every astronaut is responsible for cleaning up anything of his that misses the target.
But without gravity helping, it’s almost impossible to hit the right spot. Mullane’s theory is that crap never comes out straight but curves to one side making target practice a useless exercise. Another problem is that anything that does misses and doesn’t get stuck to the walls of the toilet is liable to escape containment and wind up floating in the cabin, eventually stinking to a piece of equipment or, even worse, a crewmate. The one place it doesn’t go is to the floor – remember, there’s no gravity to send it there.
These unidentified floating turds happen all the time. The astronauts call them “floaters” and “streakers,” depending I guess on shape and consistency. The problem is so bad that astronauts strip naked whenever they attempt a BM because, as Mullane said, “It’s much easier to wipe feces off your skin tham it is to get it off your clothes.” The astronaut said the bowel movement “is truly the most difficult part of any spaceflight.” What normally takes five minutes on earth takes at least a half hour in space, he says.
It’s also the source for much humor. The best toilet humor was a legendary skit performed by astronaut Bill Shepherd during an 1984 flight. Shepherd sneaked a piece of breakfast sausage with him into the toilet during a BM.When he finished, he set the tube steak free to float through the cabin. “As panicked crewmembers ricocheted from wall to wall in a mad retreat from the offending planetoid,” Mullane says, “Bill chased after it with a piece of toilet tissue. He finally grabbed it and then, to the horror of all, he ate it.” Ah, “Caddy Shack Goes to Space.” Somewhere, Bill Murray is smiling.
Astro urine is a whole other subject. The problem is at its worst when the Astros are dressed in their space suits. Male crewmembers deal with the problem with a form of “stadium buddy,” condom-like devices that fill up plastic collection bags strapped to legs. The condoms are sized but, well, you know, who’s ever going to ask for a small one? Therefore, “slippage” is a constant problem. Such an accident can have serious -- very serious -- consequences. Imagine if it happened during a space walk and an astronaut found himself covered with his piss. It’s actually happened and reportedly it wasn’t pretty, partly because mankind managed to learn a long time ago that you simply can’t take a shower in space. So we’re talking about the use of an enormous amount of wet naps. Enough said.
Anyway, I bet you also didn’t know that astronauts Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin used urine collection devices (UCDs) when they walked on the moon. Actually, they each used two of them and then they left them there – on the moon, right under the famous plaque signed by Richard Nixon that famously stated: “They came in peace for all mankind.” They didn’t take them home and collect the deposit because the filled UCDs weighed too much and would have used too much fuel to get them back to earth. But the real point of this story is that two of the UCDs were size large and two were size small. To this day, which astronaut belonged to which size UCD remains a national secret. And that’s probably as it should be.
The human body is just not designed to live without gravity. The mysterious force effects almost everything humans do. We haven’t begun to scratch the surface of what we need to learn to successfully escape from our poor doomed planet. We had better get our asses in gear if we want to give our great-grand-children’s children a decent chance of surviving the coming end of the world
Consider one of the basic requirements man needs to survive and perpetuate the species -- sex. It appears likely that no human couple has ever successfully become members of a 200-mile high club yet – despite a married Russian couple who spent six months together in the International Space Station. NASA actually has a rule that prohibites even attempting the act and claiming another historic first for America. Without getting too technical here, the reason probably has to do with Newton’s law that says every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Also, there is practically no privacy for crew members aboard shuttles and very little more on the much larger ISS.
NASA doctors dismiss the idea anyway. They maintain that the effects of zero gravity on the human blood supply make it impossible for the human penis to become erect. They never say how they know this but our friend Mike Mullane has first-hand knowledge that the space agency is all wet. His memoir describes waking up for the first time in space to a surprise.
“My closest friend was alert and waiting,” he writes. “I had an erection so intense it was painful. I could have drilled through kryptonite.” On Mullane’s total three trips into space before he retired, he says that most of the time when he woke up after a sleep cycle, his “wooden puppet friend was there to greet me.” NASA did not respond to any of my phone calls and emails for comment.
When the shuttle toilet malfunctions, which has been disturbingly often, the crew reverts to their backup systems. For number one, they use small plastic bags. Sounds easy for men, doesn’t it. It’s not. You would think he would just open the bag, stick his business inside and let go. But it doesn’t work like that. First, there’s the splash factor, which makes it incredibly difficult to keep the undesirable liquid waste matter inside the bag. After all, even astronauts have only two hands to work with and this activity is not conducive to team efforts. Astronauts have learned to deal with the splash factor by placing a couple of wadded tissues in the bottom of the bag to blot up the stream of urine and stop comeback streams. This has been only moderately successful, according to NASA.
The other problem with urine collection has been described as the “final shake factor.” The initial rushing stream from an astronaut is enough to overcome the lack of gravity. But, as every man knows, the final drops usually require a shake to fling them from the male appendage. This action doesn’t work in space and globules of urine just collect on the head of the space penis, so astronauts finish the job with an extra tissue to blot the final drops left over. Astronauts complain this seems excessively feminine and object to it. Besides, any paper products used during the activity must be disposed of in a special system which uses some suction to contain the paper inside yet another plastic bag. Even this method doesn’t always work and there’s very few things worse than coming up on a floating snow storm of urine and feces smeared wadded up balls of tissue paper.
Still want to be an astronaut?
I know this is getting tedious, so I’ll just briefly describe the backup system used for BMs when the toilet breaks. Briefly its just a platic bag with adhesive on the open end to stick the bag on the crewmember’s butt. They’ve been used since Gemini missions with very little change. You stick them on and then the fun part starts. With no gravity, how do you get the BM to drop neatly into the bag? Well, it can’t be done without help, so NASA has provided two finger holes on the collection bag that are used by the astronaut (one hopes) to “pinch off” his turd. It’s never nice and is rarely completed without incident.. Most astronauts drink very little and eat foods designed to result in as few BMs as possible.
And I’m not even going to deal with what, by far, is the most disgusting thing astronauts have to deal with – vomit. The sad fact is that everyone who goes into space gets sick and throws up, which is why the famous steak and eggs breakfast made famous by the early space program and still a tradition in the space program is NEVER eaten by crew members. If you think doing your number one and number twos in space is hard to master, wait until you try to contain a stream of you know what in the paper vomit bags provided in abundance. Every crew has their favorite stories describing the most disgusting moments of there mission. But you won’t hear any of them here. I admit that even I am getting a little queasy.
The famous “Urine Dump at Sunrise” was finally stopped when it almost became deadly on one of Mullane’s missions. NASA had noticed that one returned shuttle showed an abnormal amount of damage to the all-important heat shield tiles around the nozzle used for the urine dump. So, a few days into the mission, they had Mullane’s crew use the TV camera on the shuttle’s robot arm to take a look at the suspect nozzle. Mullane reports they discovered a large “urine-sicle” attached to the outlet just waiting to break off during reentry and damage a lot of those tiles. So until the nozzle could be redesigned, they told the crew to use the arm to snap off the offending frozen pee and stop using the toilet for number 1 missions.
Mullane’s description of male crew members using the toilet to leave their solid waste without letting any pee escape is classically funny. It’s written so well, I think you should buy the book and read it for yourself. Just one hint – they ran out of tissues to wad up and ended up usigng their dirty socks to piss on. Really.
The best break I ever got in reporting was when Mullane introduced me to Judy Resnik. Judy hated reporters – and just about everyone else who mightconsidered her a celebrity. And it was easy to see her that way because she was the first Jew to go into space as well as the second American woman to get launched. And she was beautiful -- and I mean she had been born breathtakingly, naturally beautiful. Mullane, who had a special relationship with her (she called him Tarzan and he called her JR) describes in some detail in his book how difficult it was to keep his marriage vows when he found himself alone with Judy during their training. Judy was also unmarried and a strict feminist who always insisted on being treated exactly the same as any male astronaut. It has long been rumored that that was the reason why Sally Ride got the nod to be the first woman and not Judy.
I learned to stay away from the dangerous subjects when I spoke to her and we usually got along pretty well when he ran into each other, usually in Bernard’s Surf, a popular restaurant and bar in Coco Beach bar south of the space center. I never mentioned Judy or referred to anything she ever told me in any of the hundreds of stories I wrote about the shuttle program for The Post over the years. I had been told that there were subjects that really ticked her off -- like her Judaism. She would uneasily talk about what had happened in orbit -- usually giving short answer that always implied she was treated just like her male crew mates, but only up to a point. Once, after her second flight in space, I told her that I thought her new haircut looked great when she was weightless in space. After she saw pictures of herself taken during her first mission, she had cut her naturally dark curly hair so it formed a perfectly round bubble on her head when it wasn’t held down by gravity. She got mad at me over the remark.
It wasn't until very recently that the world learned a secret that Judy insisted her crew mates keep after her first mission -- that the reason that expensive IMAX camera had jammed was because her hair had got stuck in the mechanism. (Actually, she said something like "I'll cut your hearts out with a spoon" if anyone told the truth. Pure Judy.
It wasn't until very recently that the world learned a secret that Judy insisted her crew mates keep after her first mission -- that the reason that expensive IMAX camera had jammed was because her hair had got stuck in the mechanism. (Actually, she said something like "I'll cut your hearts out with a spoon" if anyone told the truth. Pure Judy.
Judy was my favorite astronaut ever. I stopped covering the space program after the Challenger disaster. Judy was on that mission and covering the explosion and investigation was a constant reminder of how horrible her death had easily it could have been avoided.
A hour after what was lelf of the shuttle fell into the Atlantic, I was on a flight to the space center to cover the disaster. As I thought Judy’s last moments -- alive and conscious for over a minute and aware she was plunging toward certain death -- I saw I was holding onto both armrests so tightly that my knuckles had turned completely white. I was scared to death. It was the only time in my life that I’ve been afraid while I was flying.
A hour after what was lelf of the shuttle fell into the Atlantic, I was on a flight to the space center to cover the disaster. As I thought Judy’s last moments -- alive and conscious for over a minute and aware she was plunging toward certain death -- I saw I was holding onto both armrests so tightly that my knuckles had turned completely white. I was scared to death. It was the only time in my life that I’ve been afraid while I was flying.
Judy would never had said it to a reporter, but I’m sure she would have told her crew mates that at least she was glad she died doing what she truly loved to do. At least I hope so.
Rest in peace Judy.
