Beyond Gravity

Flights to the moon, and beyond, are still only a tenth-magnitude twinkle in the explorer's eye, but aviation medicine is determined not to be caught napping. Against the day when such flights will be tried, the U.S. Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field, Tex. has set up an interplanetary research section, named it the Department of Space Medicine. It is manned by three German scientists, imported from Berlin.

Last week, in a paper presented to the Aero Medical Association in Manhattan, two of them told what they were up against: the human body, ill-adapted for flight even at sea level, was never intended to function in the "gravity-free" state which exists beyond the stratosphere.*

Dr. Hubertus Strughold, a physiologist, and Dr. Heinz Haber, an astronomer and physicist, pointed out that the human infant, in its first year of life before muscular and nervous control have developed, is kept in its cradle by gravity. Man's muscles and sensomotor nervous system are adapted to work in a gravity field. But 50 miles beyond the earth, where the air is so thin as to afford negligible support, spaceship pilots would begin to find conditions approximating the gravity-free state.

There, body movements would not be controlled by the pressure sense of the skin or the power sense of the muscles, because weight, power and the pressure of apparent weight would not be felt. Fortunately, the researchers reported, they have already found that a third type of control, man's "posture sense," would still work under gravity-free conditions. It would enable him to find his ear if he wanted to scratch it.

But, another difficulty in the gravity-free state is that strong sensations are caused by minute accelerations--as small, for example, as those involved in routine body movements. Thus, it is possible that raising a hand to scratch an ear would produce unbearably strong sensations of acceleration. Other developments in aviation medicine reported at the convention:

P:Working with a color threshold meter, Dr. Ingeborg Schmitt found that a pilot's sensitiveness to faint differences in color was notably improved if he drank two cups of coffee within 50 minutes before taking the test.

P: Still experimenting with drugs to prevent or cure airsickness, Lieut. Colonel A. B. Strickland Jr. found dramamine the most effective so far, and less likely to cause drowsiness than other drugs.

P: To find out just how much the human body can stand in curving, tumbling and angular accelerations, the Navy is building a $5,000,000 centrifuge. With a 50-ft. radius, it is designed to reach an acceleration 40 times that of gravity. It will spin and jerk a potential spaceship pilot faster than all the scream-producing gadgets in amusement parks.

* A free-moving space ship would be like a miniature moon: its occupants, though still within the earth's gravitational field, would not feel it, and the space ship's own feeble gravity would not matter.

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