Space, the final frontier
So I just finished "Packing for Mars," the latest tome of interesting factoids by Mary Roach, who wrote "Stiff" and "Spook." As usual it was fascinating. This latest book was about, as you can guess, space travel...the more accessible vagaries of it. Like the people NASA pays to lie in bed for months at a time and not move so they can study bone-loss caused by low-grav. Or the people they've paid to not bathe for weeks on end to study the effects of hygiene restriction.
It's amazing all the things that zero-gravity affects.
Unsurprisingly, a good part of the book was about two essential practicalities that must be dealt with when you send humans into space...input and output, shall we say. Did you know that the signal to urinate doesn't work in space? You know you have to pee when your bladder starts to fill, triggering sensors that tell you to go with increasing urgency as time passes. Except in zero-g, urine doesn't collect at the bottom of your bladder, but surface tension makes it adhere to the sides, which means the "gotta go" signal doesn't get sent until the bladder is full enough to start stretching the sides, by which time it might be kinda too late and you might have to get catheterized. It's also hard to burp in space. Gas bubbles in your stomach don't rise to the top without gravity. And don't EVEN get me started on all the ways not having gravity affects one's ability to effectively have a BM. Let's just say that achieving "good separation" is a major topic of study for the guys whose job this is.
Another interesting effect of zero-g is on your blood volume. Without gravity to pull your blood down into your legs, it tends to pool in the chest and upper body. But interestingly enough, the nerves that sense the body's blood volume are all IN the upper body, so they interpret this as too much fluid, and cuts the body's blood volume by as much as 15%. It takes astronauts awhile to rebuild their blood volume after returning, and until they do, some of them have been prone to fainting. NASA has also yet to find a solution to the bone loss that occurs in zero-g. Exercise helps a tiny bit. Not a lot. The only way to do it really is to induce gravity, like in 2001 with the rotating room. Not quite in the budget yet.
Another topic I found interesting was women in space. On paper, women are better space travelers. On average they're smaller and lighter, and consume less food and air, which means less payload, and NASA is all about weight when you're talking about launching something out of orbit. So why didn't early space programs have all women astronauts?
Because they can't pee into plastic tubes. Full stop.
Drat. Undone by biology AGAIN.
It's amazing all the things that zero-gravity affects.
Unsurprisingly, a good part of the book was about two essential practicalities that must be dealt with when you send humans into space...input and output, shall we say. Did you know that the signal to urinate doesn't work in space? You know you have to pee when your bladder starts to fill, triggering sensors that tell you to go with increasing urgency as time passes. Except in zero-g, urine doesn't collect at the bottom of your bladder, but surface tension makes it adhere to the sides, which means the "gotta go" signal doesn't get sent until the bladder is full enough to start stretching the sides, by which time it might be kinda too late and you might have to get catheterized. It's also hard to burp in space. Gas bubbles in your stomach don't rise to the top without gravity. And don't EVEN get me started on all the ways not having gravity affects one's ability to effectively have a BM. Let's just say that achieving "good separation" is a major topic of study for the guys whose job this is.
Another interesting effect of zero-g is on your blood volume. Without gravity to pull your blood down into your legs, it tends to pool in the chest and upper body. But interestingly enough, the nerves that sense the body's blood volume are all IN the upper body, so they interpret this as too much fluid, and cuts the body's blood volume by as much as 15%. It takes astronauts awhile to rebuild their blood volume after returning, and until they do, some of them have been prone to fainting. NASA has also yet to find a solution to the bone loss that occurs in zero-g. Exercise helps a tiny bit. Not a lot. The only way to do it really is to induce gravity, like in 2001 with the rotating room. Not quite in the budget yet.
Another topic I found interesting was women in space. On paper, women are better space travelers. On average they're smaller and lighter, and consume less food and air, which means less payload, and NASA is all about weight when you're talking about launching something out of orbit. So why didn't early space programs have all women astronauts?
Because they can't pee into plastic tubes. Full stop.
Drat. Undone by biology AGAIN.