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88 "Suppose radar or some other device warned you a meteorite was coming toward you head-on. Or maybe some instrument indicated an error in navigation. By the time your mind registered the thought, the situation would have changed." "That's probably the answer," he agreed. "Of course, at a hundred miles a second it might not be too serious. But if they ever get up to speeds like a thousand miles a second, that mental lag could make an enormous difference, whether it was a meteorite heading a en we One of the problems he mentioned was the lack of gravity. I had already learned about this. Once away from the earth's pull, objects in the space ship would have no weight. The slightest push could send crewmen floating around the sealed compartment. "The Randolph Field lab can tell you," he said. "The coffee would stay right there in the air. So would the cup, if you let go of it. But there's a more serious angle--your breath." "Yes, they've already worked that out. But what about the breath you exhale? It contains carbon dioxide, and if you let it stay right there in front of your face you'd be sucking it back into your lungs. After a while, it would asphyxiate you. So the air has to be kept in motion, and besides that the ventilating system has to remove the carbon dioxide." He nodded. "Same as drinking, though the throat muscles help force the food down. I don't know the answer to that. In fact, everything about the human body presents a problem. Take the blood circulation. The {p. 104} amount of energy required to pump blood through the veins would be almost negligible. What would that do to your heart?" "Well, that's all the Aero-Medical lab can do--guess at it. They've been trying to work out some way of duplicating the effect of zero gravity, but there's just no answer. If you "Then all the controls would have to be automatic," I said. I told him that I had heard about plans for avoiding meteorites. "Electronic controls would be faster than thought." toward you or a matter of navigation." "Suppose you spilled a cup of coffee," said the flight surgeon. "What would happen?" I said I hadn't thought it out. "You'd have artificial air," I began. "What about eating?" I asked. "Swallowing is partly gravity, isn't it?" "T couldn't even guess," I said.