The solid rockets flared, and the space shuttle Columbia roared through a hole in the clouds toward the heavens. Inside the crew cabin the sudden acceleration to 17,000 miles per hour slammed Drew Gaffney back into his seat with a force three times that of normal gravity. He felt his pulse racing under the stress. Within minutes his neck veins began to bulge and his face puffed up, the result of a massive migration of fluids to the upper body. You feel congested, he recalls now. Not nasally congested, but cerebrally congested. It’s like there isn’t enough room in your head for your brain. Gaffney was getting his first taste of a phenomenon known in the space trade as fat-face, chicken-legs, a physiological change experienced by astronauts that has always been attributed to zero gravity. It’s a phenomenon that has fascinated biomedical researchers for years. Normally, because of gravity’s pull, blood and other body fluids in an earthbound human tend to pool in the body’s lower half. But in space the opposite occurs. Fluids tend to rise to the chest and head, giving the face a moonlike appearance, causing the legs to shrink, and bringing about critical changes in blood volume around the heart.
Unlike previous astronauts, though, Gaffney was collecting more than anecdotal evidence about the vagaries of his body fluids--he was serving as the vessel for his own experiment. The 45-year-old cardiologist was riding into space with a pack of monitoring equipment at his back and thin plastic tubing laced through his veins to within an inch of his heart.
Gaffney’s self-experiment last June was one of 18 major research projects conducted on Spacelab Life Sciences 1, the first NASA shuttle mission explicitly designed to explore how the human body behaves in space. His journey, intended to pave the way for such future long-term missions as a trip to Mars, lasted nine days. But for the opportunity to do science in space, he had waited for more than seven years--years marked by frustration, setbacks, and delays.
The idea for the experiment had originated even earlier, in 1978, when NASA first began planning a flight devoted to exploring space physiology. It was the brainchild of C. Gunnar Blomqvist, a cardiologist at the University of Texas medical school in Dallas, and one of Gaffney’s mentors. Although the fluid-shift phenomenon was well known among astronauts, much about it was still poorly understood: How large was the shift, and how quickly did it occur? How exactly did the body accommodate to it? Did the fluid redistribution affect the heart’s size and pumping ability? And just what was its role in triggering the major drop in blood volume--typically, around 10 percent--observed in returning astronauts? These questions weren’t trivial, because the way the body responds to space can cause problems for astronauts when they return to Earth.
Gaffney, who had just finished a cardiology fellowship in Blomqvist’s lab, jumped at the chance to become part of the space experiment. It was the next best thing to going up in space himself. A trained pilot, he had long been smitten with the idea of spaceflight--he had even contemplated signing up for NASA’s astronaut program. But at the time, training as an astronaut would have meant sacrificing his career as a physician and researcher, so he had given up the idea.
