Packing For Mars: The Curious Science Of Life In The Void Quotes
"The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you’ll need in space."
"A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding."
"It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander."
"To take an organism whose every feature has evolved to keep it alive and thriving in a world with oxygen, gravity, and water, to suspend that organism in the wasteland of space for a month or a year, is a preposterous but captivating undertaking."
"Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human."
"Only in space do you understand what incredible happiness it is just to walk. To walk on Earth."
"What if man’s organs depended on gravity to function?"
"Gravity turned out to be the least of the Alberts’ concerns."
"At first blush, Project Albert is difficult to fathom."
"Until this week, I failed to appreciate the gravitas of gravity."
"Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God."
"Gravity is the prime reason there’s life on Earth."
"The term 'zero gravity' is misleading when applied to most rocket flights."
"If something provides a supplemental source of acceleration, now your weight will change."
"Why is there this force, this pull between objects?"
"The National Archives has footage of Albert II’s launch and flight."
"The moon is more than 200,000 miles away, yet it is massive enough that it pulls the Earth's water moonward."
"Eventually the Air Force—and you do wonder what took them so long—stopped naming their ill-fated gravity monkeys Albert."
"The astronauts orbiting Earth remain well within the pull of the planet's gravitational field."
"In space, motion sickness is more than an unpleasant embarrassment."
"Mercury capsules, as Ham’s veterinarian Bill Britz says, ‘were not flying machines, they were bullets.’"
"‘People ask, Why?’ says Britz of the era of the spacefaring chimp. ‘Mary, we just didn’t know.’"
"‘The big bugaboo was weightlessness,’ said John Glenn in a 1967 Associated Press interview."
"‘To be preceded by a chimpanzee was just a blow to their ego,’ Bill Britz told me."
"Chuck Yeager, the rightest of stuff, famously put it, ‘I wouldn’t want to have to sweep monkey shit off the seat before I climbed into the capsule.’"
"‘He’s really quite a cool guy and not the performing type at all,’ said Captain Jerry Fineg."
"‘We were trying to see if they could actually fly,’ he told me in an email. ‘They were good!’"
"I don’t need to bother telling you this anymore."
"I’ve been an astronaut for six years, and I’ve been in space for eight days."
"Breathing during the 8 G’s of reentry, for instance, and not throwing up in front of Kazakh farmers."
"Most of the regrowth takes place in the parts of the bone needed to support walking."
"The body tends to redistribute bone to those areas—at the expense of other structures."
"The state of the art for countermeasures right now is the same as it was forty years ago."
"Black bears emerge from their dens after four to seven months in bed with bones as strong as when they turned in."
"Hibernating bears have high 'bad' cholesterol levels."
"I didn’t think it would have that much of an impact."
"He’s just depressing. There’s no joy."
"Formula 11 was thought to be just right. Except by those who had to eat it."
"What happens to the digestive health of a man who consumes regular servings of lard flakes and pregelatinized waxy maize starch?"
"Space food R&D contracts were handed out to the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories."
"Food was often tested at the same time as spacesuits, hygiene regimens, and different cabin atmospheres."
"Stool samples were…homogenized, freeze-dried, and analyzed in duplicate."
"NASA had set its sights on lunar missions up to two weeks long."
"Dieticians weighed, measured, and analyzed what went in, and they did the same with what came back out."
"One test diet scored even lower than the cubed foods."
"Scrimshaw boasted of having fed his MIT subjects liquid formula dinners for two months with no complaint."
"The astronauts no longer eat tubed food, but military pilots do, when they’re in the middle of a mission."