One of the times these pants were used, however, the Russian cosmonaut wearing them experienced a sudden drop in heart rate and lost consciousness. His crewmates thought he was in cardiac arrest and immediately ended the experiment without ill effect. Anytime a piece of equipment has put a person at risk, NASA has been reluctant to use it again. But because the Chibis is still the best possibility we have for understanding this problem, they are making an exception.
Preparing to don the pants is actually a days-long process. We have to take baseline samples of blood, saliva, and urine, and we also have to take images of blood vessels in our heads, necks, and eyes using ultrasound. So much of the equipment we need to do these tests is only on the U.S. segment, so we spend a few hours packing it up and ferrying it over to the Russian service module. This is going to be the most complicated human experiment that’s ever been done on the International Space Station.
When it’s time to put on the device, I take off my pants and clamber into the Chibis pants, making sure the seal around my waist is secure. Misha is working the controls, slowly decreasing the pressure on my lower body, and with each incremental change I can feel the blood being pulled out of my head—in a good way. For the first time in months, I don’t feel like I’m standing on my head.
But then the feeling starts to change. It’s like I’m in an F-14 again, pulling too many g’s. I can feel myself starting to gray out, my peripheral vision closing in, where you are at risk of losing consciousness. The pants are malfunctioning, and I feel like I could have my intestines pulled out in the most unpleasant way possible.
“Hey, something’s not right with this,” I announce to Misha and Gennady. “I’m gonna have to—” I reach for the seal at my waist, prepared to break it, canceling the experiment. At the same instant, I hear Gennady yelling.
“Misha, shto ty delayesh?” What are you doing? Gennady doesn’t yell much, so when he raises his voice you can be sure you have likely screwed up. In this case, I look over at the pressure gauge, which is not supposed to go past 55. Misha has it down to 80, the maximum negative pressure.
Fortunately neither I nor the equipment sustains any permanent damage, and we are able to go on with the experiment. I stay in the pants for a couple of hours, doing various medical tests like measuring blood pressure and taking ultrasound images of my heart, neck, eyeball, and a blood vessel just behind my temple. This is where my space tattoos come in handy. Shortly before my launch, I visited a Houston tattoo parlor and had some black dots placed on the most-used ultrasound sites (on my neck, biceps, thigh, and calf) so I wouldn’t have to locate the exact spot each time. It’s saved me a huge amount of trouble already. We measure my cochlear fluid pressure (by sticking an instrument in my ear) and my intraocular pressure (by tapping a pressure sensor on my anesthetized eyeball). We scan my eyeball with a laser, which can register changes like choroidal folds and optic nerve swelling.
During the time we’re doing this, I feel as good as I’ve felt in space. The constant pressure in my head clears, and I’m sorry when it’s time to shed the pants and shut the experiment down.
Later in the day, I’m sitting in the Waste and Hygiene Compartment. I’ve been sitting for a while, in fact—sometimes this process takes a while in the absence of gravity. Samantha is brushing her teeth just outside the kabin, which is like a stall in a public restroom—and I can hear her humming to herself, as she often does while she works. I can see her socked feet under the wall, hooked under a handrail to keep her steady. Her toes are close enough that I could reach out and tickle them, but I decide against it.
This scene probably sounds a bit odd to those who haven’t experienced the loss of privacy on a space station, but we get used to it. I’ve just been reading about how the men on the Shackleton expedition had to hunker down behind snow drifts and had only chunks of ice to clean themselves with, so I count myself lucky. Because I have nothing else to do while I sit, I watch Samantha’s feet hooked under the handrail, keeping her body perfectly still, and I think about the complexity of that simple task. If you showed me nothing but a foot hooked under a handrail in zero gravity, I could estimate how long that person has been in space with a high degree of accuracy. When Samantha was new up here, she would have hooked her feet too hard, used too much force, and tired out her ankles and big toe joints unnecessarily. Now she knows exactly how little pressure she needs to apply. Her toes move with the elegance and precision of a pianist’s fingers on a keyboard.
Last night we enjoyed our final Friday dinner with Terry, Samantha, and Anton. Since the loss of the Progress, the Russians are running low on food and other supplies, and though we’ve made it clear we will share food, things won’t be the same for a while. I bring over a salami my brother sent up on the last SpaceX, and I eat some of the last of the Russian meals, a “Can of White” (chicken with white sauce), and some American “Bags of Brown” (some sort of irradiated beef thing). The Russians also have something called “the Appetizing Appetizer,” which it is not.
A few of us say we have been craving fruit recently, which is no surprise given that there has been no fresh food in our diets since shortly after Dragon arrived. Our dried, bagged, and canned fruits are not the same as the real deal. I share the fact that I recently had a craving for a cheap domestic beer in a small bar glass with warm, bitter foam like my dad used to drink. This craving is weird, because I haven’t had that kind of beer since college and would never choose to drink it on Earth. I’m more of a hoppy India pale ale kind of guy. Maybe there’s some nutrient in cheap beer I’m missing. We talk about whether we are going to get scurvy, and what it is exactly, what the symptoms are. I scratch my balls to get a laugh. Just the word “scurvy” sounds horrible, we agree. I wonder whether the members of the Shackleton expedition got scurvy; I will look at the book again tonight before I go to sleep. When the next SpaceX resupply gets here at the end of June, it will bring fresh fruits and vegetables as well as desperately needed supplies, chief among them the shit cans that are so vital to life in space. My brother has also announced he is sending me a gorilla suit on SpaceX. I asked why I needed a gorilla suit on the space station.
“Of course you need a gorilla suit,” he responded. “There’s never been a gorilla suit in space before. You’re getting a gorilla suit. There’s no stopping me.”