The Fright Stuff

Astronaut Receptionist Training

In July of 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first man to plant a foot on the moon. By most accounts he was just the dude for the job but it's not like they exhausted the possibilities. John Kennedy had made the call to put a Man on the Moon in 1961 and I was not even in the running. I might have had a shot at being an astronaut's receptionist. Which is not fair. Also, I was eight. Which, the way I see it, meant I was all potential.

By 1961 Neil Armstrong had been a test pilot flying faster than the speed of sound for several years, and I was still asking the kickball pitcher to roll it Slow and Smooth so that I would not be knocked over at home plate. It is worth noting that prudence is a virtue in space travel. I was already beginning to sense my powers. For instance, merely by stepping up to the plate, I was able to make the entire outfield come forward ten feet.

Kennedy worried that, as a nation, we were not most of us astronaut material, and were instead heading toward doughiness. At the time, you could count on finding one roundish kid in every class of thirty, and not the 25 you see today, but for him that was one roundish kid too many, and he vowed to get us off the green bean bake and marshmallow salad and out into the playground. The President's Council on Physical Fitness got us all out there doing sit-ups and chin-ups and shuttle runs and the 600 Yard Dash, later renamed the 600 Yard Walk And Run because of kids like me, who disturbed a minimum of dust for 300 yards and then straggled to the finish line gaping like a landed guppy. Girls didn't do chin-ups. We hung from the bar for as long as we could, in my case approaching five seconds. It is worth noting the the ability to do chin-ups is of no value in space.

Meanwhile, Neil Armstrong got slotted right into the astronaut lineup before anyone even got my phone number, which even NASA didn't want to dial because it had two zeroes. He did well. Armstrong had lightning reflexes and a cool, clear head in moments of crisis. He once coaxed a spaceship out of a death spiral by reaching over his head and flicking all the pertinent switches in a precise order whilst tumbling end over end once a second. I feel woozy if I look up into a tree too long, I still listen for a dial tone on my cell phone, and sometimes I tip over while putting on my sock because it never occurs to me to let go of the sock. It is worth noting that I have never been given the benefit of astronaut training.

On the fateful day or possibly night of the moon landing, Neil Armstrong held off near the surface looking for a good landing spot until he had only fifteen seconds of fuel left. I do not play the odds. If I went skydiving, I would pull that ripcord in the first second out of the plane. I leave so much space between my car and the one I'm following that people keep moving into the gap, until eventually I'm going backwards and discover I haven't left my driveway yet.

Assuming I had been allowed to be an astronaut, which might have occurred as long as they didn't winnow people out by popping a paper bag behind them and seeing who levitates, I could have made a significant contribution. I could have been the first person to test the on-board computers with a variety of bodily fluids. I could have demonstrated the potential of harnessing the propulsive power of panic diarrhea. It is worth noting that more is learned from the mishaps than when everything goes smoothly.

Neil Armstrong was gracious and glib when speaking publicly but ultimately retired to his farm in Ohio, preferring it to the demands of fame. That is exactly what I, astronaut-like, would do if I were famous. But the similarities stop there. I would never have left the "a" out of the "one small step" speech. Never.

Kick-Astronauts

They've had six astronauts cooped up in a can since June of last year, and they're not planning to let them out until November, after 520 days. That's the amount of time it would take to get to Mars and back. It's a test for future manned space flight, and it's pretty clever, really. Most of us would have thought the sticking point would be the actual getting them to Mars, not to mention back again, but all of that rocket science would be for nothing if the astronauts started punching holes in each other's suits or peeing in each other's Tang twelve months in. You've got the potential for serious acrimony among the crew after a certain amount of forced occupation, and you've also got the possibility that any given individual would not be able to bear up. For all we know, even astronauts selected for their emotional sturdiness might do themselves in on a cellular level, their tiny cells slitting their tiny wrists out of sheer boredom,  and the astronauts themselves being reduced to a gummy mass of spilled mitochondria and despair. No one has actually performed such a longevity experiment before, outside of Guantanamo. You simply can't know what will happen until you try, so they jammed the guys in and started counting down the days.

That's just one thing they need to test for. There's also the difficulty that is presented when humans are deprived  of gravity for prolonged periods. With nothing to push against, muscles dwindle out of pure apathy until the entire astronaut is no longer al dente, and becomes more of a custard when reintroduced to Earth. It would be a pity to spend all that time sending a guy to Mars and then just have to pour him out when he gets there and hope he jells up.

This experiment did not address that issue or attempt to remove gravity in any way. The men were simply cooped up and allowed to age in what is essentially a shipping container, described as similar to four Winnebagos with connecting tunnels. A year in, all seemed to be well enough, although the turn signal has been on since March.

The astronauts in the experiment were distributed as follows: three Russian, one French, one Italian, and one Chinese. The "marsonauts," as they are called, did very well at first. Early conflicts were resolved when they were able to agree on a standard cuisine of goose liver and dog cacciatore with a cricket crust, the Russians reluctantly going along as long as the vodka didn't run out.

I get it about the jamming people into a can for fifteen months to see how they do. Some people are probably better suited than others. Dave spends an astounding amount of time in the can and it doesn't seem to bother him a bit.

But it's not easy for any group of people to get along when they're in forced company for any length of time. Humor is essential. Take the post office, a social experiment I was inserted into back in 1977. There I was in a room with dozens of other people (well, men), sorting mail day after day. The process of sorting your mail is called "getting your route up." Pronounce it "root," and ask your neighbor as often as possible if his root is up yet, and you have the makings of some serious comedy. But even this level of sustained hilarity isn't going to tide a person over forever. In fact, there's only so long you can take it. In my case, thirty-one years.

Sometime in September the emotional limit appeared to have been reached with the astronauts, two months shy of the time it would take to get them back to Earth from Mars. I'm not sure how they communicated their distress. I don't know if they banged on the can or just came out shootin'. "Screw the pension," they might have said. "I'm going out, and I'm taking some management ass with me."

To Boldly Go

I wasn't quite in Junior High when John Glenn, who lived across the street from the school, blasted into space, but I was like all children of the time who thrilled to the venture and the possibility of landing a man on the moon, and wondered how they went potty. Number Two was always number one in our minds, and it was hard to suppress visions of tumbling turds in the spacecraft and the possible variations on dodge-ball that might ensue. Well, we were children. Sadly, it doesn't get much more sophisticated when you grow up.

In fact it puts me in mind of a particular morning in the post office when the boss came on the intercom with an announcement. The sewer workers had the lines open right outside our building and there had been a request that we refrain from using the toilets to do anything important if we could possibly help it. Well, you haven't seen a group of workers pull together and strain for a common purpose like that in your life. Just the thought that someone would be in a position to admire our interpretive renditions of last night's burritos was enough to inspire a regular flotilla past the sewer workers, special delivery, flushed with pride.

Postal workers may well be a special subset of humanity, but everyone wonders how the astronauts cope. And it has proved vexing even for rocket scientists. Even Number One is troublesome. Each astronaut is equipped with his own funnel, in one of three sizes, the smallest of which, in the interest of maintaining morale, is called "large." Female astronauts would seem to be at a bit of a disadvantage, and that is indeed so, but they were marginally better off when it came to Number Two. My research reveals that the astronauts contemplating a boom-boom were required to use individual fecal bags which they taped to their buttocks and then ripped off. So hairlessness was to one's benefit. Shortly before I blacked out, I learned that the bags, once removed, required kneading.

All this was ameliorated with the invention of the space toilet. The main problem with the process of elimination in space is, um, separation. I had not properly appreciated the role of gravity in disconnecting ourselves from our waste materials. I had always thought we bring a certain amount of pressure to bear, especially sometimes, but it actually takes the entire mass of the planet to finish the job. Lacking that, we can remain attached to our effluent. It does shine a new light on Neil Armstrong's famous moonwalk, already a cheerful, bouncy affair, which would only be jollied up by a set of dancing dingleberries, don't you think? Fortunately, our astronauts do not need to float about the space stations trailing a string of sausages. All that is required is some negative pressure, a.k.a. suction. Negative pressure for the separation of urine from men is no doubt a finely calibrated thing. Too little, no separation; too much, no urine. They probably tested for months.

Merging a toilet with a vacuum was fraught at first. Four out of five astronauts were unhappy with the beater bar. And maneuvering to the toilet in space takes practice. Flatulence can send an astronaut tumbling through the air; if they're anything like Dave, it could even lead to head injuries. The toilet itself is a hole only four inches wide, and positioning is vital. The astronaut must center himself and clamp himself down with handles over the thighs (see "flatulence," above). The fecal matter is stored in a cylinder with what is called "unlimited storage capacity," which is another name for space. It is periodically expelled from the craft and eventually returns to earth, where what doesn't burn out during re-entry--and who among us hasn't experienced that--rains down mainly on the offices of Fox News, which has the most efficient dispersal mechanism.

The collected urine, on the other hand, is purified to the point of being potable, a process that led directly to the invention of Tang.

All of this required a lot of testing before it was put into place. The only place to test weightlessness on earth is the Vomit Comet, an airplane that in the course of a steep parabolic flight pattern delivers the sensation of weightlessness for about 25 seconds. In order to test their toilet, NASA needed to come up with volunteers who could pop a doot in that amount of time.

No one in our household will be solicited, I know that. The second the Vomit Comet takes off I will have suffered a premature evacuation. And Dave, who prides himself on his abilities in this department and loves thrill rides to boot, will be turned away at the door when they see him lumbering up with a stack of magazines.