Definición operacional de variables

In February 1949, at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, Major General Harry G. Armstrong, a legend in American aviation medicine, created a new department at the USAF School of Aviation Medicine (SAM).20 _{He called it “The Department of Space Medicine”. The first} anywhere in the world, it was staffed by four German scientists participating in Operation Paperclip, and led by Strughold. Their task was to anticipate and overcome the various physical and mental stresses of space travel: acceleration, low pressure, weightlessness, radiation, isolation and confinement, just to name a few. “The team could not be duplicated in the country today,” Armstrong boasted during a magazine interview in 1952. “Even to approach their capabilities, we would have to pull top men out of our universities or industry who might not be interested professionally in space medicine. To the Germans, this space business was their main interest.”21 With little funding or serious interest in “space” beyond his small niche, Strughold cleverly reframed the team’s research interests in terms of problems already facing the Air Force. “Space”, he argued in an early paper, actually begins at a much lower altitude from the functional perspective of physiology. At 80,000 feet—where USAF planes were beginning to reach—there is no longer enough ambient air for cabin pressurization systems to keep humans alive.22 _Survival at this altitude requires a completely sealed cabin equipped with an independent oxygen supply— the same as in space.23 _{Strughold defined “space” in terms of human survival; space begins where} the surrounding environment cannot contribute to life sustaining processes. In this sense, space

20 _{The organization which eventually became the School of Aviation Medicine was created to support American}

military aviation in the First World War. Established in early 1918 as the Medical Research Laboratory of the Army Signal Corps at Hazelhurst Field, on Long Island in New York, the training and research facility was relocated to the relatively calmer skies of Texas in 1926, and by 1931 was renamed SAM and settled at Randolph Field in San Antonio. Following the massive expansion of aviation medicine during the Second World War and the independence of the Air Force in 1947, SAM became the leading centre in post-war space medicine research, which also included work at the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, the Aero Medical Field Laboratory at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida. For a chronicle of SAM’s development, see Peyton’s base history 50 Years of Aerospace Medicine: 1918- 1968.

21 _{James L. H. Peck. “The Physical Problems of Space Travel Are Being Solved” in The Mystery of Other Worlds}

Revealed (Lloyd Mallan, ed.) Fawcett Book No. 166. (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1952) pp. 17-18.

22 _{In 1956, Strughold wrote that “The Air Force experimental sealed cabin is a prototype of the cabin that may be built}

into future space ships. This type of cabin will also be required in the coming phase of ‘global space-equivalent flight’ at supersonic speed through the space-equivalent regions of the atmosphere.” See: Hubertus Strughold. “The U.S. Air Force Experimental Sealed Cabin” in Journal of Aviation Medicine 27 (February, 1956) pp. 52.

23 _{Shirley Thomas. “Hubertus Strughold: The Father of Space Medicine Whose Dramatic Advanced Planning}

Encompasses the Universe” in Men of Space: Profiles of the Leaders in Space Research, Development, and Exploration: Volume 4 (Philadelphia: Chilton Company, 1962) pp. 264.

was figured as a “hostile” environment, a sentiment captured by USAF space medicine popularizer Donald A. Wollheim, “space is an enemy that must be conquered”.24 _{As Strughold explained, “To} keep a man alive and alert in a completely sealed compartment is the suprema lex in the space medical efforts.”25 _{Still, funding for their efforts was “meager”, and the group’s output was initially} theoretical.

On March 3, 1950, one of the first conferences on the topic of space medicine was held at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Speakers included Strughold, rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, the Haber brothers, and Buettner. The basic problem, as Strughold explained it, was that humans enclosed in small, sealed environments quickly ruin the atmosphere. They produce heat, humidity, and carbon dioxide that if left unmanaged make the chamber lethal.26 _{Clearly, if} astronauts were to spend significant amounts of time in space, countermeasures would be needed. Strughold distilled the required research into two related questions: how does the presence of a human change a sealed environment over time? And, how can these changes be counteracted?27 Buettner explained that early experiments in pressure chambers and flights in high-altitude balloon gondolas gave some indication of the answers, but he hinted that a new kind of research tool—an “experimental sealed cabin”—was at the top of the new Department’s wish list. “Let us assume that we had such a cabin,” he mused. “It would consist of a closed metal chamber in which normal conditions would have to be maintained by technical means.”28 _{In an interesting inversion of} purpose, the new sealed cabin would attempt to create habitable conditions, analogous to the interior of future spacecraft, while traditional low-pressure chambers were used to produce dangerous conditions analogous to high altitudes. At that time, no such device existed, and the Air Force’s priorities were far from space travel; the start of the Korean War in 1950 marked the first real test for the newly-independent service. Still, Strughold lobbied hard for this sealed cabin. In

24 _{Donald A. Wollheim. Mike Mars Around The Moon (New York: Paperback Library, 1964) pp. 124.}

25 _{Hubertus Strughold. “Space Medicine of the Next Decade as Viewed by a Physician and a Physiologist” in “Tenth}

Anniversary of Space Medicine Research in the U.S. Air Force” in United States Armed Forces Medical Journal 10 (No. 4, April 1959) pp. 402.

26 _{Willy Ley. “For Your Information: The Spaceship in the Basement” in Galaxy Science Fiction 15 (No. 2, December,}

1957) pp. 66.

27 _{George R. Steinkamp; Willard Hawkins; George T. Hauty; Robert Burwell; Julian E. Ward. “Human}

Experimentation in the Space Cabin Simulator: Development of Life Support Systems and Results of Initial Seven- Day Flights” in Supporting Documents: Historical Report: School of Aviation Medicine, USAF 29 (Randolph AFB: Air University, School of Aviation Medicine, 1959). pp. 2.

28 _{Konrad Buettner. “Bioclimatology of Manned Rocket Flight” in Space Medicine: The Human Factor in Flights}

1952, he along with Fritz Haber, the former aircraft designer for Junkers, constructed a wooden mock-up, and invited the School’s Director of Research, Colonel Henry M. Sweeney to help them test it out. Converted to their cause, Sweeney secured funding from the USAF Research

Figure 2: Illustration of the proposed “experimental sealed cabin” from Collier’s (1953). (Source: (Source: Cornelius

Figure 3: Strughold’s German assistant Hans-Georg Clamann receives the experimental sealed cabin at the School of

Aviation Medicine in August 1954. (Source: Space Medicine Association, online archive, 1954-1958).

Council, and again Strughold and Haber set to work on blueprints—this time for the real thing. Just like Von Braun’s rockets, America’s first space cabin was a German design.

In 1953, SAM issued a contract to the Guardite Corporation in Chicago to produce a one- person sealed cabin based on Haber and Strughold’s design. Guardite was selected in part because of the company’s experience manufacturing low-pressure chambers regularly used to train pilots. This new sealed cabin became the first tool created specifically for space medicine research and represented a transition in the nascent field from theoretical to practical work.

Also, in early 1953, Strughold introduced the space cabin concept to the public when he collaborated with Von Braun and journalist Cornelius Ryan on a famous series of articles in Collier’s magazine aimed at convincing Americans that space travel was fast becoming a reality.29 Strughold’s cabin was trumpeted as one of many technologies required to “make a space man out of an earth man” (Figure 2).30 _{“The chamber will be like the interior of a rocket ship—functional,} pressurized and cramped.” In more advanced versions, “ten to 15 men at a time will spend several consecutive weeks in the chamber, getting used to the cramped quarters—and to one another.”31 This grandiose vision guided by Von Braun’s big thinking also stressed the need to select “superbly engineered” men for jobs in space, and that sealed cabins would be used not only as research tools, but also during selection and training “to pick the top men.”32

In August 1954, Guardite delivered the sealed cabin to the School of Aviation Medicine. Strughold, away in Europe attending conferences, asked Hans-Georg Clamann, the School’s German expert on artificial atmospheres who had served as Strughold’s assistant back in the Luftwaffe days, to temporarily take over the job of installing the bulky, awkwardly-shaped contraption. (Figure 3) The only space available was the basement of SAM Research Building 661.33

The first 24-hour test with a human sealed inside the cabin occurred in April 1956. As the most senior member of the department, Strughold’s role was to think broadly and identify lines of inquiry that younger staff could carry out experimentally.34 _{So two younger American medical} doctors, James G. Gaume, and Emanuel M. Roth joined him in the basement to closely monitor the run. The person they had selected—mainly because he was willing and available—was Dalton F. Smith, a nineteen-year-old Air Force technician who worked on the base and had volunteered. This initial 24-hour test was primarily to check the basic environmental systems, with the plan to further modify the cabin for their desired week-long tests. The doctors kept vigil outside the cabin, monitoring a tabletop setup of various instruments, while Smith read and slept inside. The main

29 _{Howard E. McCurdy. Space and the American Imagination Second Edition. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins}

University Press, 2011) pp. 46.

30 _{Cornelius Ryan. “Man Will Conquer Space Soon: Man’s Survival in Space: Testing the Men” in Collier’s (March}

7, 1953) pp. 57.

31 _{Ryan, 63.} 32 _{ibid, 58; 63.}

33 _{Betty J. Evans (ed.) Semi-Annual Historical Report – School of Aviation Medicine, USAF. 1 January – 30 June}

1957 24 (Randolph AFB: Air University, School of Aviation Medicine, 1957) pp. 52.

34 _{Green Peyton. 50 Years of Aerospace Medicine: 1918-1968 (AFSC Historical Publications Series No. 67-180, 1968)}

difference between this test and the future week-long tests was that Smith and the doctors could communicate freely via a telephone connection. A crucial detail of future tests was that the subject was not allowed to talk directly with anyone on the outside. Everything went as planned until the eighteenth hour. Smith—at this point struggling to stay awake—accidentally disconnected the carbon dioxide absorber and dozed off. Gaume and Roth knew something was wrong when their instruments began to show both the CO2 level, and Smith’s pulse and respiratory rate, begin to rise.35 _{Recognizing the potential danger, they used the telephone to wake Smith, and after some} initial confusion—they later described Smith as “stuporous” and “very uncooperative”—guided him through the process of repairing the broken absorber connection.36 _{Conditions soon returned} to normal inside the cabin, and the first 24-hour test was competed without further incident.