Would You Go First?

The chapter that interests me so far in this book is Chapter 4: You Go First: The Alarming Prospect of Life Without Gravity. The talk about gravity was a nice refresher of what I knew and I also learned a few things from this chapter. This chapter included a lot of good questions that people have when the topic of space comes to mind. “Aerospace professionals at the time were gripped with almost universal foreboding at the prospect of cutting loose from gravity’s hold. What if man’s organs depended on gravity to function? What if the pumping of the heart failed to push his blood through his veins, and instead merely churned it in place? What if his eyeballs changed shape and compromised his visual acuity? If he cut himself, would his blood still coagulate?” (Roach 83). These were just some things that were worries when the time came to send a human being into space without having a definite answer of what could go wrong. Of course they had control studies performed, but going to an unfamiliar place is still a scary thought. It must have been terrifying and still is to go into space; I knew that I would be too afraid of what can go wrong for me to go to space. Those that go through all the training and screenings are brave and I applaud them for it. Getting to go into space sounds like it would be a wonderful experience, just a few adjustments have to be made. In the antigravity portion of the chapter, reading about the weight changes that occur in an elevator because of the acceleration was also interesting. Reading about food floating into the nasal passages, staying near the back of the throat and fluid floating into sinuses was a little unsettling. This makes it hard to eat because the food wouldn’t stay down, causing vomiting. It sounds like something that would take a while to get used to, but they don’t just send people into space without any training.