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

16. EATING YOUR PANTS Is Mars Worth It?

I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine. It is clear and sweet, though not in the way mountain streams are said to be clear and sweet. More in the way of Karo syrup. The urine has been desalinated by osmotic pressure. Basically it swapped molecules with a concentrated sugar solution. Urine is a salty substance (though less so than the NASA Ames chili), and if you were to drink it in an effort to rehydrate yourself, it would have the opposite effect. But once the salt is taken care of and the distasteful organic molecules have been trapped in an activated charcoal filter, urine is a restorative and surprisingly drinkable lunchtime beverage. I was about to use the word unobjectionable, but that’s not accurate. People object. They object a lot.

“It makes me sick to have urine in the refrigerator,” said my husband Ed. I had finished running yesterday’s output through the charcoal and the osmosis bag, and had placed it, in a glass bottle, on the door of the fridge pending lunch down in Mountain View. I replied that everything objectionable had been filtered out, and that astronauts don’t mind drinking treated urine. Ed made a flaring motion with his nostrils and said that circumstances would have to be “postapocalyptic” for him to consider it.

My lunch date at Ames is Sherwin Gormly, a waste-water engineer who helped design the rig to recycle urine on the International Space Station. He has been referred to in the press as “the urine king.” This doesn’t bother him. What bothered him was being known, briefly, as the guy who said that the moon might be a good place to store weapons-grade plutonium out of reach of megalomaniacal despots. It wasn’t a serious suggestion; just Gormly idly speculating. That’s what they do down at Ames. In case you didn’t pick this up from Norbert Kraft, the NASA of Ames is a different critter from the NASA of Johnson Space Center. “We’re a think tank here at Ames,” says Gormly. “We’re kinda the wingnuts.” Gormly is dressed in cargo pants and a lavender Henley shirt. There’s nothing especially radical about cargo pants and lavender shirts, but in four trips to Johnson Space Center, I never saw either. Gormly is fit and tan. You’d have to inspect him closely to guess his age correctly; some gray creeping into the blond crewcut, the eyebrows just starting to sprout crazies.

We’re not scheduled to land on Mars until sometime in the 2030s, but it’s always at the back of the collective NASA mind. The things dreamt up for a lunar base these past five years were dreamt with an eye on Mars. Much of the most innovative stuff comes out of Ames. Not that it will all fly. “Nothing we do,” says Gormly, “becomes a space reality until it goes through some filters downstream.” You probably want to run anything Sherwin Gormly gives you through some filters.

Landing a spacecraft on Mars is yesterday’s challenge. Space agencies have been blasting landers to Mars for three decades. (Remember, once a craft reaches space, there’s no air drag to slow it down; it keeps traveling through the vacuum of space without needing more rocket power, aside from small course corrections. Space ships basically coast to Mars. The fuel they’d need is for landing and for the return blast back.) Rockets powerful enough to accelerate an 800-pound lander to Mars are a whole other animal from a rocket that can do so while carrying five or six humans and two-plus years’ worth of supplies.

Back in the sixties, when aerospace scientists assumed that the follow-up to a moon landing would be a manned Mars mission, some fantastical Ames-style creativity was afoot. An obvious alternative to launching 8,000 pounds of food is to grow it—or some of it—on board in greenhouses. But in the early sixties, meat ruled the dinner plate. The space nutritionists, for a brief and wondrous moment, turned their minds to the possibility of zero-gravity ranching. “What type of animal should be taken along to Mars or Venus?” asked animal husbandry professor Max Kleiber at the 1964 Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems. Kleiber held an accommodating view of animal husbandry; he included rats and mice in his calculations along with cattle and sheep. He left the unpretty logistics of zero-gravity slaughter and manure management to others, for Kleiber was a metabolism man. He simply wished to know: Which beast provides the greatest number of calories for the lowest launch weight and feed consumption? To serve beef to two or three Mars astronauts, “a steer of 500-kilogram body weight has to be hauled into space.” Whereas the same number of calories could be derived from just 42 kilograms of mice (about 1,700 of them). “The astronauts,” stated the paper’s conclusion, “should eat mouse stew instead of beef steaks.”

Present at the same conference was D. L. Worf, of the Martin Marietta Company (before Lockheed got there). Worf was big on thinking outside the box, and then eating it. “Food may be processed by many of the same techniques that are used to fabricate structures and shapes from plastic.” Worf did not limit this thinking to food containers but included spacecraft structures normally jettisoned or left behind when preparing to return home. In other words, instead of abandoning the Lunar Module on the moon, the Apollo 11 crew could have broken off pieces to take along and eat on the way home. Thereby needing to carry less food in the first place. Worf envisioned a return-trip menu that included Fuel Tank, Rocket Motor, and Instrument Casing. Leave room for dessert! “Transparent sugar castings as a substitute for windows” also made Worf’s idea list.

You wouldn’t complain about a breakfast of Worf’s egg-albumin office paper if you’d sampled Dr. Carl Clark’s paper cuisine. Clark, a Navy biochemist, was quoted in a 1958 Time article on long-duration spaceflight, recommending that astronauts add shredded paper—the ordinary wood pulp variety—as a “thickener” to a main course of vitamin-and mineral-enriched sugar water. Whether Clark viewed the shredded paper as an aid to palatability, regularity, or document security, I can’t say.

“If the imagination is allowed to wander”—and with D.L. Worf it surely should be—astronauts could also eat their dirty clothes. Worf estimated that “a space crew of four men will, for a 90-day flight regime, dispose of approximately 120 pounds of clothing, if laundry facilities are not available.” (Thanks in large part to Sherwin Gormly, they now are.) For a three-year Mars mission, that’s 1,440 pounds of dirty wash/victuals. Worf reported that several companies were already spinning textiles from soybeans and milk proteins and that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has “prepared [textile] fibers from egg whites and chicken feathers that would be highly acceptable as food under the controlled environment of a spacecraft.” Meaning, I think, that a man who is willing to dine on used clothing is a man unlikely to balk at chicken feathers.

But why go to the added expense of shopping at USDA experimental research stations? “Keratin protein fibers such as wool and silk,” muses Worf, “could be converted to food by partial hydrolysis….”

Onboard hydrolysis is the point where astronauts start to get uncomfortable. Hydrolysis is a process by which proteins, edible if not necessarily palatable, are broken down into still edible but typically less palatable constituents. Vegetable protein, for instance, can be hydrolyzed to make MSG. Pretty much any amino acid arrangement can be hydrolyzed, including those of the recyclable that dares not speak its name. A four-person crew will, over the course of three years, generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of feces. In the ominous words of sixties space nutritionist Emil Mrak, “The possibility of reuse must be considered.”

Sometime in the early 1990s, University of Arizona microbiologist Chuck Gerba was invited to a Martian strategy workshop whose topics included solid-waste management. Gerba told me that he recalls one of the chemists saying, “Shoot, what we could do is hydrolyze the stuff back to carbon and make patties out of it.” Whereupon the astronauts in attendance went, “We are not eating shit burgers on the way back.”

Moralewise, this brand of extreme recycling is ill advised. The current Mars thinking is to deposit caches of food ahead of time, using unmanned landers. (The strategy of leaving caches on Mars came up during an interview with some Russian cosmonauts. My interpreter Lena paused and said, “Mary, what did you say about kasha on Mars?”)

A better way to recycle astronautical by-product would be to seal it into plastic tiles and use it as shielding against cosmic radiation. Hydrocarbons are good for this. Metal spacecraft hulls are not; radiation particles break down into secondary particles as they pass through. These fragmented bits can be more dangerous than the intact primary particles. So what if you’d be, as Gerba crowed, “flying in shit!” Beats leukemia.

GORMLY AND I have been talking about psychological barriers to progress. As it turns out, we’re not the only Californians drinking treated urine this afternoon. (In solidarity, Gormly treated a batch of his own.) The citizens of Yellow, I mean Orange, County are drinking it right along with us. The difference, says Gormly, is that Orange County pumps theirs into the ground for a while before they call it drinking water again. “There is absolutely no technical justification for what they’re doing. It’s psychosocial and political,” he says. People are not ready for “toilet to tap.”

Even here at Ames. As Gormly stood in line to pay for his sandwich, the man ahead of us asked what was in the bottle. “It’s treated urine,” said Gormly, straight-faced but obviously enjoying himself. The man glanced at Gormly, looking for something that might confirm the hope that Gormly had made a joke. “No, it’s not,” he decided and walked away.

The cashier was going to be tougher. “What did you say was in the bottle?” She looked like she might be wanting to call security.

This time Gormly said, “Life support experiment.” Confronted with science, the woman backed down.

One of the things I love about manned space exploration is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn’t acceptable. And possible. It’s amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation that saves multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy? The latter, by Jim Lovell’s reckoning. “You get to know each other so well you don’t even bother turning away.” Your wife and kids have seen you on the toilet. So Frank Borman sees you. Who cares? Worth it for the prize at the bottom of the box.

When someone tells a crew of astronauts they’re going to have to drink treated sweat and urine—not only their own, but that of their crewmates and, who knows, the 1,700 mice in the pantry, they shrug and say, “No biggie.” Maybe astronauts aren’t just expensive action figures. Maybe they’re the poster boys and girls for the new environmental paradigm. As Gormly says, “Sustain-ability engineering and human spaceflight engineering are just different sides of the same technology.”

The tougher question is not “Is Mars possible?” but “Is Mars worth it?” An outside estimate of the cost of a manned mission to Mars is roughly the cost of the Iraq war to date: $500 billion. Is it similarly hard to justify? What good will come of sending humans to Mars, especially when robotic landers can do a lot of the science just as well, if not as fast? I could parrot the NASA Public Affairs Office and spit out a long list of products and technologies[98] spawned by aerospace innovations over the decades. Instead, I defer to the sentiments of Benjamin Franklin. Upon the occasion of history’s first manned flights—in the 1780s, aboard the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloons—someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. “What use,” he replied, “is a newborn baby?”

It might not be that hard to raise the funds. If the nations involved were to approach their respective entertainment conglomerates, an impressive hunk of funding could be raised. The more you read about Mars missions, the more you realize it’s the ultimate reality TV.

I was at a party the day the Phoenix robotic lander touched down on Mars. I asked the party’s host, Chris, if he had a computer I could use to watch the NASA TV coverage. At first it was just Chris and I watching. By the time Phoenix had plowed intact through the Martian atmosphere and was about to release its parachute for the descent, half the party was upstairs crowded around Chris’s computer. We weren’t even watching Phoenix. The images hadn’t yet arrived. (It takes about twenty minutes for signals to travel between Mars and Earth.) The camera was trained on Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was standing-room with engineers and managers, people who’d spent years working on heat shields and parachute systems and thrusters, all of which, in this final hour, could fail in a hundred different ways, each of those failures having been planned for with backup hardware and contingency software. One man stared at his computer with the fingers of both hands crossed. The touchdown signal arrived, and everyone was up on their feet making noise. Engineers bear-hugged each other so enthusiastically that they knocked their glasses crooked. Someone began passing out cigars. We all yelled too and some of us got a little choked up. It was inspiring, what these men and women had done. They flew a delicate scientific instrument more than 400 million miles to Mars and set it down as gently as a baby, exactly where they wanted it.

We live in a culture in which, more and more, people live through simulations. We travel via satellite technology, we socialize on computers. You can tour the Sea of Tranquility on Google Moon and visit the Taj Mahal via Street View. Anime fans in Japan have been petitioning the government for the right to legally marry a two-dimensional character. Fundraising has begun on a $1.6 billion resort in the rim of a simulated Martian crater in the desert outside Las Vegas. (They can’t simulate Martian gravity, but the boots of the spacesuits will be “a little more bouncy.”) No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.

But it isn’t anything like reality. Ask an M.D. who spent a year dissecting a human form tendon by gland by nerve, whether learning anatomy on a computer simulation would be comparable. Ask an astronaut whether taking part in a space simulation is anything like being in space. What’s different? Sweat, risk, uncertainty, inconvenience. But also, awe. Pride. Something ineffably splendid and stirring. One day at Johnson Space Center, I visited Mike Zolensky, the curator of cosmic dust and one of the caretakers of NASA’s meteorite collection. Every now and then, a piece of asteroid slams into Mars hard enough that the impact hurls small chunks of the Martian surface way out into space, where they continue to travel until they are snagged by some other planet’s gravitational pull. Occasionally that planet is Earth. Zolensky opened a case and lifted out a Martian meteorite as heavy as a bowling ball and handed it to me. I stood there taking in its hardness and heft, its realness, making an expression that I’m sure I’d never before had call to make. The meteorite wasn’t beautiful or exotic-looking. Give me a chunk of asphalt and some shoe polish and I can make you a simulated Mars meteorite. What I can’t possibly simulate for you is the feeling of holding a 20-pound divot of Mars in your hands.

The nobility of the human spirit grows harder for me to believe in. War, zealotry, greed, malls, narcissism. I see a backhanded nobility in excessive, impractical outlays of cash prompted by nothing loftier than a species joining hands and saying “I bet we can do this.” Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government red-lining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let’s squander some on Mars. Let’s go out and play.