Mercury Astronauts Research Articles

Characterizing dehydration in short-term spaceflight using evidence from Project Mercury

Short-term spaceflight is commonly perceived as posing minimal risk to human health and performance. However, despite their duration, short-term flights potentially induce acute physiological changes that create risk to crews. One such change is dehydration (primarily body water loss) due to a heat-stressed environment. Such loss, if severe and prolonged, can lead to decrements in performance as well as increase the risk of more serious medical conditions. Though the general mechanisms of dehydration are broadly understood, the rate and extent of dehydration in short-term spaceflight has not been characterized. Combining data from the six spaceflights of the US Mercury program with a causal diagram illustrating the mechanisms of dehydration, we fit a path model to estimate the causal effects for all pathways in the causal model. Results demonstrate that Mercury astronauts experienced some degree of dehydration across the range of suited time and that the relationship between suited time and dehydration appears to be logarithmic. We discuss causal interpretations of the results and how the results from this and similar analyses can inform countermeasure development for short-term spaceflight.

Making Space for Women: Stories from Trailblazing Women of NASA’s Johnson Space Center ed. by Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal

Reviewed by: Making Space for Women: Stories from Trailblazing Women of NASA’s Johnson Space Center ed. by Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal Margaret A. Weitekamp Making Space for Women: Stories from Trailblazing Women of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Edited by Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2022. Pp. 443. Illustrations, notes index.) With this excellent compilation of oral history interviews, editor Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, the historian at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), the center for human spaceflight and mission control for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), introduces readers to twenty-one women whose hard work and dedication helped build that center’s reputation for excellence. As a scholar, I have frequently searched for oral [End Page 393] history interviews in the deep collection that the JSC’s history office created and maintains. The individual experiences and personal recollections of contemporary actors—and the more than 1,400 oral history interviews compiled by the Johnson Space Center as of the book’s printing—deepen understanding of historical events and enliven their retelling. With this collection, Ross-Nazzal brings a selection of those resources to a broader readership. Ross-Nazzal’s introduction provides a well-researched and carefully footnoted summary of the history of women’s participation as NASA professionals. That progress was uneven, as such changes tend to be. She traces the broad outlines of the history beginning from the 1960s, when a woman behind a desk was assumed to be a secretary even if she was not, to the current day, which includes women in JSC’s leadership positions and an onsite childcare center. Ross-Nazzal self-consciously frames this volume as another possible aid to encourage that cultural shift toward women’s fuller participation in the professional work of spaceflight. Ross-Nazzal opens the volume with two oral history interviews from secretaries and administrative support, a fitting choice because for many years women’s participation at JSC was restricted to such roles. Nonetheless, reading these interviews reminds readers how vital such positions were for NASA’s work. The oral histories in this collection feature mathematicians and engineers, then flight controllers, spacesuit technicians, nurses and scientists, astronauts, trainers, senior management, and center management. Given how much the work at JSC focuses on human spaceflight, Ross-Nazzal makes a deliberate choice to illustrate through the book’s structure how much the work of astronauts is embedded in a network of other equally vital positions. The interview subjects go as far back in JSC’s history as Dee O’Hara, the nurse who worked closely with the original seven Project Mercury astronauts. She started at NASA in 1959, before the agency moved its human (then called “manned”) spaceflight operations to Houston. Peggy Whitson brings the story almost to the present as an astronaut who commanded the International Space Station and served as Chief of the Astronaut Office before retiring in 2018 to work for Axiom, a commercial spaceflight company. Throughout, the themes of mentorship and commitment to the mission illustrate how women gained professional footholds in fields that were not always completely welcoming. Often professional advancement decisions occurred because the right job, at the right level, opened at the right time. Readers should note that the chapters are edited versions of oral history interviews, not third-person accounts. As a result, in some instances there are references to federal government employment (such as pay-grade levels and NASA acronyms) that may not be immediately clear. Making Space for Women would be an excellent addition to history, women’s studies, or STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) [End Page 394] classes to show students the range of careers that might be open to them thanks to these path-breaking women. Margaret A. Weitekamp Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

FR-18 HOW DO ASTRONAUTS URINATE? THE HISTORY OF INNOVATIONS ENABLING VOIDING IN THE VOID

You have accessJournal of UrologyHistory Forum1 Apr 2018FR-18 HOW DO ASTRONAUTS URINATE? THE HISTORY OF INNOVATIONS ENABLING VOIDING IN THE VOID Kimberly A Maciolek and Sara L Best Kimberly A MaciolekKimberly A Maciolek More articles by this author and Sara L BestSara L Best More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2018.02.3038AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES Astronauts require significant technological assistance for essential daily activities, and urination is no exception. We sought to discover the history of device innovation to enable urination in space. METHODS We searched NASA technical reports, Google, and PubMed for media and articles describing technology for waste management in space from the first manned missions to modern day space travel. RESULTS Urine collection was an oversight in early manned space travel. Alan Shepard, the first American in space in 1961, had no option but to urinate in his pressure suit after significant flight delays. He avoided electrocuting himself but short circuited his biosensors. The second Mercury astronaut, Gus Grissom, wore a urine collection device (UCD) in his suit in 1962. UCDs were modified versions of condom catheters with a belt-like collection bag. UCDs persisted until Apollo missions into the 1970′s. UCDs were prone to leakage and incompatible with female anatomy. These design flaws drove the use of high absorbency adult diapers, or Disposable Absorption Containment Trunks (DACTs), during the 1983 Challenger mission. DACTs were replaced with disposable, moisture-wicking and superabsorbent shorts, called Maximal Absorptive Garments (MAGs), in 1988 to avoid skin irritation. Outside the confines of a pressure suit, urine collection has been enabled by vacuum-assisted devices. Astronauts in a space shuttle void into various male or female-specific funnels attached to a flexible hose. The cumbersome nature of these devices and the time required to use them often caused astronauts to decrease oral intake. The first American space station, Skylab, included the first toilet. Astronauts are required to practice using the toilet as well as timed voiding to reduce risk of urinary stasis, infection, and retention, all of which are risks in a microgravity environment. Improvements upon this basic Skylab design to allow voiding procedures most similar to that on Earth were used for the International Space Station (ISS). Technology on the ISS has allowed processing of urine into drinking water since 2008 and new prototypes are harnessing urine waste products as fuel for longer missions. CONCLUSIONS Early space missions showed that microgravity posed both a physiologic challenge for urination as well as a design challenge for urine containment and disposal, especially for female astronauts. These challenges were not expected for some of the earliest manned space missions but since then has been a considerable focus for innovation and astronaut quality of life. © 2018FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 199Issue 4SApril 2018Page: e1247-e1248 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2018MetricsAuthor Information Kimberly A Maciolek More articles by this author Sara L Best More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

In Memoriam: Neil S. Cherniack, M.D. (1931–2009)

neil s. cherniack, m.d., a long-time member of the American Physiological Society (APS), former Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Applied Physiology ( JAP ), and a pioneering respiratory physiologist, died on October 21, 2009, at the age of 78. A renowned scientist, educator, and clinician, Dr.

The Right Stuff at the Wrong Time: The Space of Nostalgia in the Conservative Ascendancy

In taking account of Hollywood practice during the Reagan era, Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, in Camera Politica, make the point that the triumphant conservatism of the 1980s, steeped in yearning for redemptive leadership, used the popular arts, especially the cinema, to secure the return of the hero, who combines three essential components of the contemporary conservative social agenda: he is a warrior, an entrepreneur, and a patriarch (219). Unsurprisingly, the film texts that most clearly anticipate this political turn are the violent, hyper-masculine Sylvester Stallone vehicles like the Rocky and Rambo series. But the impulse is also present, if slightly muted, in the George Lucas Star Wars trilogy, particularly The Return of the Jedi (1983), and in the several iterations of Superman (1978-2006) and The Terminator (1984-2009). What is more interesting, however, is that some sci-fi films of this period, not conspicuously right-wing in tendency, easily assimilate to the ideology of free markets, limited government, and traditional values that Donald Critchlow describes in The Conservative Ascendancy. The Right Stuff (198 3), Hollywood's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's non- fiction homage to America's Mercury astronauts, fits this somewhat self- contradictory paradigm almost to perfection. More specifically, the film - far more insistently than the book - overcomes the technophobia latent in social conservatism, making it possible to reconcile unemployed steel workers and born-again Christians to the high-tech culture essential to international free-market capitalism. Both rhetorically and visually, the film argues that small town heroes, spiritual cousins of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontiersmen and Hollywood's favorite cowboys, can out-fly Communists, outwit bureaucrats, and make cutting-edge technology fit their individual creative purposes. Two considerations make it quite ironic that The Right Stuff would tacitly support a right wing political agenda. First, the film's director, Philip Kaufman, is by no means a conservative: he is well known for decidedly antiestablishment films like The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), which critiques commodity capitalism, and Henry and June (1990), which celebrates the eccentric love affair between Anais Nin and Henry Miller. Secondly, The Right Stuff has as one of its principal protagonists astronaut John Glenn, who by the 1 980s was Senator John Glenn, a prospective Democratic nominee for president in 1984. So decisive seemed this second fact that Newsweek in October, 1983, put John Glenn's filmic impersonator Ed Harris on its cover, while asking, Can a movie help make a president? Reality proved to be the exact opposite of Newweek's implied prediction. Glenn never won the nomination of his party, let alone the presidency, and during the two months following the commercial release of The Right Stuff, President Reagan improved his standing against all Democratic contenders by approximately 7%. In other words, despite Newsweek' s conjectures, The Right Stuff either had no impact whatsoever upon national politics or had an impact in a direction exactly opposite to the one the news magazine had imagined. My analysis resolves this paradox by arguing that The Right Stuff is really more conservative than it appears, implicitly supporting the ideology of crucial to the Reagan administration's political success. But we should quickly add, is a double- sided term, invested with an ambiguity that allows the film to be part of the rebirth of national pride and optimism that President Reagan referred to in his 1984 reelection campaign as morning in America without endorsing the more aggressive heroics of right-wing populism. The word nostalgia is derived from two Greek words, nostos (home) and algia (longing), hence literally a home-longing or for home. From this composite term, Svetlana Boyn in The Future of Nostalgia derives the two faces of nostalgic emotion, a restorative which puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and a reflective nostalgia, which dwells in algia, in longing and loss (41). …

Obituary for Neil S. Cherniack, MD

NEIL S. CHERNIACK MD, A LEADING FIGURE IN THE FIELD OF RESPIRATORY CONTROL, DIED WEDNESDAY, OCT. 21, 2009, AT THE AGE OF 78. HE WILL BE MISSED for his intellect, candor, and humor. He is survived by his wife Sandra and three children, Evan, Andrew, and Emily Cherniack Walsh; a sister, Karen Lederer, and six grandchildren, Yitzchok Zev, Ariella, Madeline, Luke, Diana, and Carolyn. Neil received his A.B. with Honors from Columbia University and was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity; but scratch hard enough and he would talk about his being a writer for the Columbia Jester and an artist who in recent years started to paint in earnest and exhibited in Cleveland, Newark, New Brunswick, and Morristown, New Jersey. In between, he received a medical degree from the State University of New York and post-doctoral training both at the Cardiorespiratory Laboratory of Columbia University with an illustrious group of fellows and junior faculty, and at the University of Illinois-Chicago in infectious disease. As a captain in the US Air Force from 1958 to 1960, he worked at the Acceleration Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, as part of a project that selected the first seven Mercury astronauts. He rode the centrifuge at NASA Ames Research Center. He moved to the University of Pennsylvania and rose to the rank of Professor of Medicine and head of the pulmonary disease section in the cardiopulmonary group led by Dr. Albert Fishman. There he developed theoretical models and performed experiments that focused on the control of the mechanical properties of the thorax, and in respiratory control systems in general. After a sabbatical turn with Kurt von Euler at the Karolinska Institute where he developed experimental methods to study upper airway as well as chest wall muscle control, he moved to Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine where he gathered a group of investigators in the field of regulation of respiration who went on to successfully compete for the largest NIH-NHLBI program project grant for respiratory control in the 1980s. He published articles on sleep and respiration on and off between 1979 and 2008, although most of his influential work relative to the sleep field was done in the 1980s. During his 18 years at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine he served as Dean and Vice President (1990-1995); Vice Chairman of the Department of Medicine (1986-1990); Associate Dean, Division of General Medical Sciences (1983-1990); and Professor of Academic Program Development (1977-1989). In 1995 Neil “retired” and moved to northern New Jersey to be closer to family; however, he was appointed as Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Physiology and vice chairman of research at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, from 2001 to the present. He received an honorary doctoral degree from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden in 1991. He was a Josiah Macey Faculty Scholar in the department of neurophysiology at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, and a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. In the course of his career Neil traveled to six continents to teach and learn, and was the author of eight medical textbooks and more than 300 published articles Neil was a distinctive leader, and his mentorship consisted of asking leading questions and forming challenges to almost any topic. His level of thought about a problem was very high, seemingly intuitive, but based on a fairly certain degree of fact or theory. He touched many people including physicians, basic scientists, students, and administrators, often in memorable ways. He continued to be extremely active in research, having recently published an updated model for recurrent obstructive and central apneas during sleep, representing an enduring, productive collaboration with Guy Longobardo with whom he published his first models of recurrent central apneas in the 1970s. His many contributions led to national and international recognition for the neural and chemical regulation of breathing and formed today's scientific bases for understanding dyspnea, acute and chronic respiratory failure, and, especially for our field, sleep disordered breathing.

A forgotten moment in physiology: the Lovelace Woman in Space Program (1960–1962)

In 1959, Brigadier General Donald Flickinger and Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace II suggested that it would be more practical from an engineering standpoint to send women rather than men into space due to their lower body weights and oxygen requirements. When the Air Force decided not to pursue this project, Dr. Lovelace assumed leadership of the Woman in Space Program and began medical and physiological testing of a series of accomplished women aviators at the Lovelace Medical Clinic in Albuquerque, NM, in 1960. The tests that these women underwent were identical to those used to test the original Mercury astronauts, with the addition of gynecological examinations. Thirteen of the nineteen women tested passed these strenuous physiological exams (for comparison, 18 of 32 men tested passed); a subset of these pilots was further tested on a series of psychological exams that were similar to or, in some instances, more demanding than those given to male Mercury candidates. Despite these promising results, further testing was halted, and the Woman in Space Program was disbanded in 1962. Although the Woman in Space Program received a great deal of publicity at the time, the story of these women was somewhat lost until they were reunited at the 1999 launch of the shuttle Columbia, commanded by Colonel Eileen Collins.

The Right Stuff: Veterans Affairs National Surgical Quality Improvement Project

Robert S. Lagasse, MD*† The 1983 movie, The Right Stuff, was an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book by the same name that chronicled the Project Mercury astronauts selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Project Mercury began in 1959 and was the first manned space flight program in the United States (US). At that time, the Soviet Union was clearly leading the way in rocket technology and the US was not “measuring up.” The political mandate of competing against the Soviet Union in the “space race” seemed doomed to failure given the expense of such an endeavor and our obvious technology deficits. The first human space flight occurred on April 12, 1961, when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth aboard a Soviet spacecraft. Fortunately, a determined group of astronauts, dubbed the Mercury Seven, brought the “right stuff” to the NASA program and the United States became the second nation to achieve manned space flight with the suborbital flight of astronaut Alan Shepard on May 5, 1961. Less than 1 yr later, the first US orbital flight was achieved by John Glenn, and established the US as a true competitor in space. As of this year, human spaceflight missions have been conducted by the Soviet Union, the US, Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and by a private US space flight company. I mention this brief history of the early years of the Project Mercury space program because I believe there are many parallels between the NASA quest for manned space flight and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) quest for quality perioperative care as described by Bishop et al. in this issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia. During the mid-to-late 1980s, the VA came under a great deal of public scrutiny over the quality of surgical care in their 133 hospitals. At issue were the operative mortality rates in the VA hospitals and the perception in Congress that the VA was not measuring up to the private sector. To address the gap, Congress mandated the VA to report risk-adjusted surgical outcomes annually, and compare their outcomes to national averages. Unfortunately, perioperative performance measurement technology had not advanced to the point where there were risk-adjusted national averages. Still, the VA was able to exhibit the right stuff and develop the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) that includes risk adjustment models for 30-day morbidity and mortality after major surgery in 8 surgical subspecialties and for all operations combined. Preoperative patient characteristics used in these models include demographics, symptoms, physical findings, comorbidities unrelated to the reason for surgery, preoperative laboratory values, and ASA physical status which, with all of its strengths and weaknesses, is a major predictive factor. But, this modeling did not come without a price. The cost of data collection and analysis has been quoted at approximately $38 per case. The VA database is expanding by approximately 100,000 cases annually and currently has more than 1 million cases. Thus, the cost to date has been more than $38 million, yet private sector hospitals are still lining up to participate as they expand this project beyond the VA hospitals under the auspices of the American College of Surgeons (ACS). In ACS NSQIP, each hospital From the *Department of Anesthesiology, Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, New York; and †The Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York. Accepted for publication July 24, 2008. Reprints will not be available from the author. Address correspondence to Robert S. Lagasse, MD, Department of Anesthesiology, Weiler Division of Montefiore Medical Center, 1825 Eastchester Rd., Bronx, NY 10461. Address e-mail to boblagasse@yahoo.com. Copyright © 2008 International Anesthesia Research Society DOI: 10.1213/ane.0b013e31818af90a

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965 by Francis French and Colin Burgess

Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 Francis French and Colin Burgess. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Americans (and Russians, too, for that matter) have always found in their spacemen the faults they wished they had. Many of America's first astronauts drove too fast, drank too much, and left their pants in unexpected places, and when the public found out, they didn't mind so much. Soviet cosmonauts often came off as goodnatured farm boys-dim bulbs who took their knocks without complaint and, when necessary, died tending their machines in good socialist fashion. More recent works, about Apollo astronauts haunted by their mind-bending lunar travels or cantankerous Russians tending broken space stations, feed the same yearnings. If only we had their problems, readers dream. The earliest accounts of 1960s astronauts fawned over their seeming lack of introspection; more recent works, like Francis French's and Colin Burgess's Into That Silent Sea, suggest that spacemen felt their experiences more deeply than anyone realized. Rather than recounting the first five years of American and Soviet spaceflight in simple narrative form, the authors let the spacefarers (and would-be spacefarers like female aviator Wally Funk) speak for themselves through ten chronological character studies of figures familiar to spaceflight enthusiastslike first person in space Yuri Gagarin and the enigmatic and larger-than-life Project Mercury astronaut Gordo Cooper, who passed away while proofreading the manuscript. With unusual access to their sources, the authors enrich conventional accounts of these characters, walking a delicate line between history and hagiography. An account of the life and death of Gagarin begins the volume: a miraculous fairy tale of an uneducated Soviet youth's cruel upbringing in Nazi-occupied territory. Improbably finding himself a pilot cadet in 1955 (at a time when some American astronauts were already experienced engineers and combat pilots), polite, unflappable Gagarin became the first human being in space only six years later. Sadly for him, this feat ended his flying career; the seven years of life Gagarin enjoyed upon his return to Earth were punctuated by international celebrity, a drunken fall off a balcony, and a fatal airplane crash at the tender age of thirty-four. A cipher even in death, Gagarin epitomizes the black hole of astronaut biography: whether very deep or very dull, spacemen too often take their stories with them. From Russia with love, Silent Sea moves to Florida, where, through the eyes of people like nurse Dee O'Hara and helicopter pilot Jim Lewis, the authors recount the flights of the first Americans in space, Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom, both now deceased. …

The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff Kathryn Morse (bio) Michael F. Robinson. The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xii + 206 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.00. Who among America's daring explorers had the right stuff? So asked Tom Wolfe in his epic book The Right Stuff (1979), adapted to film in 1983 by Philip Kaufman. In Wolfe's story, the national heroes of the Mercury space program were not necessarily the truest and best of America's Cold War daredevils, possessed of the right stuff. The title belonged to the unknown test pilots, like Chuck Yeager, the men with the skill and courage to push themselves beyond all known limits, to "push the outside of the envelope." Yeager missed the Mercury astronauts' fame and fortune not because he lacked any essential heroic qualities, but because John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gordon Cooper, and others better fit the media image of the space-age explorer: young, clean-cut, church-going, college-educated, and articulate, with all rough edges carefully rounded for television consumption. As a billion-dollar government plan to secure technological and military superiority over the Soviet Union, the Mercury program required astronauts with unimpeachable credentials and personalities, men who would make no mistakes. But those men were not necessarily the ones with the right stuff. Chuck Yeager and John Glenn, it seems, were not the first American explorers caught between the challenge of exploration and the unpredictable expectations of a powerful national media and public audience. Michael F. Robinson's The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture tells the story of eight others: Elisha Kent Kane, Isaac Hayes, Charles Hall, Adolphus Greely, Walter Wellman, Robert Peary, and Frederick Cook. From the 1850s through the beginning of the First World War, these men braved the Arctic in search of the North Pole and other symbolic goals. They returned to find that success, fame, and continued funding depended not on their skill, strength, and leadership, but on the whims of a newspaper-reading, scandal-hungry public primed to judge every failure by changing standards of manhood and, most powerfully, "good character." Three generations of explorers thus found [End Page 77] themselves lost in the vast wasteland of the American media machine, struggling to maintain national reputations in the face of cultural change. Their efforts revealed two broader stories. First, national goals for Arctic exploration shifted away from scientific knowledge and commercial gain toward proof of manly character through symbolic feats. Second, Americans moved away from a cultural belief in the march of progress led by civilized men toward an antimodern embrace of primitivism as the antidote to the enervation of the industrialized age. Explorers in the 1850s and 1860s portrayed themselves as men of science and progress, men of the future. By 1900, Arctic adventurers had recast themselves as exemplars of an ideal frontier past, with little use for modern science and technology and little tolerance for the increasingly professionalized methodologies of field research. After the turn of the century, Americans ventured to the Arctic primarily out of belief that human nature dictated the masculine urge to test and conquer worldly limits. They went north out of instinct, because it was there; they went to test their character and prove themselves to have "the right stuff." This, Anderson writes, has been their "most lasting legacy today: the widespread belief that exploration is . . . deeply rooted within the human psyche" (p. 163). This monograph is clear, detailed, meticulously researched, and elegantly written. As a cultural historian, Anderson privileges culture above class, politics, or economics as the driving force of this history. The meanings that Americans' constructed and expressed through their fascination with explorers and exploration revealed more about middle-class values than about the journeys themselves. Those meanings emerged, dialectically, from interactions between explorers and their audiences at public lectures, and in newspapers, magazines, and cartoons. Explorers shaped their narratives to meet public expectations. Those expectations in turn shaped not only the practice of science, exploration, and imperial expansion, but also American encounters with new lands and peoples, near and far. The emerging mass media economy proved both a tool with which explorers shaped their...

"Manned" Spaceflight for Women?

The author compares four works (two scholarly and two popular) on the same topic: an early 1960s medical study by the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque of the feasibility of using women pilots for NASA's Mercury astronaut program. The essay includes a synopsis of the Lovelace study, stymied by politics and technical requirements, not solely by American society's reluctance to have females fly "Right Stuff" vehicles. In concluding that only one of the four books, Margaret Weitekamp's Right Stuff, Wrong Gender, is adequately researched, analyzed, and written, the author makes the point that more scholarly work needs to be done in the field of aerospace history and gender. Without contributions from qualified aerospace historians, the void in that subgenre will be filled by amateurs or historians without topical knowledge who may disregard accepted rules of evidence-gathering and analysis or simply be unable to accurately interpret and write about what they uncover.

NASA's PR campaign on behalf of manned space flight, 1961—1963

This essay examines NASA's public relations campaign from 1961 to 1963 to sell manned exploration of space to Congress and the American people. Not only did the space agency attempt to depict manned exploration as superior to unmanned exploration, but it also attempted to create the impression that humans were indispensable to the conquest of outer space. Tactically, NASA used the timing of its Mercury flights and the appearances of the astronauts at crucial congressional debates and hearings to gain funding for its manned space flight programs. The agency also controlled the media's access and coverage of the seven Mercury astronauts by instructing the astronauts to enter into a $500,000 contract with Life, which gave the periodical exclusive rights to the men's “personal stories.” Ultimately, NASA's public relations campaign helped to establish a presumption in favor of massive commitments of the nation's resources to placing humans in space which went virtually unchallenged until the Challenger accident in 1986.

Radical Faith: The Right Stuff?

The title of Tom Wolfe's current best seller, The Right Stuff, refers to those qualities — manliness, fearlessness, survivability, and recklessness — that characterize successful test pilots in general, and Mercury astronauts in particular. A similar list could be compiled to characterize successful surgeons. It would likely include decisiveness, confidence, dexterity, and dedication. The list would be unlikely to include open-mindedness or a concern to present patients with all the options available for particular disease conditions.This “self-righteous silence” has recently brought the wrath of the women's movement down on surgeons who perform breast cancer operations without informing their patients about alternatives. And in 1979 Massachusetts became the first state to enact a law requiring physicians to provide “a patient suffering from any form of breast cancer” with “complete information on all alternative treatments which are medically viable.” This column examines the reaction to the law.