By C. J. Houchens

I'm already apprehensive, but the list clinches it. I'm in the belly, as it were, of the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Lab at Brandeis University in Waltham Massachusetts, moments away from a spin in the rotating room. I'm wondering if eating lunch was such a great idea when I see the list tacked to the bulletin board: a neatly penned parchment poster of "Ye Olde Synonyms" – all the dubiously hilarious ways of saying what I'm now certain I'll do in the next ten minutes. Upchuck, Retch, Ride the rail. Ralph. Talk into the big white telephone, Worship the porcelain god. And – how's this for euphemism – laugh at the ground.

What the hell am I doing here? Good question. I'm about to experience, firsthand, the effects – and side effects of "artificial gravity." The idea of rotating a spacecraft to counteract the effects of weightlessness has been around ever since physicists and sci–fiers began noodling with Newton's laws and considering the physical implications of traveling beyond Earth's gravity. We've seen it in Hermann Obert's pioneering projections from the 1920s and in Stanley Kubrick's languidly waltzing 2001 space station.

On Earth, stomach–lurching carnival rides like "The Barrel" and "Gravitron" spin so quickly that when the floor drops out beneath them, shrieking teenagers are pinned in place to the wall by centrifugal force. Eureka! Artificial gravity.

Until recently, we haven't heard much about artificial gravity from NASA. Larry Lemke, an engineer at Ames Research Center on assignment to study artificial gravity at the space agency's Washington headquarters, explains that zero–g is fine for short missions, the current stage of America's space program. In fact, learning how we adapt to microgravity and how to exploit it have been key research objectives.

"Zero–g is what you get if you go in orbit around the planet. And since people knew that, they made it an asset," Lemke says. "But if your goals are interplanetary travel, then you have to reassess."

Why, if zero–g works for short hops, couldn't we float around on long–duration flights, too? Mainly because the same physiological adaptations that allow us to overcome initial space sickness (yet another olde synonym for several days of lost lunch) and work comfortably in microgravity make the return to gravity rough. If we could stay in zero–g forever, no sweat. But what goes up must eventually come down, and it's got to be in good enough shape to do its work in the low Martian gravity or back on Earth's surface.

The most debilitating bodily changes caused by zero–g are deconditioning of the cardiovascular and skeletal muscle systems, and bone "demineralization." Calcium leaches from bones because they don't get the kind of impact exercise - running, walking - that stimulates marrow growth. A couple of things conspire to weaken the heart, including the shift of fluids toward the center of the body. "You're a water balloon, explains Paul DiZio, assistant director of the Graybiel Lab. That's a simple model [of the human body]. If you had a water balloon in space, it would expand to fill the greatest possible volume and be perfectly round."

The same thing happens with the body in space. After the astronaut whizzes away a couple of now–superfluous pints of fluid, the rest pools around the chest. When blood no longer drops into the feet and legs, the heart doesn't have to struggle to pump it through the system. The lazy heart weakens. In fact, every muscle weakens, because the body simply doesn't get the workout it does in it's customary tug–of–war with Earth's gravity.

"You don't realize how much force it takes just for you to sit in that chair. You call it resting, but if you were to totally relax, you would slump and fall in a heap on the ground. You'd look like a boxer that had just been knocked out," says DiZio, a psychologist with a gift for analogy.

Of course, that's what makes zero–g such a fun place to be, and coming home such a drag. Space travelers generally return to Earth with a condition called postflight orthostatic instability - Greekspeak for "our hero's back, but he can't stand up." Jerry Carr, veteran of the 1973 Skylab 3 flight that holds the U.S. space endurance record, says, "I didn't faint, but I felt pretty clumsy. My head felt like a big watermelon and I had to work hard to support it. I'd been a butterfly for 84 days and suddenly weighed something again."

It's the slapstick but appalling prospect of a contingent of space butterflies taking one small flop for mankind on the Martian surface that has NASA minds engaged in finding antidotes to the effects of weightlessness. Even the shortest Mars journey would take 14 months round-trip; other scenarios last as long as three years, and experts anticipate the effects of readaptation will only worsen as missions get longer.

So how do we keep our astronauts from falling apart? Lemke notes that in this country we really haven't done the fundamental research that would give us a definitive answer. However, the Soviet space program has long been geared toward studying problems of prolonged piloted flight: They've developed a regimen that gets cosmonauts back on their feet – although not working at full Earthbound capacity - in as little as two days, after stays in orbit lasting up to a year.

In space, cosmonauts slog away on treadmills and bicycle ergometers for four hours, every day, six days a week. During waking hours they wear a "penguin" suits, full–body get–ups with woven–in rubber bands that force automatic isometric exercise for the torso and legs. They take mineral supplements and electrolytes, hammer their fists against solid surfaces to stress arm bones, and chugalug mildly saline solutions prior to reentry to replace the fluids lost in the initial adjustment to weightlessness. For the last two weeks of flight, they slip into something a little less comfortable - the "Chirig" lower body negative–pressure device, which creates a vacuum around the legs to coerce blood downward again.

If all these pharmacological and mechanical gizmos make space travel sound like the health–spa–from–hell, they're nothing compared to the bizarre side effects of artificial gravity. The problem is that rotating a spacecraft creates not only centrifugal force - the useful stuff - but something called the "Coriolis effect, " which wreaks havoc on the body' balance system.

Try picturing a huge clock with a sweep second hand in motion. Now imagine trying to walk a straight line along the hand toward the center of the clock; you can't, because the forward motion of the hand sweeps you off into, whoops, a slightly elliptical path instead. A more mundane example: because the Earth rotates, the Coriolis effect makes water swirl down the drain instead of dropping straight down the pipes.

When you consider that the semicircular canals of the inner ear - the things that (along with vision) control balance, orientation and whether you're going to toss your cookies – are basically no more than a set of tiny liquid-filled pipes, you can appreciate why NASA's interest in artificial gravity has led the agency to fund human response studies in the Graybiel Labs rotating room.

And why I'm getting more anxious by the minute.

DiZio tries to calm me. "We have a pretty good idea when people are getting sick," he says less than reassuringly, enumerating ye olde clues: pallor, panting, perspiration, salivation. "If we see someone with a sweaty brow, we know they're feeling a little nauseous and we stop." And if they're drooling? His laugh holds a hint of Vincent Price, "Then it's probably too late."

The rotating room is actually a cylindrical chamber, 22 feet in diameter, turned by four banks of motors - the same kind that power the monorail at Disneyland. Built of submarine–gray aluminum sheeting over structural foam, the room is a decidedly grim–looking, totally enclosed, merry–go–round. There are no windows, no portholes. Once inside, with the door shut, you get absolutely no visual clues as to whether or not you're spinning in relation to the outside world.

To communicate with research associate Joel Ventura, DiZio wears a headset walkie–talkie with bobbing antenna that gives him a raffish John Belushi–the–killer–bee look. Ventura bolts the door from the outside, moves to the control room, scans the rotating room with a ceiling–mounted videocam to be sure he's got us in sight, and gives the okay for rotation over the speaker system.

Let the fun begin.

DiZio recommends I lean against the wall at first and keep my head still. We're going to take it up to 5 rpm and leave it there unless I beg for mercy - or for more. At that speed of rotation, at this radius, we'll get a combined force of about 1.45 g's. Although I know we're moving because the motors grind and then level off to a comforting starship–in–flight purr, I get no physical sensation of acceleration - perhaps because I'm pressed against the wall tighter than a dealer in a drug bust.

Piece of cake, I think. Then I turn my head to look at DiZio and all my semicircular canals scream, "Omigod, we're spinnnnning." I swallow hard, will my stomach to stay in place, s–l–o–w–l–y move my head back to center, pretend I'm wearing a neck brace, and concentrate on keeping my eyes focused on a wall speaker directly opposite me. I'm so intensely involved with damping down my inner ear alarm system, I lose my grip on my pen. When it drops, it whips through the air in a bizarre Coriolis path and sort of rig zags rather than rolls along the floor.

"Try to walk toward the center", DiZio says. He's gotta be joking. Game soul that I am I look menacingly at the floor, unglue myself from the wall, and take what I think will be a normal step forward. Coriolis forces sideswipe me. I Charge on with a drunk's locked knees and flat feet and find myself pushed farther and farther out of a straight line. DiZio notes that I'm leaning into the artificial gravity toward the center at about 15 degree angle, but I'm starting to get pretty woozy and can't even respond, because all my attention is nailed to the elementary problem of locomotion.

When I stand still, look at the opposite wall, and move my head in an arc – left ear to left shoulder then right ear to right – my field of vision pitches and yaws like a movie shot through a rocking camera. All this time, remember, the room is spinning around once every twelve seconds. Because I can't see the world ripping by outside, I don't perceive the rotation visually. All my information is coming from my inner ear, and it's telling me this is a crazy way to go to Mars.

DiZio, veteran of 200 parabolic zero–g jet fights and a guy with a self–proclaimed iron stomach, claims experiments suggest that volunteers can be gradually conditioned to ignore the horror show effects. But they have to then be de–conditioned to function in the real world again. Of course, DiZio himself copes at 5 rpm by moving his eyes eerily to look around - but never his head - and by taking small, shuffling baby steps that make him look like a comedian's parody of a geriatric case. On Joel Ventura's video monitor we must seem to be reliving an old episode of I Love Lucy, Ricky and Lucy stumble into a giant centrifuge. Is this any way to run a space mission?

Maybe not. Ten miles away in Cambridge, at MIT's Man–Vehicle Lab, Peter Diamandis, a 27–year–old hyperachiever with graduate degrees in aerospace engineering and an M.D. from Harvard, has a different idea for countering the effects of weightlessness - give astronauts a daily dose of artificial gravity while they're sleeping. With a grant from NASA, Diamandis has built an experimental Artificial Gravity Sleeper – a.k.a. "Robocot," or the rotating bed. Naturally the concept spawns shtick about Hugh Hefner and mirrored ceilings, but the only slightly sexy features of the Sleeper are its hospital–issue water mattress and royal blue velour bedspread. The Sleeper is distinctly laboratorial: a sort of stainless steel examining table cantilevered at the head from a cylindrical motorized base, housed in a bunker–like concrete room under a ceilingful of glaring fluorescent lights.

Diamandis mans a jerry–rigged control panel with more raw circuitry than the inside of a TV, and cranks the Sleeper up for a quick riderless demo spin. At 24 rpm – the speed required to create a 1–g force at the footplate - the bed swirls like a toppled windmill kicking up a stiff little breeze in the lab. Diamandis puts on the brakes and turns to me. "Now, what I propose," he says, "is that you hop on board and I'll go at a much slower speed."

Fine. I kick off my shoes and stretch out flat on my back, with the soles of my feet just grazing the footplate and my ears at the exact centerpoint of rotation – my head skewered, as it were, on the spindle of a record player. Diamandis buckles me down with a lapbelt, takes my glasses and gives me a borrowed–from–an–airline sleep–mask to darken any visual sensations of rotation "Give me your hand, please," he says, placing my palm on large red button at the edge of the bed "This is the emergency stop." Emergency stop? Nervously crack bad ejection button jokes as Diamandis wrestles the windshield into place – a curved construction of clear Mylar over a paned metal frame. Feeling like a vegetable in a greenhouse, I put on the mask, and brace myself for the ride.

Diamandis cautions me to keep my head still. The motor starts its electric shaver buzzing, and rotation begins and accelerates until it levels off at 5–rpm. I'm aware that the water mattress changes shape beneath my legs as the Sleeper speeds up and centrifugal force pulls water toward the outside of rotation – toward the foot of the bed. My feet, too, are now pressed into the footplate by an unaccustomed force that feels as I imagine attraction would feel to a magnet.

The ride is smooth, oddly soothing and beneath the not–quite–opaque sleep mask, can't tell whether I'm spinning clockwise or counter – or whether I'm spinning at all – except that Diamandis voice dopplers in and out and I get a slight sensation of light/dark/light/dark from burned–out row of ceiling lights.

Diamandis cranks The Sleeper up to 24 rpm. The 1–g of artificial gravity pulls my feet so strongly I could swear the bed has tilted up at the head. When I raise my arms at my sides, my hands are purled in parabolic motion by the Coriolis effect. I very cautiously turn my head from side to side. Because my eyes are shut, the effect isn't nauseating, but I get the same Coriolis–distorted sense of motion. It's weird, but not unpleasant. I am so relaxed, my impulse is to roll over on my side and settle in, but instinct tells me my semicircular canals would go wild.

As the bed slows to a stop, the pressure eases on my feet. My knees lower as the water in the mattress shifts back up under my backside. With eyes closed and the bed stopped, for the first time my head feels like it's spinning. After a few seconds, the sensation disappears. Diamandis removes the windshield, unbuckles the belt, and I sit up. I feel fine, I feel great. I'm a gyronaut. And I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Whether I'd happily do it again on the thousand and one nights of a mission to Mars is another question. For one thing, flat on the back with hands at sides is not a comfortable posture for most humans who are still breathing. For another, to conserve space, several beds would probably be arranged spoke–like around a hub of rotation. Who could sleep head–to–head–to–head like so many fishsticks on a microwave–safe plate?

Back in Washington, Lemke has a hunch that the best artificial gravity system for a long, stressful flight is the one that minimizes Coriolis effects and most closely duplicates Earth's – a long radius, with a slow rate of rotation. He tinkers at blackboard and computer with the possibility of two craft joined by a flexible tether the length of five football fields. Questions buzz. How to control them? How to slow the system down? Only two things are certain. It will be at least a decade before we get the ideas all ironed out. And when we do, we're guaranteed to have a solution that would make old Isaac Newton's head spin.

FINAL FRONTIER Magazine,
June 1989