Surviving in Space

A voyage to Mars may be every astronaut’s dream, but the health risks to even the most superbly conditioned earthlings are formidable indeed.

Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.

Boarding a bus at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center north of Moscow, 11 German tourists chat excitedly about their holiday - Russia’s aerospace holiday where you trade cash for thrills and spills. Three men report that tomorrow they will have a ride in the MiG-21 fighter ($4,000 apiece). A slender woman wearing thick glasses and a buzz cut reveals that she is going to do the centrifuge ($2,000), a whirling device that will subject her to perhaps 5 g’s, or five times the force of gravity.

Right now they’re all experiencing the 1 g common to earthlings but are looking forward to a dose of zero gravity (for $1,500 a head) that produces weightlessness or, as the Germans call it, Schwerelosigkeit. At Chkalovsky Air Force Base they enter the huge cargo bay of a four-engine Ilyushin-76 MDK. The brilliantly white aircraft surges down the runway, engines screaming.

At altitude a steep 45-degree climb begins. Bright lights come on, and the pilot says, “Prepare for zero gravity,” then lowers the nose of the airplane to produce about 30 seconds of weightlessness. Magically, we all rise like smoke and float and fly around. Just like that. People wriggling, eyes wide, mouths open, faces smiling, frowning. Bodies turning upside down - a stunning sight that my eyes record but that my brain seems unable to interpret. Maj. Boris V. Naidyonov of the Russian Air Force, my instructor, asks, “You OK?” He is concerned about nausea, and so am I. “I think so,” I reply.

During other zero-gravity periods, one of my companions ricochets off the ceiling. Another does weightless gymnastics. Naidyonov tosses me around the cargo bay like a javelin, twirls me like a baton. This is serious fun, as exhilarating as the airborne maneuvers I’ve taught as an aerobatics flight instructor.

But the slender woman with the buzz cut and two others are silently vomiting into plastic bags. The remainder of the group, while not overtly sick, seem to have lost interest in Schwerelosigkeit.

They are experiencing the motion sickness that afflicts more than two-thirds of all astronauts upon reaching orbit, even veteran test pilots who have never been airsick. Though everyone recovers after a few days in space, body systems continue to change.