Objetivo 5: Relacionadas con el tipo de intervención escogida y el tipo de

What type of person did this device and its regimen produce? Alongside the debut of the space cabin simulator in the 1953 Collier’s series, space medicine experts set the human standards for space astronomically high. Strughold predicted that the job of astronaut would be extremely competitive: for every 200 applicants, 199 would be eliminated. The “top men” left standing would possess a “degree of perfection”, meeting rigid physical, psychological, educational, and age requirements. “He must be between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five; he must have a college education; he must be of medium weight, and between five feet five and five feet eleven inches tall.”103 _{According to the article, successful candidates then embarked upon five years of training} including graduate level classroom instruction in “rocket and instrument design, physics, astronomy, navigation, and basic medicine.”104

Unlike Von Braun’s grand vision of military exploration and colonization, laid out in the rest of the Collier’s series, the cramped one-person space cabin simulator Strughold eventually built evoked a more modest, even more militaristic vision of humans in space.105 _{By 1956, space} medicine experts assumed that the capsule would be part of a weapons system, and that it would be manned exclusively by USAF officers—soldiers. In early 1958, just months before NASA was established as a civilian agency, Steinkamp wrote, “It is reasonable, also, to assume that for many

103 _{Ryan, 57.} 104 _{ibid, 57.}

105 _{For Von Braun’s vision, see Michael Neufeld. Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York:}

years to come space flight will be more or less a military controlled operation.”106 _{A SAM research} report written in the wake of Sputnik describes the “biologic problems anticipated in manned space vehicles” as “problem areas pertinent to current and future weapons systems.”107 _{In late 1957,} Hauty drew parallels between “Human Performance in the Space Travel Environment” and “the concomitant evolution of human functions required by manned weapons systems.”108 _{Of future} astronauts, Hartman wrote, “he is going to function as the operator of a complex, semi-automatic system in a manner much like operators of many other advanced weapons systems.”109 _{Anker has} shown how space cabin environmental systems heavily resembled those also in submarines, missile silos, command bunkers and fallout survival shelters.110 _{The same could be said for the} human—a Cold War technological subject was constructed along with these small, enclosed, instrumented spaces. In this early moment, when the Air Force was seriously contemplating “The Military Potential of The Moon” as a missile silo, the space cabin occupant was assumed to be a button-pushing solider, either an alert reconnaissance officer, watching a radar screen for evidence of enemy activity, or an ever-vigilant launch control officer, ready to unleash a warhead at the illumination of an indicator light.111 _{This dark vision conjured up by the space cabin scientists} extended beyond missilemen targeting warheads from low earth orbit, and may partly explain the lunar destination of the simulations. Gerathewohl found Von Braun’s grand paradigm unrealistic, but still assumed a permanent Air Force presence would soon be established beyond the Earth. “Although it seems improbable that much larger settlements will be erected on the Moon, bases of a limited size will definitely be set up.”112

Before it was even built, the sealed cabin was assumed to be a military, and therefore masculine, space. Rachel N. Weber has shown how USAF cockpit simulators designed exclusively for men ended up effectively excluding women from jobs as fighter pilots even after the official ban against them was lifted.113 _{When Strughold introduced the simulator in Collier’s, the piece} included the bold headline “Reasons for Ban on Women.” Women, he wrote, “won’t go along on 106 _{Steinkamp, 375.} 107 _{Evans, 31.} 108 _{Hauty, 1.} 109 _{Hartman, 15} 110 _{Anker, 239.}

111 _{S. E. Singer. “The Military Potential of the Moon” in Air University Quarterly Review, 11 (No. 2, Summer 1959)}

pp. 31.

112 _{Gerathewohl, 466. During this same period, the Air Force was secretly drawing up plans for “Project Lunex”, a}

permanently-manned Air Force base on the Moon.

interplanetary journeys, where privacy will be lacking for long periods. So they’ll take the chamber tests separately, and briefly, in preparation for the shorter flights they will make.”114 _{In reality, it} ended up being worse than that. No women were ever tested in the SAM space cabin simulator. The only surviving photograph of a woman in the simulator is a gag shot taken years after the last tests: an aging Strughold sitting inside, with his arm playfully draped around space writer Shirley Thomas. It was emblazoned on the back of volume four in her popular Men of Space series, which included her treatment of Strughold, by then known in America as “the Father of space medicine”.115

Access to the space cabin simulator was limited to military men, but what types of men? The German aviation experts who founded the Department of Space Medicine were obviously most familiar with pilots. But they also studied a number of other analog situations for insight into what life in a tiny, artificial capsule might be like. For Strughold and his colleagues, the practice of testing humans in low-pressure chambers was routine. While the set-up was superficially similar (person sits in sealed box), the purpose was opposite. Low-pressure tests were meant to study deleterious reactions to extreme altitudes. The job of the space cabin was to maintain a habitable environment free from negative physiological and psychological effects. In this sense, the subject was similar to the occupant of a submarine—inhabiting an enclosed, artificial, military-oriented environment, like that on the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine launched in 1954. That same year, Strughold acknowledged that “a sealed cabin in space resembles a submarine in many respects,” but he also highlighted key differences. Simply extrapolating from years of Navy research was not enough.116 _{In 1958, Hauty explained that spacecraft would be much smaller and} even more confining than submarines. They would have greater weight restrictions, a smaller crew, and could not “surface” in event of an emergency.117 _{Pressurized high-altitude balloon gondolas} pioneered by the Piccards in the 1930s were seen as important precursors to the space cabin, but for an analog of long-duration isolation, space medicine experts looked to the cramped confines in Antarctica where explorer and Navy Admiral Richard E. Byrd spent several winters.118

114 _{Ryan, 63.} 115 _Thomas.

116 _{Strughold, “The U.S. Air Force Experimental Sealed Cabin”, 50.}

117 _{Hauty, 2. “In a closed ecological system on extended space operations, the crew will be much smaller, restriction}

of mobility far greater, and the duration of confinement considerably longer.”

118 _{Strughold, Steinkamp, and Hauty all reference Byrd’s autobiography Alone. On his second expedition to}

In addition to the pilot, the low-pressure test subject, the high-altitude native, the submariner, the aeronaut, the mountaineer, and the polar explorer, perhaps the most surprising analog Strughold and his colleagues discussed in the context of the space cabin was the prisoner of war. The end of the Korean War in 1953 brought rumours that American soldiers had been kept in tiny, windowless cells to facilitate “brainwashing” by communist captors. In 1961, Hartman wrote that “historically, the current interest in isolation and confinement problems arose during the Korean War. A national concern developed over the behaviour of American prisoners-of- war.”119 _{In her 1962 survey Space Medicine, pathologist Ursula Slager noted that “prisoners of} war, especially those in China and Korea were kept in severe social and emotional isolation and confinement… these situations may be considered as more nearly ‘space equivalent.’”120

But the specter of the prisoner of war in space medicine needs to be understood in a special way, not only in the context of the Korean War, but also World War Two. As the former head of the Luftwaffe’s Aviation Medicine Research Institute in Berlin for the entire length of the Second World War, Strughold knew about lethal low-pressure and hypothermia experiments carried out by some of his colleagues on concentration camp prisoners, including Polish prisoners of war at Dachau.121 _{These experiments were justified as generating useful data that would help German} pilots survive rapid decompression and bail-out into the freezing North Atlantic.122 _{After the fall} of Berlin in 1945, Strughold himself became a prisoner of war, kept under house arrest by American forces at Heidelberg. Putting the brightest possible spin on what was a stressful and uncertain period, Strughold later recalled that, “with occupation, I became an American prisoner of war and was confined to the building. Actually, this was very good. I am convinced that every scientist should be confined for one year, if possible—to read the history of his profession. I read during this time three volumes on the history of medicine. This was very valuable to me.”123

Advance Base. His team had to mount a risky rescue operation when they determined that his increasingly bizarre radio transmissions were symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning.

119 _{Hartman, 25.}

120 _{Ursula T. Slager. Space Medicine (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962) pp. 342.}

121 _{Karl Heinz Roth. “Flying Bodies - Enforcing States: German aviation medical research from 1925 to 1975 and the}

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” in Man, Medicine, and the State: The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century. ed. Wolfgang U. Eckart (Franz Stein Verlag) pp. 107-127

122 _{Data from these callous experiments on prisoners was often stripped of its cruelty when cited in the literature.}

Writing in Space Medicine, Slager notes in passing that, “At Dachau, nude, non-medicated men immersed

experimentally for 1 h in water at 4.6 C (40 F) died at an average of 6 min after removal from the water… the men died with an average rectal temperature of 26.8 C.” Slager, 79.

Along with the operator of an advanced weapons system, and a prisoner, the space cabin set-up also figured the occupant as a medical and psychological subject. During simulations, the subject was dressed in green surgical scrubs, and covered in biometric sensors relaying respiratory and pulmonary data to the doctors outside. A “shirtsleeve environment” is how NASA later referred to the practice of not wearing a protective suit in a pressurized spacecraft. Tests in the space cabin simulator with subjects wearing full pressure suits were conducted, but the suits were exceedingly uncomfortable and later abandoned. NASA astronauts were also biomedical test subjects, and Apollo crews similarly went suit-free for the transit portions of their voyages.

Gerathewohl also suggested that the subject be given a journal and encouraged to record subjective experiences to significant events during the test. This required the subject to spend portions of their rest period in a reflexive, contemplative state. The subject’s diary also ended up being a place where frustrations brought on by the claustrophobic, technocratic environment were vented, but not without the ground crew eventually finding out. In this sense, the diary marks the beginning of the practice of self-reporting in space psychology, an imperfect method long considered unreliable and subject to manipulation by astronauts concerned with preserving the appearance of sound mental health, so as not to jeopardize their flight-ready status.

Who would be tested first? Despite a long-standing tradition in aviation medicine of self- experimentation, experts decided to select a subject from the ranks of young enlisted men on the base. In 1956, when it came time for short tests with human subjects, space travel was not a high enough priority to attract “top men”. Strughold had to make due with who was around, and available. Despite these limitations, the subjects they chose were still heavily pre-screened, healthy, young, white, military men. The first short tests lasting only a few hours were to check systems and establish operating procedures. These were performed by Joseph A. Dupraw, a young first lieutenant, and Fred W. Childress, who held the rank of airman, second class, and was brought in from neighbouring Lackland Air Force Base.124 _{The first subject for the 24-hour test, Dalton F.} Smith Jr., was a 19-year-old technician, with the rank of airman, third class.125 _{When the hatch} door was wheeled open from his day-long stay—which included the dramatic CO2 incident— Smith was personally greeted by Strughold and Gaume, one of the attending doctors. A photo of

124 _{Photographs of the two men practicing tasks in the simulator with the door open can be found in between pages}

53 and 54 in Semi-Annual Historical Report – School of Aviation Medicine, USAF. 1 July – 31 December 1957.

this moment ran in the August, 1956 issue of Popular Science, and for his trouble Smith received a commendation ribbon.126

Describing those eventually selected for the week-long tests, Steinkamp wrote, “Without exception, the subjects were athletically inclined and possessed a vigorous physique.”127 _{The first} space cabin subjects were younger, less skilled, less educated, and less experienced than the elite test-pilots initially slotted into NASA’s Mercury capsule, but they still represented a very thin slice of the American population: healthy, white, male soldiers. In early 1958—with the world suddenly watching—Strughold, along with resident doctors Steinkamp, Roth, Gaume, and psychologists Gerathewohl, Hauty and Hartman, had to decide who to select for their seven-day simulated “trip to the Moon and back.”128

126 _{Ibid, 35.} 127 _{Steinkamp, 18.}

128 _{“Spaceman Fatigue: He Enters Final 48 Hours of Simulated Trip to Moon” in New York Times (February 15,}

Figure 6: Airman Donald G. Farrell in training the day before starting his week-long stay in the simulator. He holds

the electric hot cup used to prepare meals. (Source: Space Medicine Association, Online archive, 1954-1958).