Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

13. WITHERING HEIGHTS Bailing Out from Space

The Perris SkyVenture vertical wind tunnel is a hurricane in a can. Air rushes at 100-plus miles per hour through the core of a cylindrical building that resembles an air-traffic control tower. It’s probably not the tallest building in Perris—a sprawl of malls and tract homes a couple hours out from Los Angeles—but it feels like it. Up near the top, where the controllers would be sitting, a set of doors open onto the column of wind. Customers lean into the air, open their arms and legs as they fall, and are lifted off their feet. It’s the sensation of free fall with no danger or rush: skydiving with its balls removed. If it is your first visit, a staff person helps steady you in case you drift upward and panic and bounce off the walls like an air-popped kernel.

Today is Felix Baumgartner’s first visit to SkyVenture, but no one is holding on to him. Baumgartner, a photogenic forty-one-year-old Austrian, is a high-profile skydiver and BASE[80] jumper. You can go on YouTube and watch Baumgartner jump off the outstretched right arm of the enormous Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro or, more prosaically, the roof of the Warsaw Marriott. For most of his jumps he wears a skydiver’s jumpsuit. In the Marriott video, he’s dressed in business casual. He’s done this to pass through the lobby without arousing suspicion, but the impression it gives, as you watch him walk to the edge of the roof in his tie and dress shirt, is that jumping off buildings is just another day on the job for Felix Baumgartner.

This evening finds Baumgartner dressed like an astronaut. He has traveled to Perris this week as part of the Red Bull Stratos Mission. The mission’s aims are twofold. I’m mainly interested in the aeromedical side of it. Baumgartner is testing a modified emergency escape suit made by the David Clark Company, makers of spacesuits since the days of the Mercury space program.[81] Since 1986, when Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 72 seconds after launch, astronauts have worn pressure suits not just while spacewalking, but during launch, reentry, and landing—the chanciest parts of a flight. Baumgartner will wear it to keep himself alive during a “space dive” from 23 miles (120,000 feet) up. (It’s not technically space—space begins at 62 miles—but it’s close; atmospheric pressure at that altitude is less than one one-hundredth of what it is at sea level.) The jump—slated for summer or fall 2010 in an undisclosed locale—will provide escape-system engineers with hard-to-come-by information about the behavior of a falling body in a pressurized suit in extremely thin air and the reactions of that body to transonic and supersonic speeds. Because there’s so little air resistance up there, Baumgartner is expected to reach 690 miles per hour, rather than the 120-miles-per-hour terminal velocity of a typical free fall at lower altitude. No one has ever bailed out in a spaceflight emergency, and it isn’t clear how best to do it safely in all phases of flight.

Baumgartner says he’s proud of the contributions he’ll be making to safer space travel, but he’s primarily interested in breaking records. The current skydiving altitude record is 102,800 feet. That record was also set by a man testing high-altitude survival gear. In 1960, in a project called Excelsior, Air Force captain Joe Kittinger stepped from an open-top steel gondola carried by a helium balloon and skydived, in a partial pressure suit, 19 miles to the ground. He was testing a multistage parachute system. In his oral history transcript on file at the New Mexico Museum of Space History, Kittinger says he broke the sound barrier while free-falling, but he did not carry the equipment needed to make the record official. Thus Baumgartner will likely also make the record books as the first human to reach supersonic speed without a jet or other conveyance.

The Stratos Mission is funded in large part by Baumgartner’s corporate sponsor, Red Bull. Sponsoring extreme athletes is Red Bull’s way of telling the world that the brand stands not just for caffeinated pop, but for, as the press releases say, “pushing limits” and “making the impossible happen.” Teenage boys with little hope of becoming pro skateboarders or record-breaking BASE jumpers can nonetheless drink the drink and feel the feeling. NASA might do well to adopt the Red Bull approach to branding and astronautics. Suddenly the man in the spacesuit is not an underpaid civil servant; he’s the ultimate extreme athlete. Red Bull knows how to make space hip.

Baumgartner looks the part. To quote an industrial cutting materials pamphlet I saw not long ago, he has very good bulk and edge-line toughness. He looks like Mark Wahlberg and sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he’s cooler than either. He’s in the wind tunnel now, holding facedown in the classic spread-eagle free-fall position. The spacesuit has been pressurized. I count ten charging red bulls. The logos appear vertically on the suit’s arms and legs, making some of the bulls appear to be executing a skydiving move called the sit-fly. Baumgartner reaches around to his front to get a feel for the placement of the ripcord. (He can’t see it, because the spacesuit prevents him from bending his neck.) Now he straightens his legs, assessing the suit’s flexibility. This adds surface area for the wind to push against, and he shoots up ten feet, and then stops, hovering above a group of onlookers like a Thanksgiving parade balloon.

Not since Joe Kittinger’s day have escape suits and emergency parachute systems been tested in high-altitude skydives. (It’s too expensive. Baumgartner will ascend in a pressurized capsule suspended below a huge—26 million cubic feet—helium balloon.) They probably should be. With so little air resistance, it’s hard to control one’s body position. Imagine holding your hand in the wind outside a car window at 60 miles per hour. By angling it slightly to present more or less surface to the wind, you can feel obvious shifts in direction and pressure. If the car were traveling 23 miles in the air, you’d feel none of that. It’s harder for skydivers—or astronauts or space tourists ejecting at high altitude—to stop a spin, and a poorly designed suit could make the situation worse. Baumgartner will need to free-fall for about 30 seconds before he gains enough speed to generate the wind force needed to control his position—or to benefit from the emergency stabilization chute he’ll carry.

The dangers of spinning were explained to me by retired Air Force colonel and master parachutist Dan Fulgham. Fulgham was Joe Kittinger’s backup for the record-setting Project Excelsior jump and a veteran escape-system tester for the U.S. Air Force and NASA. During a test of the X-20 “space plane” ejection system, Fulgham went into a flat spin and experienced centrifugal forces so strong that he could not bend his arms to his chest to pull the ripcord. “It was like I was encased in iron,” he told me. His chute opened automatically, but he came close to dying even so. Sensors clocked him spinning at 177 revolutions per minute (rpm). “We ran some monkeys on the centrifuge at Wright-Pat,” he said, referring to the Wright-Patterson Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories,, “where the force was outward on the head at about 144 rpm. The brain compressed enough into the top of the skull that it separated from the spinal cord. That should have happened to me.” He could also have died from redout, wherein blood is spun into the brain with enough force to rupture vessels. Did you see figure skater Mirai Nagasu with a bloody nose at the end of her 2010 Olympic routine? Same sort of thing. Centrifugal force spun the blood in her head outward like water in a salad spinner.

One thing Baumgartner and the Stratos team want to check today is whether the suit allows him to get into “tracking” posture: angled downward with his arms extended Superman-style in front of him. Tracking position causes the skydiver to move laterally as he falls. This is explained to me by Art Thompson, the technical director of the Red Bull Stratos Mission, who is overseeing tonight’s tests. Thompson uses a pair of folded reading glasses to demonstrate. By shifting the center of rotation, the tracking position changes a tight, level turntable spin into a larger, slower three-dimensional spiral. Thompson’s glasses track out away from his chest and arc around to the left. If that doesn’t work, the forces of the spin will trigger the release of a stabilizing chute called a drogue. The drogue will pull Baumgartner’s head upright and keep him from spinning into a redout scenario and, hopefully, save his life. (Unless it deploys prematurely, winds around his neck, and chokes him until he passes out, as Joe Kittinger’s did in an Excelsior dress rehearsal jump from 76,400 feet.)

There is no way, down on Earth, to simulate free fall in a near vacuum. The Project Excelsior team used to try by dropping anthropomorphic dummies out of high-altitude balloons. The results were worrisome. On a side note, civilians would sometimes be passing through the drop zone and head over to see what was going on. Because the project was operated in secrecy and the recovery teams behaved in a furtive, scurrying manner—and because the dummies had fused fingers and no ears or noses—rumors began to spread that a UFO carrying aliens had crashed in the scrubland outside Roswell,[82] and that the military was trying to cover it up.

On one occasion, the “alien” that people were sure they’d seen was Dan Fulgham. Fulgham and Kittinger crashed one Saturday morning as their balloon came down in a field on the outskirts of Roswell. The 800-pound gondola was freed from the balloon too early and began to tumble, coming to a stop on Fulgham’s head. When Fulgham took off his helmet, his head swelled so severely that Kittinger was moved to describe his face as “just a big blob.” Fulgham was taken to the hospital at Walker Air Force Base, which was staffed in part by civilians. I asked Fulgham if he recalls people pointing and staring as though they’d seen an alien. “I don’t know,” he said, “because the only way I could see was to put my fingers up and pry my eyelids open.” When Kittinger led Fulgham down the steps of a plane to his waiting wife, the woman asked Kittinger where her husband was. “I replied, ‘This is your husband,’ and she screamed and began to cry,” wrote Kittinger in his witness statement in the Air Force publication The Roswell Report. I saw photographs of Fulgham taken after the crash. It was weeks before he looked human again.

Thompson thinks the dummy results were misleading and that high-altitude spinning is unlikely to be a serious problem for Baumgartner. I brought up Fulgham’s near-lethal spin and Kittinger’s drogue-chute cravat. Thompson pointed out that back then people didn’t skydive for sport the way they do now. “They weren’t used to the idea of controlling body position in flight. There’s been so much advancement.” This is evident to anyone who’s spent time watching the SkyVenture staff hover and dart like hummingbirds.

But astronauts aren’t experienced skydivers like these guys. And while Baumgartner will begin his descent at zero miles per hour, jumping from a balloon that’s drifting on air currents, a person ejecting from a spacecraft during reentry would be traveling in the neighborhood of 12,000 miles per hour. It’s not a neighborhood you’d want to spend any time in.

THE RED BULL STRATOS MISSION medical director is well qualified for his post. Jon Clark was a high-altitude parachutist for the U.S. Special Forces. He’s been a flight surgeon for NASA Space Shuttle crews, and he was involved in the Columbia investigation. (Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry in February 2003; a piece of foam insulation had broken off the external tank and knocked a hole in the left wing during launch, damaging the thermal protection that the craft needed to reenter the atmosphere safely.) Clark’s team examined the remains of the crew to determine at what point in the disaster’s unfolding they had perished and how, and whether anything might have been done to save them.

Clark isn’t here in Perris today. I met him more than a year ago, up on Devon Island, where I’d gone for the lunar expedition simulations at the HMP Research Station. I heard him before I saw him. His tent was pitched next to mine, and each evening around eleven, I’d hear the pained exhalations of a middle-aged human trying to get comfortable on hard-frozen ground. The night I finally met Clark, he showed me a PowerPoint presentation about the technologies that air forces and space agencies and, lately, private companies have come up with to keep fliers and astronauts alive when things go wrong. It also covered the things that happen when those technologies fail—as Clark put it, “all the things that can kill ya.”

We sat at his desk in the medical tent. No one else was around. A wind turbine outside made a haunted droning sound. At one point, without comment, Clark handed me an STS-107 mission patch, like the one the Columbia astronauts had worn on their suits. I thanked him and set it down on the desk. It seemed like a good time to ask about his work on the Columbia investigation.

I knew from reading the Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report that the astronauts had not had their visors down when the crew compartment lost pressure. I wondered whether they might have survived had their suits been pressurized and had they been equipped with self-deploying parachutes. The closest thing to a precedent was the crash of Air Force test pilot Bill Weaver. On January 25, 1966, Weaver survived when his SR-71 Blackbird broke up around him while traveling Mach 3.2—more than three times the speed of sound. His pressure suit—and the fact that he was flying at 78,000 feet, where the air is about 3 percent as dense as the air at sea level—protected him from the friction heating and windblast that would, at lower altitudes, handily kill a person moving that fast. Columbia was traveling at Mach 17, but given the negligible density of the atmosphere at 40 miles up, the windblast was about the equivalent of a 400-miles-per-hour blast at sea level. (More on windblast shortly.) It presented what Art Thompson describes as a manageable risk. “It’s survivable,” said Clark.

But the Columbia astronauts faced crueler threats than windblast and thermal burns. “We had some very unusual injury patterns that were not explainable by anything that we are accustomed to,” Clark said. By “we,” he meant flight surgeons: people accustomed to brains spun off their stems and limbs snapped by windblast.

“We know how people break apart,” Clark continued. “They break on joint lines.” Like chicken. Like anyone with bones. “But this wasn’t like that. It was like they were severed, but it wasn’t from some structure cutting them up.” He spoke in a flat, quiet manner that reminded me of Agent Mulder from The X-Files. “And it couldn’t have been a blast injury, because you have to have an atmosphere to propagate a blast.”

I was looking at the Columbia patch. The seven crew members’ last names were stitched around the perimeter: MCCOOL RAMON ANDERSON HUSBAND BROWN CLARK CHAWLA. Clark. Something clicked in my head. When I had first arrived on Devon Island, I’d heard that the spouse of one of the Columbia astronauts would be here. Laurel Clark was Jon Clark’s wife, I now realized. I didn’t know whether to say something, or what that something would or should be. The moment passed, and Clark kept talking.

The atmosphere at 40 miles up is too thin for blast waves, but not for shock waves. The investigation team concluded, mostly through a process of elimination, that that’s what killed the Columbia astronauts. Clark explained that in breakups at speeds greater than Mach 5—five times the speed of sound, or about 3,400 miles per hour—an obscure shock-wave phenomenon called shock-shock interaction comes into play. When a reentering spacecraft breaks apart, hundreds of pieces—none with the carefully planned aerodynamics of the intact craft—are flying at hypersonic speeds, creating a chaotic web of shock waves. Clark likened them to the bow waves behind a water-skier’s boat. At the nodes of these shock waves—the places where they intersect—the forces add together with savage, otherworldly intensity.

“It basically fragmented them,” Clark said. “But not everyone. It was very location-specific. We had things that were recovered completely intact.” He said one of the searchers who combed the Columbia’s 400-mile debris path in Texas found a tonometer, a device that measures intraocular pressure. “It worked.”

The wind outside the medical tent had picked up. The turbine made a tortured sound. It was a strange evening. We sat side by side, staring at the slides on Clark’s laptop, him narrating and me listening. Occasionally I’d interrupt with a question, but not the ones on my mind. I wanted to ask him how he had coped with learning the details of his wife’s death. I wondered why he had chosen to join the investigation. It seemed insensitive to ask. I imagine he got involved for the same reason he’s involved in the Red Bull Stratos Mission. He wants to learn everything he can about the things that happen to human bodies when the vehicle in which they are traveling breaks apart at high altitudes and crazy speeds. He wants to apply what he learns to design technologies that can be put in place to protect those bodies, to keep astronauts and space tourists alive, to keep families intact.

It is an extremely complicated challenge. Any spacecraft escape system works for a limited range of altitude and speed. Ejection seats, for instance, will work for the first eight to ten seconds of launch, before Q force—as the interplay of air density and speed-generated wind force is known—builds to a lethal level. An ejection system needs to quickly blast the astronauts far enough away from the craft to keep them from smashing into its appendages or getting caught in the fireball of a catastrophic explosion. The most recent Space Shuttle escape system employed a long pole that crew members would hook onto to slide out away from the craft and clear its wing. Retired aerospace engineer and space historian Terry Sunday points out that this would only work well if the shuttle were flying in stable, straight-and-level flight. “And in that case,” says Sunday, “why would you want to leave it?”

To survive the extreme speed and heat of reentry is yet more problematic. The Russian space agency has tested prototypes of an inflatable crew escape pod called a ballute (an amalgam of balloon and parachute). Heat shielding on the broad forward face of the pod protects the terrified occupant, and the large surface area creates the drag needed to slow the pod to a speed where a multistage parachute system could, if all goes well, lower it safely to Earth. It has never flown all the way from space to the ground. Alternatively, a parachute system could lower an entire capsule or crew cabin to the ground. (Current plans call for NASA’s new Orion capsule to be used initially as an ISS escape pod.) The chute would be heavy and costly to launch—and in the case of the Space Shuttle, the process of separating the crew compartment from the rest of the craft presented serious technical challenges. Also, the parachute would need its own heat shielding to keep it from melting during reentry, and this would make deployment trickier.

What about airplane passengers? Is there a way to bail out safely from a jet that’s about to crash? Why, other than the weight and expense, don’t airlines outfit every seat with a portable oxygen supply and a seat-back parachute? Many reasons. Time for a short primer on windblast and hypoxia.

AT THE HALFWAY POINT of the Beaufort Wind Force Scale, air is traveling 25 to 31 miles per hour. “Umbrella use becomes difficult,” states the Beaufort, a tad overdramatically. The scale tops out at 73 to 190 miles per hour—hurricane-force wind. That is all the blow nature can muster. Where the Beaufort leaves off is where windblast studies begin. Windblast isn’t weather. The air isn’t rushing into you; you are rushing into it—having bailed out or ejected from an imperiled craft.

At the speed of a typical private plane—135 to 180 miles per hour—the effects of windblast are mainly cosmetic. The cheeks are pressed flat against the skull, bestowing a taut, over-face-lifted appearance. I know this both from hideous photographs of me in the SkyVenture wind tunnel and from a 1949 Aviation Medicine paper on the effects of high-velocity windblast. In the latter, a man identified as J.L., handsome at 0 miles per hour, appears in a 275-miles-per-hour windblast with his lips blown agape, gums in full view like an agitated, braying camel.

At 350 miles per hour, the cartilage of the nose deforms and the skin of the face starts to flutter. “The waves begin at the corners of the mouth…and progress across the face at the rate of about 300 per second to the ear, where they break, causing the ear to wave.” Umbrella use is out of the question. At faster speeds this Q force causes deformations that can, as the Aviation Medicine paper gingerly phrases it, “exceed the strength of tissue.”

Cruising speed for a transcontinental passenger jet is between 500 and 600 miles per hour. Do not bail out. “Fatality,” to quote Dan Fulgham, “is pretty much indicated.” A windblast of 250 miles per hour will blow an oxygen mask off your face. At 400 miles per hour, windblast will remove a helmet—as it did to Bill Weaver’s SR-71 copilot. His visor was blown open and acted like a sail, snapping his head back against the neck ring of his suit and breaking his neck. At 500 miles per hour, “ram air” blasts down your windpipe with enough force to rupture various elements of your pulmonary system. An unnamed test pilot mentioned in a paper by John Paul Stapp ejected at more than 600 miles per hour. The windblast pried open his epiglottis and inflated his stomach like a pool toy. (This worked to his advantage, as he had ejected over water. “The estimated three liters of air in the stomach substituted as flotation gear, which he was in no condition to inflate,” wrote Stapp.)

At supersonic speeds, your body would be coping with the kind of Q force that used to regularly shake experimental jets to pieces. Dan Fulgham has heard about pilots who ejected at 600-plus miles per hour. “Ejection seats back then had metal wings on each side of the head to keep it from flopping around,” he told me. “When they did autopsies they found the brains had just been emulsified because of the tremendous vibration of the head between those steel plates.” Whenever they can, fighter pilots stay with a crippled jet until they can slow it down, reducing the Q load and raising their odds of survival. Red Bull has cause to be nervous about Baumgartner. He could be vibrated to death inside his suit as he approaches or surpasses the speed of sound.

The immediate and dire consequence of plunging into thin air is lack of oxygen. At 35,000 feet, a human being has 30 to 60 seconds of “useful consciousness.” You’d definitely want to be first in line at the emergency exit. I can tell you what it’s like to wander out to the edges of useful consciousness. As a prerequisite for the weightless flight I undertook in chapter 5, the engineering students and I took a NASA aerospace physiology seminar that included a hypoxia (not enough oxygen) demonstration inside the Johnson Space Center altitude chamber. By pumping air out of a sealed chamber, technicians can simulate the atmosphere at any altitude, all the way to near-total vacuum—a big box of outer space. Space agency personnel use these chambers to test spacesuits and other equipment that will be exposed to the vacuum of space.

After about a minute with our oxygen masks off at 25,000 feet—where one has two to five minutes of useful consciousness—we were asked to complete a list of mental tasks. One question read, “Subtract 20 from the year you were born.” I felt fine, but I remember puzzling over it, feeling utterly stumped, and moving on. One of the last questions was: “What does NASA stand for?” I obviously know this, but my answer reads, “N.”

More than useful consciousness you would need luck, given that 400 other panicked passengers are bailing out with you, creating a significant danger of tangled parachute lines and canopies. But it would be possible to survive, provided you stay with the plane until it slows to a more survivable speed. You might experience pain, but nothing major. At higher altitudes, as air pressure drops, air inside the body’s own chambers tries to unbutton its shorts and expand. A pocket of gas inside an unfilled tooth cavity may press painfully on nerves. Same sort of thing happens to air in the sinus cavities—particularly if they’re congested. Even gas dissolved in the cerebrospinal fluid inside the brain’s ventricles tries to expand. If I’d had a hole in my skull, my fellow students in the altitude chamber could have watched my brain bulge out of it.[83] The gas expansion you are most likely to notice is in your digestive tract. At 25,000 feet, air in the stomach, for example, expands threefold. “Go ahead and fire it off,” our instructor told us, as if eleven male college students needed an invitation.

BAUMGARTNER IS TAKING a break. He’s slumped in a chair with his helmet in his lap, sipping water. (Perris SkyVenture doesn’t stock Red Bull.) Art Thompson, the project technical director, is in a good mood. The suit is working well, and Baumgartner feels comfortable in it. (As comfortable as anyone ever feels in a spacesuit. As spacesuit historian Harold McMann put it, “It’s not a nice place to be. It’s not even a nice place to visit.”)

As you read this, there’s a good chance Felix Baumgartner will have completed his history-making jump. As I write this, I don’t how it turns out. I am cautiously optimistic. Skydiving from extremely high altitude is risky, but probably not as risky as Baumgartner’s more typical occupation—jumping from extremely low altitude. If something starts to go wrong during a space dive, you have five minutes to figure out how to remedy it. On a BASE jump, you don’t have five seconds. BASE jumpers don’t carry reserve chutes, as there’s no time to deploy them. “That’s why they don’t tend to have a long…” Thompson searches for the right word.

“Life span?” I offer.

“Career.”

Thompson says he isn’t worried. “Eventually, most BASE jumpers get complacent, but Felix is really anal about what he does. That’s what keeps him alive.”

Brave and anal: the ideal space explorer. Though you don’t find “anal” on any of those lists of recommended astronaut attributes. NASA doesn’t really use words like anal. Unless they have to.