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President Nixon was prepared for Neil Armstrong and
the other Apollo 11 astronauts to die on the moon in
1969. Written in an old memo titled "In Event of Moon
Disaster" is Nixon's backup speech for the media in
case something went horribly wrong during the moon
landing.
It begins with this poignant statement: "Fate has
ordained that the men who went to the moon to
explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in
peace."
Thankfully, Nixon didn't need it.
But now, for the first time since the Apollo missions,
there is serious talk of more manned spaceflight
missions, and it is raising an important question: When
someone dies in space, what do you do with the body?
A mission to Mars would require several months of
travel just to get there. And if manned missions start
happening, someone will eventually die in space. No
one has a great plan for what to do when that
happens.
Right now, astronauts usually spend only six months
at a time in space on board the International Space
Station (ISS), and all of them undergo an intense
medical examination before they are ever approved for
spaceflight. No one has ever died on the ISS. It is clear
from NASA reports that the organisation is focused
more on prevention than on what to do if an astronaut
actually dies in space.
In a recent StarTalk Radio episode , co-host Chuck Nice
asked astronaut Mike Massimino whether NASA had
some kind of protocol for bringing back an astronaut
who dies in space. "It could happen, but you know out
of all the training I had, we never went over that one,"
Massimino said.
Even though there is no official protocol, astronauts do
some practice for this worst-case scenario.
In his book, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth ,
astronaut Chris Hadfield explains a chilling training
exercise called a 'death sim'. It's designed to help
prepare astronauts for what they should do in the
event of the death of one of their colleagues.
Death sims usually operate as a roundtable discussion
in which one astronaut is announced as having died
and whoever is leading the exercise will throw
curveballs into the hypothetical scenario that plays
out. In his book, Hadfield explains what it was like
listening to his own death sim played out:
"We've just received word from the Station: Chris is
dead." Immediately, people start working the problem.
Okay, what are we going to do with his corpse? There
are no body bags on Station, so should we shove it in
a spacesuit and stick it in a locker? But what about
the smell? Should we send it back to Earth on a
resupply ship and let it burn up with the rest of the
garbage on re-entry? Jettison it during a spacewalk
and let it float away into space?
The death sims force the astronauts to really think
through how they should respond, Hadfield writes:
"Who should tell my parents their son is dead? By
phone or in person? Where will they even be - at the
farm or at the cottage? Do we need two plans, then,
depending on where my mom and dad are?"
This is a start, but it gets trickier to deal with death on
a long-term mission.
NASA already has plans for manned missions to Mars,
and private companies like Mars One and SpaceX are
working out the logistics of setting up human colonies
on Mars. Manned trips to Mars may still be a few
decades off, but they seem inevitable, as does the
possibility of someone dying in space, whether while
en route to or on Mars itself.
The simplest solution is to just pop the ship's airlock
and send the body floating out into the vacuum of
space, as in Spock's funeral in Star Trek.
It turns out that one of the weird international rules
that govern the cosmos prohibits this. A UN agreement
says you can't litter in space, and that includes
dumping bodies.
That's because bodies floating through space could
collide with other spacecraft or even float over to alien
planets and effectively colonise them with human
remains and whatever bacteria and other organisms
may be living on and in the body.
So we need a plan B, but it's not practical to keep a
human body on a spaceship during a long journey
either. It could jeopardise the crew's health, both
physically and mentally. (Just think about spending a
couple of months on a small spaceship with
someone's coffin on board). Also, spacecraft are
incredibly expensive. Adding a mini mausoleum to any
ship would be a multimillion-dollar addition.
One of the most interesting proposals for dealing with
death in space is a collaboration between the green
burial company Promessa and NASA that spawned the
idea of the 'Body Back'. Body Back involves an airtight
sleeping bag that a human corpse is zipped into and
then exposed to the freezing temperatures of outer
space.
The frozen body is hauled back on board and intensely
vibrated around until it shatters. You end up with
about 50 pounds of finely ground human body dust
that you can hang outside your spacecraft until you
arrive at your destination.
There's no good answer for what to do when someone
dies after landing on Mars though. NASA's and Mars
One's plans to visit the red planet both involve the
settlers growing their own crops on the planet. One
radical idea is to use human bodies for composting
and fertiliser. It doesn't seem likely that that idea will
ever catch on though.
"I'm not sure human bodies make particularly good
fertiliser," Paul Wolpe, a senior bioethicist at NASA, told
Slate.com . "I mean, no society has done that on Earth
that I know of. There are societies that desperately
need fertiliser, and even they don't use their dead
bodies for the purpose. There's always been an
extremely strong taboo for using dead bodies for
instrumental purposes."
Death is a deeply human issue, but for long-term
spaceflight it has to also be treated as a cost issue
and a practicality issue. The Guardian's video
interview with some of the volunteers who signed up to
be Mars One's first colonisers is poetically titled "If I
Die on Mars" (see below). It's a question that will
require a lot more thought before any missions launch.
This article was originally published by Business
Insider.