You're inside a space
capsule the size of a small sailboat's saloon on a three-week voyage
to another planet (the capsule, not the sailboat). How do you
carry enough food, water and oxygen for the journey? For that
matter, how do you stay cooped up in the capsule for three weeks
without strangling your crewmate to death when he tells one too many
"knock knock" jokes?
That almost did in the Lewis &
Clark expedition
The answer, according to Gerry
Anderson, can be found in the frightening bit of surgery on the left.
You get the surgeons to graft some shunting valves into the veins and
arteries in the astronauts' wrists, then you hook the men up to the
space capsule's heart-lung-kidney machine, which takes over all the
metabolic functions and feeds the crew intravenously while they remain
in a drugged sleep and enjoy psychedelic hallucinations that
suggest that the dosage needs to be cut back a bit.
The hazard pay that
Eurosec doles out must be bloody amazing, because I can never watch
this film without getting the heebie jeebies at the thought of those
plastic tubes running out of my wrists and nothing between me and
eternity except being so fried that there's no chance of my rolling
over and ripping them out. I really want to know what the project
director said to these guys to get them to agree to go along and how
he got the photographs.
But
none of this addresses the incredible oversight on the part of Eurosec
as to the hazards of space hibernation. You would have
thought that they'd have learned from the American attempt of a year
before and realised that no good would come of it.
You're inside a space
capsule the size of a small sailboat's saloon on a three-week voyage
to another planet (the capsule, not the sailboat). How do you
carry enough food, water and oxygen for the journey? For that
matter, how do you stay cooped up in the capsule for three weeks
without strangling your crewmate to death when he tells one too many
"knock knock" jokes?
The hazard pay that
Eurosec doles out must be bloody amazing, because I can never watch
this film without getting the heebie jeebies at the thought of those
plastic tubes running out of my wrists and nothing between me and
eternity except being so fried that there's no chance of my rolling
over and ripping them out. I really want to know what the project
director said to these guys to get them to agree to go along and how
he got the photographs.
But
none of this addresses the incredible oversight on the part of Eurosec
as to the hazards of space hibernation. You would have
thought that they'd have learned from the American attempt of a year
before and realised that no good would come of it.