In the 1950s, the question “Can Man Be Improved?” was not new, and has a long history extending back to The Enlightenment.140 The eighteenth century debate about the perfectibility of humans centered around comparative studies of “natural man”—feral children and Indigenous peoples seen as being closer to nature—and self-described “civilized” Europeans.141 The attempt to draw a line separating the range of humanity from animals was bound up in questions of colonialism, slavery,
140 Julia Douthwaite. The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of
Enlightenment. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Freedman, Toby. “Can Man Be Modified?” Paper delivered before American Rocket Society meeting, Los Angeles, California, Nov 13-18, 1962.
141 Francis Moran. “Between Primitives and Primates: Natural Man as the Missing Link in Rousseau’s Second
gender, citizenship and education.142 This question took on a broad new urgency in several Western nations in the late nineteenth-century when Francis Galton extended Darwin’s concept of natural selection toward the goal of improving humans, which he termed ‘eugenics’. According to Darwin, who focused his study on plants and animals, an organism’s relative “fitness” is defined by its surrounding niche. Change aspects of the niche, and “fitness” is also affected. For Galton and his disciples, rationally directing human evolution through artificial selection meant deciding on a goal—an idealized vision of humanity—that could be worked toward by either positive (encouraging reproduction) or negative (limiting reproduction) means. Eugenics flourished in Europe and North American in the early twentieth century but was discredited following its most infamous application in Nazi Germany’s programs of sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide.
In the context of early aviation, some wondered if humans would evolve to live permanently in the atmosphere. In 1916, commercial aviation pioneer and utopian author Alfred Lawson argued that prolonged contact with low-pressure environments enabled by aircraft would over time produce a vastly superior new type of human he called “Alti-man” (short for “altitude man”). Alti-man would live in the atmosphere, and would no longer require oxygen, or even an airplane. Lawson also imagined a new totalitarian political configuration based on altitude tolerance: the “all knowing” Alti-man would rule over non-altitude adapted “ground-men” below.143 This vision was based on Darwinian evolution, emerging slowly over thousands of years.
In the context of early space medicine, the urgency of the Cold War required much faster means of “improving” humans to fit hostile environments be considered. At the 1962 Ciba symposium “Man and His Future”, J.B.S. Haldane, once a leading proponent of eugenics before World War Two, used the astronaut to complicate the supposedly fixed and obvious idea of human “perfection”, and the idea of cavalierly altering human bodies. In space, he argued, “fitness” would be relative to a totally new environment, reconfiguring categories of ‘ability’ and ‘disability’.144 Underlining his point with some dark humour, Haldane imagined using a chemical like thalidomide to produce astronauts without legs, since he argued these would not be wanted in a
142 Anthony Pagden. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
143 Joseph Corn. The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp.
41.
144 Alexander Von Lünen. “‘The Perfect Astronaut Would Be A Human Without Legs’: JBS Haldane and Positive
Eugenics” in What is National Socialist About Eugenics? (Regina Wecker, Sabine Braunschweig, Gabriela Imboden, Bernhard Küchenhoff, Hans Jakob Ritter, eds.) (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2009).
weightless environment.145 Turning to the problem of low-pressure, Haldane noted that “an Andean or Tibetan might be able to live at an external pressure of a fifth of an atmosphere. If this is the approximate pressure on Mars, as some astrophysicists believe, it may be desirable to pick colonists with Andean or Tibetan ancestry.”146
In his 1965 chapter “The Quest for Optiman”, American space writer Tom Allen explores two different figures that represented competing approaches to how astronauts might be altered: the technologically enhanced cyborg (short for “cybernetic organism”), and the now-forgotten Optiman (“optimized man”). Despite Clynes and Kline’s initial focus on drugs, Allen describes the cyborg as “a creature who accomplishes his space mission at the cost of trading most of his physiological systems for electronic ones.”147 General Electric engineer Dandridge M. Cole goes further, suggesting that all internal organs will be replaced with “superior artificial components”, and that this trend will result in the ultimate cyborgs, “Closed-Cycle Men”. These “will be things consisting of hardly more than brains with electrochemical substitutes for arms, legs, and trunks.”148 This concept centers around the radical augmentation and eventual replacement of the body with technologies. Philosopher Hannah Arendt worried that the cost of leaving Earth would be “the stature of man”—our sense of humanness, lost in space.149
To contrast this vision, Allen presents “Optiman”, “an ideal man, but still a man”.150 Conjured by Air Force space medicine expert Toby Freedman, Optiman “would be a man whose outward appearance is quite normal, but who has been adapted to the oxygen requirements of a Himalaya Sherpa, the heat resistance of a walker-on-coals, who needs less food than a hermit, has the strength of Sonny Liston, and runs the mile in three minutes flat, while solving problems in
145J.B.S. Haldane. “Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next Ten
Thousand Years” in Man And His Future. (Gordon Wolstenholme ed.) (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1963). pp. 354. This idea has endured, and NASA’s anthropomorphic “Robonaut”, built in 2011, is legless. See: http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov/default.asp
146 Haldane, 355.
147 Thomas B. Allen, “The Quest for Optiman” in The Quest: A Report on Extraterrestrial Life (Philadelphia: Chilton
Company, 1965) pp. 230.
148 Allen, 230.
149 Hannah Arendt. “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man” in The New Atlantis (1963) pp. 52. Online:
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-conquest-of-space-and-the-stature-of-man
“The astronaut, shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death, might well be taken as the symbolic incarnation of Heisenberg’s man—the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything but himself and man-made things the more ardently he wishes to eliminate all anthropocentric considerations from his encounter with the non-human world around him.”
tensor analysis in his head.”151 Balke’s acclimatized airmen formed the basis for part of Freedman’s vision of optiman as a human “improved” without violating the integrity of the body. Preserved in optiman (and reflected in its name) is humanity. Freedman points out that “Optiman would presumably not be a mosaic of spare parts and odd pieces of machinery, a Loop unto himself. Rather, he would be pure man.”152
When USAF space experts began working out what type of person to pair with a spacecraft, they were thinking in grand, epochal terms about evolution and the future of humanity. In ways not present in aviation medicine, space medicine experts cast their work in cosmic, sometimes outright religious terms. A good example of this philosophizing can be found in Paul A. Campbell’s career capstone tome Earthman, Spaceman, Universal Man? (1965). “Man had been placed on a pedestal high above all the other kingdoms of Earthlife. He was given intelligence, imagination, ingenuity, dexterity, and ability to communicate his ideas, by a purposeful Creator. His future is placed in his own hands… in Renaissance II, our era, space flight has become reality. In our time Earthman has become Spaceman. He is now potential Universal Man.”153 Campbell also worries that this process must be wisely managed in order to preserve a sense of “humanity”. “Basically, he is the son of Adam… he has, and must continue, to engineering himself around the slow processes and the limitations of natural evolution. He must accept ‘black boxes’ as aid but not as replacement.”154
Balke was an early champion of astronaut physical fitness, and non-invasive, non- technological adjustment to the space environment. Steeped in early twentieth-century German climbing culture, Balke’s body ethos carried strong nationalistic, masculine, racial, and moralistic overtones. The conditioning of the body was not just a technical exercise to aid engineers attempting to save weight, it was a moral imperative tied to preserving the nation, and a concept of “humanness” threatened by the prospect of extreme technological “improvements”. In Balke’s vision of the future, the body was not obsolete but perhaps more important than ever.
In 1959, Balke lamented that Americans were distressingly out of shape. After assessing the physical fitness of a few hundred airmen, he pessimistically concluded that “the over-all state of ‘physical fitness’ in Air Force personnel is ‘poor’ and that the Air Force physical fitness
151 ibid, 231. 152 ibid, 231.
153 Campbell, Prologue. 154 ibid, 161.
program, as it now stands, is ineffective.”155 For him, a fit population, especially in the military, was a key for a strong nation. Balke worried that automation and modern comforts produced an unhealthy neglect of the body, and he framed his concerns in sharp evolutionary, nationalistic, and moral terms:
Balke: “In most minds, power today rests in ideas, in motives, in organization and above all in technology. According to this thinking the evolution of the human race should tend toward the development of a strictly cerebral-visceral type of man with more and more neglect of all the body parts and organs which originally were vital for survival. Unfortunately, a nation's place among the other nations and its survival in the eternal struggle between them depends largely on the general vitality of the population. History has shown that the great accomplishments of all the ancient nations were destined to perish when a peak of civilisation slowly softened the physical resistance of man against the forces of nature, or against the onrush of a more vital enemy. We cannot expect this pattern to change in modern times despite all technologic advancements. Unless one does not care about the destiny of future generations conscious and sustained efforts should be made to maintain the physical capacities of man at high standards.156
Extending this view to future astronauts, Balke noted that “‘normal’ man cannot be expected to perform too well under ‘abnormal’ conditions… only the best conditioned individual will have a chance to perform adequately in the long run.”157 He argued that “the first space flyer must be capable of the most exacting human performance, must have the highest degree of tolerance to stress, and must have a demonstrated endurance to prolonged marginal conditions.”158 For Balke, there was no question about the physical superiority of the astronaut. “Our search,” he wrote, “is therefore for the qualities of the superman.”159 Despite finding some of these qualities advertised in Indigenous Peruvian miners, Balke worked to challenge this purported superiority—first by himself, and then by showing that he could acclimatize American soldiers as well, thus preserving outer-space as a white-dominated zone, much like the summits of very tall mountains.
155 Balke, “The Present Status of Physical Fitness in the Air Force”, 9. 156 ibid, 9.
157 Balke, “Experimental Studies for the Training and Selection for Manned Extraterrestrial Flights”, 165. 158 Balke, “Experimental Studies on the Conditioning of Man for Space Crews”, 177.
CONCLUSION
The Mount Evans acclimatization experiment provides an opportunity to think about the origins of astronauts in terms of the mountaineer and extreme explorer. Balke’s biography situates the desire to acclimatize astronauts within the longer histories of mountaineering and high-altitude physiology. Balke’s participation in the 1938 German Expedition to Nanga Parbat shows how his methods and practices emerged in the context of nationalistic and colonial mountaineering expeditions and were organized around solving the military problem of high-altitude flight for the Luftwaffe. Following his transfer to the United States in Operation Paperclip, Balke’s research in the Peruvian mountain town of Morococha incorporated a racialized, colonial view of the Indigenous people into a comparative practice that produced “guidelines” for future astronauts. The history of the Air Force’s interest in the bodies of Indigenous peoples thought to be specially adapted to newly-strategic “hostile” environments has been explored in other areas of Cold War environmental medicine, including tolerance to cold and radiation, but not yet in the context of space exploration. The topic of race and astronauts is often discussed in the context of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, focusing on the slow integration of African Americans into the astronaut corps., and contrasts between the urban crisis and massive budgets for the Apollo Program. The experimental use of Indigenous people shows how norms for space reflected race, and performed a subtle act of exclusion. Additionally, altitude acclimatization and the figure of Andean Man was one way the astronaut factored into debates over technology and evolution.
This approach of tracing the history of a category of “space normal” can serve as a methodology for exploring other aspects of space medicine and the astronaut body. Which humans were used in their construction? How did they include or exclude others? Women, for example, were not used to define early standards of work capacity or TUC. Other physiological and psychological norms in space medicine should be investigated in this manner. Bringing the figures of the colonial mountaineer and the Indigenous person who lives at high-altitude into space history highlights how astronauts are hybrid creations, with long contributing histories and deep political resonances. The rhetoric used to promote space exploration has been peaceful and inclusive (“we came in peace for all mankind”), but as the colonization of space is increasingly positioned as imperative for securing the continued existence of humanity, we must consider the ways certain people have been excluded from this future.
CHAPTER FOUR: BETWEEN HUMAN AND ANIMAL ASTRONAUTS: