In February 1958, during the post-Sputnik but pre-NASA period, Hubertus Strughold and some colleagues at the United States Air Force (USAF) School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) in San Antonio, Texas, sealed a young airman named Donald G. Farrell inside a device they called “the space cabin simulator”.1 Farrell’s job during the seven-day “flight to the moon and back” was to simulate the job of astronaut by living inside the sealed cabin with no direct communication with the outside world. With the major omissions of weightlessness, radiation exposure, and an extreme environment outside, the interior of the cramped, purpose-built cabin modeled many aspects expected of life in space, including an artificial low-pressure atmosphere, isolation, confinement, and stressful technical work. Regarded primarily as tests of the cabin’s environmental and communication systems, these experiments were also the debut of what these space medicine experts called “the human component”. Until this point, astronauts existed only as characters in science fiction, or as speculative lists of physical, mental, and experiential requirements.2 After Farrell’s simulated flight, a real person had modeled a kind of astronaut, and had been widely publicized and celebrated for doing so.
This chapter explores the history and design of the space cabin simulator to understand what type of person—what sort of astronaut—emerged along with it. Despite the image of the heroic military aviator associated with the astronaut, the subject in the space cabin simulator was initially not a pilot—Farrell, as it turns out, was an accountant clerk from the base controller’s office. The simulated work designed for the subject by the school’s German space psychologist, Siegfried Gerathewohl, did not resemble the flying of an aircraft. Gerathewohl’s “work” replicated the monotonous task of monitoring automatic systems for long periods of time.3 The mental quality he was most interested in was “vigilance”—could the subject remain alert and responsive to electronic commands after hours, days, or weeks in the windowless cabin? This chapter argues that the space cabin “astronaut” emerged not as a heroic aviator, but as a passive, decentered
1 The simulator was first used for short tests in January, 1956. School of Aviation Medicine, USAF, History, 1 July –
31 Dec. 1955, 35.
2 Robert K. Quinnell “The Human Component in Extraterrestrial Flights”, 1955-1956; and S.B. Sells and Charles A.
Berry, “Human Requirements for Space Travel”, 1958.
system component, similar to other Cold War-era “push-button” soldiers dispatched to missile silos, command bunkers, and radar stations in extreme environments.
For the origins of America’s astronauts, space historians often turn to the early debate at NASA over the Project Mercury selection process.4 In late December 1958, three months after the new agency began operations, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed off on an executive order from NASA’s first administrator T. Keith Glennan that settled a fierce disagreement over just what types of people America should consider sending to space.5 A wide call to soldiers and civilians alike for the position of “research astronaut-candidate” was rescinded at the last minute, and replaced with a much narrower request for experienced military test-pilots with college degrees in engineering.6 However, once selected, the Project Mercury astronauts famously balked at the passive role they were expected to fill. In Inventing The American Astronaut (2012), Matthew Hersch shows how the Mercury Seven used their celebrity status to tweak the astronaut’s job description and public image—even the design of the capsule—toward their aviator comfort zone.7 In Digital Apollo (2008), David A. Mindell examines compromises between human and computer control in the digital guidance computer for the Apollo spacecraft.8 The story of the Mercury Seven’s push-back against NASA engineers’ plans for automation has attained mythic status in astronaut lore, conjured by the protest catch-phrase “Spam in a can”.9 But what about elements of the job they could not change? Or that they accepted? They were not stepping into a void; the space cabin simulator had already established a “passive” astronaut that they were reacting against.
These pre-NASA tests are important because rehearsals with a real person playing the role of astronaut initiated a set of practices and relationships that carried over into actual spaceflight. These include how astronauts relate to spacecraft systems, to ground controllers (especially flight surgeons), and perhaps most importantly, to themselves. Key to the formative power of these
4 Project Mercury: A Chronology, 34-36.
5 William Augerson, Robert B. Voas, Stanley C. White. “Outline of Proposed Research Astronaut Selection and
Training Program for the NASA Manned Satellite Project” pp. 1-5.
6 A NASA announcement soliciting applicants for what was then called “Project Astronaut” was to have been sent
out on December, 22, 1958. The document invited civilians and soldiers alike—as long as they met age, height, weight restrictions, had a college degree in science, engineering, or medicine, and experience in some dangerous job like test pilot, submarine crew, deep-sea SCUBA diver, parachutist, mountain climber, polar explorer, or soldier.
7 Matthew Hersch. Inventing The American Astronaut (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). Hersch’s labour
history of astronauts at NASA includes a comprehensive overview of the 1958 Project Astronaut debate.
8 See David A. Mindell. Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2008).
rehearsals was the simulated work, but also, and perhaps most importantly, surveillance. Designed into the simulator by the German space doctors were multiple forms of surveillance: closed circuit television cameras, one-way viewing portholes, concealed microphones, biometric sensors, and subjective self-reports the subject was ordered to record in a diary. For the subject inside, knowledge of this surveillance affected their behaviour. Cameras, microphones, and one-way portholes produced a kind of self-policing of anything others might consider abnormal, and the diary entries encouraged a reflective contemplative state.
Hersch and Mindell have studied how spacecraft design shaped and was shaped by astronaut professional identity and public persona. The space cabin simulator was also a site for these human-machine negotiations, but it is important to extend their analysis to subjectivity and subject formation. Recent work in surveillance studies has taken up the question of how surveillance produces modes of subjectivity in those being watched.10 The astronaut provides a good historical example of this since it was one of the first types of worker to be monitored so closely in training and on the job. In the early 1950s, surveillance became a central Cold War practice for monitoring military and domestic activities—from numbers of warhead-tipped rockets, to the private telephone calls of everyday people.11 In space medicine, the desire to monitor “the human component” shaped both the interior of the simulator, and the “inner life” of the astronaut themselves. The mental virtue of “vigilance” that seemed crucial to the psychologists was gauged through proficiency at simulated tasks, but also through these modes of surveillance. Space histories organized around Sputnik, NASA, and the so-called “Space Race” often underappreciate the Air Force’s near-decade of preparations prior.12 Work at SAM was not simply America’s “other” astronaut training enterprise, it was the original astronaut endeavor that later became the core of NASA space medicine. When the space cabin simulator does appear in space histories, Farrell’s test is often misrepresented as a complete success, a narrative hastily established by powerful space boosters in the press at the time.13 However, a closer examination reveals this
10 David Harper et al. “Surveillance and Subjectivity: Everyday Experiences of Surveillance Practices” in The
Surveillance Industrial Complex. (Abington: Routledge, 2013).
11 Paul N. Edwards. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 1996)
12 A USAF press release from April 1, 1958, with the heading “Space is the Air Force’s Natural Element” shows
how the service lobbied and expected to lead America’s space efforts.
13 Maura Phillips Mackowski. Testing The Limits: Aviation Medicine and the Origins of Manned Spaceflight (College
Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2006). Mackowski offers this kind of brief summation of the Farrell experiment, as do Harsch and Campbell in their eponymous biography of Hubertus Strughold, and Jacobsen in her account of Operation Paperclip. See: Mark R. Campbell; Viktor A. Harsch. Hubertus Strughold: Life and Work in the
episode was actually considered a failure of the human component, one that prompted SAM doctors to select their next test subjects more carefully, limiting their choice to experienced military pilots—a move that presages Eisenhower and Glennan’s decision months later in Project Mercury. In this sense, Farrell can be seen as pioneering the role of both astronaut, and washout. In general, simulators produce more than just analog situations, they instill new values, virtues, and behaviours in their users. Their military history dates back to World War One when ground-based apparatuses were used to teach aerial gunners the practice of “deflection shooting”, aiming their shots ahead of intended targets. The history of flight simulation begins with the Link Trainer, a device invented by American flier and organ manufacturer Edwin Albert Link in the late 1920s to indoctrinate new pilots in the practices of instrument and radio flying. Beginning in the mid-1930s and culminating during World War Two, the Link Trainer replaced the daring flyer of the early air-age with the modern, rule-bound, instrument-reliant operator.14 Since pilots and planes both existed before aircraft simulators, the Link trainer altered a set of preexisting pilot virtues.15 But the space cabin simulator predates actual spaceflight, so work here established, rather than altered, astronauts. More than just a research tool to test systems and establish baseline medical and psychological data, the space cabin simulator was also designed for use in the selection and training of actual astronauts.16
During the 1950s, a number of different USAF centers conducted human experiments with low-pressure chambers, rocket-powered sleds, human centrifuges, high-altitude balloon flights, and experimental research aircraft to simulate specific (and usually experimentally isolated) physiological stresses expected in spaceflight.17 Daring flight surgeons at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico soared high into the stratosphere in encapsulated balloon gondolas. At Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert, military test-pilots took rocket-powered planes
Fields of Space Medicine (Neubrandenburg: Rethra, 2013); Annie Jacobson. Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (New York: Back Bay Books, 2014).
14 Chihyung Jeon. “The Virtual Flier: The Link Trainer, Flight Simulation, and Pilot Identity. Technology and
Culture, 56. No. 1, 2015. pp. 30.
15 Jeon, 30.
16 Paul A. Campbell. “The Present Space Medicine Effort at the School of Aviation Medicine” in “Tenth Anniversary
of Space Medicine Research in the U.S. Air Force” in United States Armed Forces Medical Journal, 10 (No. 4, April 1959) pp. 394. “A space cabin simulator will be an extremely necessary selection and indoctrination device for manned space flight.”
17 David Bushnell. “History of Research in Space Biology and Biodynamics at the Air Force Missile Development
Center, Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, 1946-1958.” (Historical Division, Office of Information Services, NASA, 1958)
to extreme altitudes and velocities. However, the space cabin simulator was unique in its dual physiological and psychological purpose, its long-duration period, and its comprehensive attempt at realism.
Simulations have become a central practice in preparing astronauts for spaceflight. In the 1960s, the tiny one-person USAF space cabin simulator was expanded, improved, and duplicated many times over, spreading from its niche in the Air Force to NASA, and military defense contractors like Boeing, Honeywell, and Vought where it joined a growing list of other types of space simulators. From the beginning of Project Mercury, simulation was seen as a key practice for training and indoctrinating astronauts. During Gemini and Apollo, astronauts spent increasing numbers of hours in an array of different simulations, everything from complex spacecraft mock- ups, to expeditions to analog environments.18 Today, simulation has become an important if routine facet of astronaut life. More than just technical acts of preparation, simulations are also social models, and useful public relations tools. As the reception of airman Farrell’s 1958 test shows, simulations of speculative space missions, (like the Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station, the European Space Agency’s Mars500 psychosocial isolation studies, and NASA’s year- long Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) double as advocacy for their real-life counter-parts.19 In this way, simulations can evoke and instill an entire approach to human involvement in space, the specificity of which is not always obvious. Put simply, they indoctrinate the wider public as well as astronauts.
This chapter begins with a look inside the simulator; at its military origin, its environmental and information loops, and the mutual shaping between these cabin systems and the human supposed to live inside. The second half of the chapter recounts the most famous experiment with the simulator, the week-long “flight to the moon and back” with airman Farrell in February, 1958. While the first section deals more with details in and around the cramped simulator—which was first set up in the basement of an obscure research building—the second section broadens the story to situate SAM’s work on astronauts within the wider history of the American south in the early Cold War.
18 North, Warren J. “Astronauts Training At the Ph.D. Level” in The New York Times (July 17, 1969) pp. 39. The
average number of hours NASA astronauts were required to spend working in various simulators was 50 hours for Project Mercury, 195 hours for Gemini, and 380 hours for Apollo. Neil Armstrong famously used simulators obsessively, practicing critical sequences right up until the day before launch. In 1967, the entire crew of Apollo 1 died during a simulated launch.