Science: Leap, Eat & Die

Other space news of the week:

¶ At Fort Eustace, Va. a helmeted engineer from Bell Aerosystems Co. leaped a truck with a “rocket belt.” With 100 lbs. of tanks, tubes and nozzles strapped to his back, he began his flight by flexing his knees and turning a valve. With an earsplitting racket, superheated steam from decomposing hydrogen peroxide jetted out of two down-pointed nozzles and slowly lifted him off the ground. In a 15-sec. flight he cleared the Army truck and made a perfect two-foot landing 150 ft. from his takeoff. The Army, which is paying for Bell’s Rocket Belt, is still uncertain about its military value on earth, but Bell spokesmen see a grand future for it when the U.S. has colonized the moon, where gravitation has only one-sixth of its strength on earth. By releasing a few bursts of steam, rocket-belted colonists will soar easily over the moon’s scratchy topography. In fact, a Bell man cautioned, they will have to be careful not to send themselves accidentally into lunar orbit.

¶ Long concerned with the U.S. kitchen, engineers of Whirlpool Corp. (dishwashers, freezers) escaped into deepest space. Worried that dull food during long journeys may drive astronauts dotty, Whirlpool last week was busy testing a space kitchen designed to serve Swiss steak, baked ham, filet of sole, cakes, cookies and other goodies out of gleaming bins and refrigerators. There will be three electric ovens; from nozzles hot and cold water will spurt into collapsible tubes containing dehydrated coffee or fruit juice, so that the weightless spacemen can drink by squeezing the liquids into their mouths. Built under Air Force contract, the Space Kitchen weighs 818 lbs., of which only 236 lbs. is food. But as of now, there is no rocket big enough to launch a kitchen-equipped spaceship.

¶ “What will be done,” asked scientists of Aerojet-General Corp., “with the body of a man who dies on a space voyage?” Answering their own question, they pointed out that “there will be no ‘ground’ in which to bury the man. The coldest scientific efficiency would be to place the corpse in the spaceship’s ‘digester’ system. However, the digester system will be one that receives all of the astronauts’ waste materials and regenerates them as food and water. So disposing of the cadaver in this way would simply be too revolting because of the cannibalistic implications. Thus the most palatable solution at this point seems to be a space version of a ‘burial at sea.’ After suitable rites, the dead astronaut would be simply pushed out into space. And there, because of the vacuum and the intensity of the sun’s heat, his body would eventually evaporate and vanish into the vastness of space.”