Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in ... - The Black Vault

Exploring the Unknown 251
does it appear to affect the performance of the pilot. For all pilots weightlessness
has been a pleasant experience. All the senses such as sight and hearing perform
normally during space flight. There has been no hallucination, no blackout or
any other medical phenomena which might have an effect on Man in space. We
even experimented with drifting flight and whether the astronaut would become
disoriented when he could not distinguish up from down or have the horizon of
Earth for a reference. But each time the answer seemed to be that a man could
adapt as long as his basic needs for breathing oxygen and pressure were supplied.
Perhaps the greatest contributions to the program have come in the
area of development of aeromedical equipment. Blood pressure measuring
systems were developed that would automatically take readings and transmit
them by telemetry to the ground. The biosensors were designed to pick up other
information such as pulse rate and respiration rate. There were numerous small
changes that were made to these systems to increase the accuracy of the data that
we got back from the man in space. The in-flight studies of the test pilot’s reaction
are probably the most complete medical records we have tried to keep on an
individual. Their value has been to demonstrate that man functions normally in
the space environment.
Related to the aeromedical studies in the environmental equipment that
provides life support for the astronaut. We started with the basic Navy pressure suit
for aircraft flying and modified it for performance in the spacecraft. We found it
was desirable to eliminate as many pressure points as possible and have tailored
the suits on an individual basis for each [8] astronaut. There are two areas in
life support which presented new problems to be overcome. First, there was the
problem of circulation of air. In the absence of gravity, the normal rules of air
circulation are cancelled, and the carbon dioxide breathed out by the astronaut
would suffocate him. The air in the cabin would also have to be forced through
the air conditioning system to keep the cabin area from overheating.
Secondly, there is the problem of the air supply itself and its possible effect
on the spacecraft pilot. For conserving weight, a single gas system was desirable.
But it was not known if breathing pure oxygen over long periods of time could
have harmful effects. The Mercury flights and other research in a pure oxygen
environment have proven that no injury to the body’s system has been produced
by using a one gas system.
SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS
Man’s role as a scientific observer and experimenter in space was another
unknown in the program. Much of it was based on the ability of man to exist in
space. It had to first be determined that he would be able to function normally
and then the scientific benefits of the program could be explored. Man as an
observer has proven his capabilities from the first orbital flight. The brightness,
coloring, and height of the airglow layer was [sic] established. It was something a
camera could not record nor could an unmanned satellite perform this mission.
Man in space has the ability to observe the unknown and to try to define it by
experiment. The particles discovered at sunrise by John Glenn were determined by