Free Packing For Mars by Mary Roach

Heinz Haber, “deeply affect the autonomic nervous functions and ultimately produce a very severe sensation of succumbence associated with an absolute incapacity to act.” I queried an online dictionary about succumbence. It said, “Did you mean succulents?”
    The only way to know was to send a “simulated pilot” up there—to launch an animal in the nose of a thundering V-2 rocket. The last attempt at something similar took place in 1783. That time the experimenters were Joseph and Étienne de Montgolfier, the inventors of the hot-air balloon. It was like something from a children’s book. A duck, a sheep, and a rooster went for a ride beneath a beautiful balloon, in the skies over Versailles on a summer afternoon. On they sailed, over the king’s palace and the courtyard filled with waving, cheering men and women. In fact, it was an ingenious, controlled inquiry into the effects of “high” (1,500 feet) altitude on a living organism. The duck was the control. Since ducks are accustomed to such altitudes, the brothers could assume that any harm that befell one was likely to have been caused by something else. The balloon landed uneventfully after a two-mile voyage. “The animals were fine,” reads Étienne de Montgolfier’s report of the flight, “and the sheep had pissed in the cage.”
    Gravity turned out to be the least of the Alberts’ concerns. There were six Alberts, told apart, like kings or movie sequels, by the Roman numeral after their name. It was Albert II who made history. (Albert I suffocated while awaiting liftoff.) The excellent volume Animals in Space reproduced the historic printout from the recorder that monitored Albert II’s heart beats and the breaths he took during the zero-gravity portion of the flight, 83 miles high. They did not stray far from normal. (He had, like all the Alberts, been anesthetized.) They were also among his last. The nose cone tore loose from its parachute and fell to the desert floor. At worst, a lethal scenario. At best, a very severe sensation of succulents. The National Archives has footage of Albert II’s launch and flight. I didn’t order a copy. The shot list was enough.
    CU [CLOSE-UP]:…Several scenes of little monkey being prepared for flight in V-2, being placed in box with head sticking out, given hypodermic…
    Night shot, launching of V-2.
    CU: Parachute rolled up into ball on ground.
    CU: Smashed instruments and equipment in warhead.
    CU: Remains of the section containing the monkey.
    AT FIRST BLUSH, Project Albert is difficult to fathom. Here are men contemplating sending a human being into space atop a tank carload of explosive chemicals, and they’re worried he might be harmed by gravity?
    To understand the Project Albert mind-set, you need to spend a few moments pondering the forces of gravitation. If you are like me, you have tended to think of gravity in terms of minor personal annoyances: broken glassware and sagging body parts. Until this week, I failed to appreciate the gravitas of gravity. Along with electromagnetism and strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity is one of the “fundamental forces” that power the universe. It was reasonable to assume that gravity might have something darker up its sleeve that mankind was yet unaware of.
    A quick refresher: Gravity is the pull, measurable* and predictable, that one mass exerts on another. The more mass involved, and the shorter the distance between the masses, the stronger the pull. The moon is more than 200,000 miles away, yet it is massive enough that without any conscious effort, without plugging anything in, it pulls the Earth’s water and even its tectonic plates moonward, causing ocean and (very, very small) land tides. (Earth exerts similar forces on the moon.)
    Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God. In the beginning, the cosmos was nothing but empty space and vast clouds of gases. Eventually the gases cooled to the point where tiny