Space: The Moon in Their Grasp

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Alone once more after rendezvous, the Gemini 7 astronauts received a humorous plea from Post Office officials—relayed through Mission Control in Houston—to mail Christmas cards and packages early. "I have a stack of stuff up here," Lovell complained, "but I can't find a post office." Replied a controller: "You should have sent it down with Gemini 6."

As uncomfortable as it was for the pilots, Gemini 7's flight will provide NASA doctors with invaluable information on the effects of prolonged weightlessness. Their findings may well influence the conditioning and medical treatment of Apollo pilots, who will have to spend between eight and 14 weightless days during a successful trip to the moon.

Getting a Little Crummy. Last week, by coincidence, Russian scientists reported that two of the three cosmonauts sent aloft on the first Voskhod flight showed symptoms of motion sickness and suffered from illusions. Earlier Cosmonaut Gherman Titov came down with a celebrated case of vertigo on the first day-long Vostok flight. But NASA's chief space-flight surgeon, Charles Berry, believes that insufficient training, rather than still unexplained phenomena, was the cause of the Russian problem. With the exception of Titov, he notes, none of the Russians bothered by weightlessness had received lengthy training or were jet pilots (who learn to ignore the strange inner-ear sensations associated with acceleration and weightlessness).

Of more immediate concern to Berry are what he calls "adaptive changes." During the four-day flight of Gemini 4, for instance, Astronauts Jim McDivitt and Ed White lost as much as 10% of the calcium in their heel bones and little fingers. Both Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad lost weight and about 13% of their blood volume. They also had reduced red-cell counts after their eight-day flight. But both returned to normal after 72 hours. The condition of Borman and Lovell, who were weary but seemed otherwise healthy after their two-week trip, should reveal if any further and more permanent deterioration occurs during longer flights.

To determine where the lost calcium goes, the NASA doctors will look for traces of calcium in the astronauts' liquid and solid wastes, examine blood and perspiration samples taken immediately after they return to earth. Even the astronauts' underwear will be carefully washed in distilled water to collect dried perspiration for later analysis. Lovell will be examined to see if pneumatic cuffs, which were automatically tightened around his thighs for two minutes out of every six, kept his heart from becoming lazy in the weightless environment by forcing it to work harder at pumping blood. His condition will be compared with that of Borman, who was not fitted with the cuffs.

One unavoidable result of prolonged space flight was a foregone conclusion. By the end of Gemini 7's tenth day in flight, Borman admitted to NASA's Dr. Owen Coons: "We're getting to the stage where we're starting to itch a little bit. We're just getting a little crummy."