Ep. 658: Space Exploration Horror Stories (2)
Fraser: Wait, he was on the station, and he heard something knocking on the outside of the station?
Dr. Gay: He was in a capsule. This was back in 2003, pre-station. So, you have Chinese astronaut in a capsule going around the Earth and hears what sounds just like someone knocking on the door. This freaked the poor guy out enough that he actually edged up to the door and looked outside, and there was nothing to be seen.
Fraser: Right.
Dr. Gay: Other taikonauts have reported the same experience.
Fraser: And he didn't open the door to see who it was?
Dr. Gay: Dude. No, you don't do that when there's vacuum outside. That's just a bad idea.
Fraser: Again, this now is starting to feel like a space horror story where someone just keeps hearing the knocking and then they just go, “Fine,” and then they open up the door and then they're sucked out into space. It turns out it was just a piece of metal clanking against the outside of the spacecraft.
Dr. Gay: So, that's some Solaris stuff right there, but in reality, they suspect it was a heating and cooling, just like your oven sounds like it's knocking. In all likelihood, it was the space capsule's thermal cycling was causing what sounded like knocking on the door, and since multiple capsules all share the same design, you would expect multiple astronauts to have this same disturbing experience.
Fraser: So, I get that happening here. So, our place has a metal roof and metal sides, so has all kinds of thermal expansion and contraction. There will be times when I hear sounds right outside the front door and I'll open up the front door, go take a look, and there's nothing. It's just the building itself creaking, and groaning, and contracting, and expanding in various changing temperatures, but you never get over it. There's gotta be something deeply human about being attuned to those kinds of sounds, and it always setting your hackles on edge. Yeah.
Dr. Gay: Our house has steam radiators that ping and hiss.
Fraser: Yeah, yeah. Totally.
Dr. Gay: It's the same thing.
Fraser: Yeah. Absolutely so loud. Very cool.
Dr. Gay: Then, there's the creepy thing every single astronaut experiences. Can you guess? You closed your eyes –
Fraser: Oh, yes, of course. Cosmic rays on their eyeballs.
Dr. Gay: Yeah.
Fraser: Yeah.
Dr. Gay: So, this can't be something that they were prepared for. The astronauts had the misfortune of just being in space and you close your eyes for the darkness of sleep, and you keep getting these bright flashes coming at you randomly in different places in your vision, and it's just flashes of high energy particles working to act damage on your retina. Yeah. Yeah. Just like you get cosmic rays on CCD images, you can get them on your eyeballs.
Fraser: Right. So, you're out there in space, you're less protected by the magnetosphere of the Earth and these cosmic rays are impacting your retina, the cells in your retina, and are causing flashes to be triggered to your brain, and you're actually taking eye damage as this is happening. So, this is almost like the opposite.
The experience would be kinda cool that you would be seeing these flashes as you have your eyes closed, but the understanding of what is actually happening is the part that's really, deeply unnerving that you are suffering – those are just your retinas. You're getting hit across your entire body. Your brain, your bones, your blood, your organs. Every part of your body is getting cosmic rays going through it, it's just you can only see the ones that are going through your retina.
Dr. Gay: I somehow feel like the first time you experience it, it's more creepy to see it than understand it in that one moment, but after that first moment, the understanding is creepier, but initially. Initially.
Fraser: Yep, that would be my concern. When you go to space, the clock is ticking, and your body is wearing down the various damages that are happening. You're losing your muscle mass, you're losing your bone mass, your fluids are redistributing, your eyesight is getting worse, you're getting increased radiation damage. I don't think I could think about anything else.
I know for a lot of people, they're like, “Oh, yeah. I want to go to space. It's gonna be so exciting,” but for me, going to space would be like start the clock. You are now in the death zone like when you're climbing Mount Everest. That's why I did my intro at the beginning. Just space itself is deeply terrifying just at a baseline. All right. I see you've done freaked right out. Keep going.
Dr. Gay: So, I think your comment on death from space is an excellent Segway into the next thing that I did some Googling on and I had to say that I found some of the creepiest, wrong information on the internet. Not that that should surprise absolutely anybody.
Fraser: Yeah.
Dr. Gay: So, what I was trying to find out was I wanted to find out if there's any information on how you deal with dead bodies in space. It seemed appropriate for this particular episode, and somewhere along the path from what actually happened to what got written, the story became that there are mummified, dead animals in orbit that get seen by astronauts.
Fraser: What? Again, space is big!
Dr. Gay: I know, and this is where I feel the need to take a moment and step back and debunk. So, firstful, yes, there have been a ton of animals that have died in space for various animals, whether it be they were laboratory animals on the International Space Station that get sent back after being euthanized in space, got sent back through the atmosphere and burned up in the atmosphere, or they were early animals from early attempts at rocket flight where the animals didn't make it back to Earth, but eventually, those capsules also burnt up in the atmosphere.
Any critter that has died in space has either been brought back to Earth and studied in a laboratory or has been burnt up in the atmosphere. So, to all of you who, like me, go and click on every one of these spookiest things in space headlines that are out there, this glorious time of the year, understand that when they say, “Space is filled with mummified dead animals,” there may be one or two things out there that just managed to not come back down through the atmosphere yet. I have not been able to find documentation either direction, but things don't stand in low Earth orbit forever.
Fraser: For more than a couple of years.
Dr. Gay: And anyways, the animals aren't free-floating, mummified death.
Fraser: Okay. So, is that a scary story? I guess.
Dr. Gay: I guess. It's a scary story if you don't know the truth, and time was needed. I mean, can you imagine you're a little kid, like the one reading my book that comes out tomorrow, that is trying to Google about what do astronauts see, and they find an article saying that astronauts and suborbital space flights see mummified dead animals. That's kind of disturbing.
Fraser: Right, and the reality is that plenty of animals have died in space. They've just all burned up in the atmosphere or brought back down for further experimentation in cargo vessels.
Dr. Gay: Yeah.
Fraser: Yeah, and yet no human body has ever gone to space. There are no human remains orbiting right now, but there will be. When you think about the Apollo missions, and I'm sure you've read that speech that Nixon was gonna give if their lander failed to take off again, and so the astronauts would just be stuck on the moon and then they would die of lack of oxygen. There are lots of spacecraft that have failed and are now floating in deep space. We don't know where they are, but so far, no humans have done that, but there will be a time when it will happen, and there will be people out there in space dead.
Dr. Gay: Yeah, and I just want to put the caveat on this as of as far as we know because there are other nations that launch rockets, and there have always been unconfirmed rumors, but that's it. No one has ever been able to confirm them, and you can't really hide things orbiting the planet.
Fraser: Yeah, did they go beyond low Earth orbit?
Dr. Gay: No, not that we know of.
Fraser: Did the Russians send a cosmonaut off to Mars?
Dr. Gay: They did send turtles around the moon and those came back safe.
Fraser: Okay. All right. Do you have time for one more?
Dr. Gay: Yes. Yes, I do.
Fraser: Okay. You get to choose one more, that's all we have time for.
Dr. Gay: All right. So, NASA doesn't have a public “this is what we do with dead bodies” procedure, but Chris Hadfield reported that they have to go through contingency simulations where they pretend to be killed.
So, they take turns offing the different astronauts in these contingency sims and running through the “how does this get handled”? and the question of what do you do with the body is one of the things that always get lefts unanswered when you ask an astronaut, but when you ask an engineer, a possible solution is brought up, which is stick the astronaut in a body bag, you put them in space so they essentially freeze dry really fast, then you use the robotic arm to shake the bejesus out of that so they break into a million pieces, take up less room. You bring them on board, and then you figure out what to do.
Fraser: Whoa.
Dr. Gay: Yeah.
Fraser: So, there is a book that they have on the International Space Station. It's this 1,000-page book about medicine, and they list all of the things that they are supposed to do like what if they have a cavity, what if somebody has their appendix rupture, so on, but haven't looked through it to see what to do in case of death. I wonder if it's in there. It must be. There must be rules in there on what to do in the case of death.
Dr. Gay: Every article I found said that NASA does not have a standard procedure for dead bodies. So, that may simply be that none of the journalists dug hard enough, and this is one of those times when there's no publicly available procedure.
Fraser: I'm gonna find it. I'm gonna find it. I'm sure it exists. Yeah. Training manual. Okay. I will look for it. Now I want to dig into it. All right. Well, this has been, I hope, appropriately spooky and scary for everyone. So, when you are contemplating the existential horror of an uncaring cosmos, you can take a moment to think about even scarier things on this hallowed eve. Thanks Pamela.
Dr. Gay: Thank you Fraser and thank you to all of our patrons out there who – you are really the ones that we count on to keep this show going week after week, year after year.
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