PART III

OMNI: What would you do in space that you haven't done yet?

Musgrave: Go to another planet. When I joined NASA I was going to MARS. That was totally realistic at the time, given the acceleration and the way we we doing things then. Then Kennedy said, "Go to the Moon," and after a 13-minute suborbital flight, three and a half years later a Saturn lifted off. I thought I'd make it to Mars. You need a physician because once you've got your velocity, you can't turn around. You're committed for a year and a half out, without medical care. You'd not only have to take care of the human, but also the regenerative side of the system. With he human consuming oxygen and making carbon dioxide, you need plants or the like to consume the humans' CO2 and make oxygen.

OMNI: What are your thoughts on the Mars mission now?

Musgrave: I don't know when, but it's gonna happen. So will other solar-system outposts--once you've developed the technology to mine the moon, use solar energy, take the materials there, and turn them into structural materials. Mass transfer of material from Earth is a hugely expensive enterprise.

OMNI: What shouldn't we do in space?

Musgrave: It would be nice to use it only for peaceful purposes. The view of Earth from space tends to wipe out national boundaries. We've got to see it as a whole, to realize we share the same home. Space expands one's horizons. Eventually we'll start seeing ourselves as universal creatures, and won't even refer to other living creatures out there as aliens, much less refer to immigrants as aliens.

OMNI: Would you be surprised if you were contacted by intelligent life from elsewhere in the universe?

Musgrave: Only because of the probabilities--intelligent life is out there! We have a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and there are billions of galaxies. The Hubble will find a planet outside our solar system that will revise our thinking about our place in the universe. But with the universe being so big, it takes light years upon light years to get to the nearest other star. They may know we're here, but how many light years will it take for them to send something to us, even after they catch our signal? And they're catching the TV stations putting out 50 megawatts. It's the most powerful stuff going out, but it's not directed.

OMNI: Could there be a space ship in our galaxy?

Musgrave: Sure. I think there's spaceflight going on in our 100 billion stars. And if they were in our solar system they'd be contacting us.

OMNI: There are those who believe beings have already made contact, and that the government doesn't want to tell us. And we'll never know the answer to that.

Musgrave: Yeah, we will. But I believe the government has told me all there is to know about classified things, and I do not believe there is any information relating to UFOs that they're keeping from us.

OMNI: Who do you think's out there?

Musgrave: Living creatures far more developed as civilizations. They've been around for 100 million years, and we can't even conceive how advanced they are and the kinds of things they're doing. That's why I make an effort to communicate, and might be considered eccentric because I do, because I know the probabilities are close to zero. But I do tell them to come down and get me.

OMNI: How would you signal them?

Musgrave: Let's just say I express a desire that whatever is out there would come down and get me. And if they came for me, unconditionally, I'd go. If they're that advanced, they probably know my requirements in terms of oxygen, pressure, and other things. If dimensions exist that are beyond our conceptual ability, they define reality also. I do not impose my limitations on the system. I recognize that this room is not this room, but only the way I perceive it. The signature a bat has of this room, seeing it in ultrasound, or a fly with that great big eye it has--neither looks upon my reality as I do. It's frightening to realize I'm in an environment that is nothing like the reality I perceive. My perceptions are there for one reason: I survive in this environment. There is no reality anywhere of anything. So in this situation, how do we transcend space? The speed of light appears to be a block so that, based on what we know now, we'll never go anywhere. We might be able to use electromagnetic energy, which does go at the speed of light. If you encode this energy you send out, maybe it's possible.

OMNI: How has being a physician affected you as an astronaut?

Musgrave: I've looked upon all the basic sciences--anatomy, physiology, pathology--as the science of life. Within NASA probably the biggest application of what I learned was in spacewalking. In 1971 I became the astronaut specialist in spacewalks, leading into the Skylab program. I'm also the astronaut specialist for the shuttle suits, EVA, and others. The physiology you have in a suit is what the suit gives you--the pressure, the oxygen. It removes carbon dioxide, controls your temperature, everything. There's a lot of good anatomy in the relationship of your body to the suit: It has to work as an integrated organism. As soon as you learn that, you become more skillful in working with a space suit. You don't work against it anymore, and you don't even look at it as a friend. When I go out in this suit, I am now a new organism that has to work in certain ways.

OMNI: How can we treat space sickness?

Musgrave: We've got to get to the cause of it. My theory is that the brain is trying to integrate many sensory conflicts--what the eyes and the rest of the body are given--and they don't add up. For decades, they've taken the systems approach, such as studying the vestibular system, claiming is you can't study the brain. I disagree. We've been studying the brain for centuries. You can ask people, "Is the floor always your down?", "Where is the Earth?" Some people have a sense of where Earth is and some do not. You look at their symptomology. You ask 100 questions: What do they sense, what's important to them, their reference points, their orientation. Then you begin to get a feel for the phenomenology.

OMNI: You've never been space sick?

Musgrave: No. I'd say it runs about 50-50, and of those who get sick, some get a mild queasiness, others are throwing up for three days. Some people can vomit and work, some cannot. But almost everyone adapts and is well at three days. There's no correlation between people prone to motion sickness down here and space sickness. It's a different mechanism, having to do with orientation and sensory conflict and this magical realm between zero g and gravity.

OMNI: What important things have we learned about the body?

Musgrave: Spaceflight for the first time focused people on the significant physiology occurring when you're forced into a sedentary condition. You don't need muscles to counteract gravity, your blood's not moving up against a hydrostatic gradient, your bones don't have any stresses. Spaceflight is physiologically similar to bedrest, which is not good. It de-conditions you. There are ways to keep our systems active in space. But because NASA wanted to study what happens and not interfere, Skylab, our first space station program, was just research. Since then, we haven't been out there long enough to really find out about these things. The Russians have. They have penguin suits--you wear a harness and springs, and a cap to pull down on your head and create a force on the neck muscles and vertebrae. They have platforms in which you wear a harness and hook up all sorts of springs to create a force equivalent to your body weight against the platform. You can only create artificial gravity in big spaceships that rotate. But that has huge problems. It's incredibly sickening when you change your radius: say, if you walk from the outer edge to the inside.

OMNI: At 58, you're the oldest man to have spacewalked, and the second oldest man to have been in space. What are the advantages and limitations?

Musgrave: Space is very complex, so experience plays an important role. In developing new systems, an historical and long-term approach is important. When you know the history of current designs you know where their limitations are. There's also long-term dedication, a calling. You feel loyalty to space itself, not something smaller than that. It is space and it is you.

OMNI: Why have so many other astronauts gone on to other things, then?

Musgrave: Well, there are maybe five people in its history who've made a career of space. People try to put us in one group so they can make statements about astronauts. But that fails to acknowledge the diversity of our interests and motivations. I think it boils down to how much you like space and the space business.

OMNI: Is there any limit physiologically to the age at which a man or woman should go into space?

Musgrave: You meet the same tests everyone else does. There's a bottom line every single day. It's not just periodic physical exams and running on treadmills. You get into an airplane and fly with people who trust their lives to your ability to fly. If you are not flying right, the community knows about it in one huge hurry . . . like now! If you're unable to do the job in an EVA suit, you find out, you find out every minute. Spaceflight does not require you to be an Olympian. The reason to be fit is to work 16 hours a day, decade after decade, to still hang in there. Then when you need to kick in a little more, it's there. It gives you some margin working in the space suit, although you shouldn't need it. You want to design tools and the work so that it doesn't take muscle. If I'm using muscle in a suit I stop in my tracks and say, What are you doing wrong? General spaceflight doesn't require superfitness.

Continued in OMNI part IV