The Breakaway Effect

I was fascinated to read in the chapter “Star Crazy” of Roach’s 2010_14ya Packing for Mars (review) a lengthy discussion of how even up the ’60s there were serious concerns—like in Smith’s story—about whether astronauts could remain sane in space rather than suicidal, and this was not fringe speculation but mainstream & reasonable extrapolation from disturbing datapoints in aviation about the break-off phenomenon in airplane pilots at high altitude:

There was a great deal of conjecture at the time—both at the Soviet space agency and at NASA—about the unique psychological consequences of breaching the cosmos. Would hurtling into “the black”, as pilots used to call it, blow the astronaut’s mind? Hear the ominous words of psychiatrist Eugene Brody, speaking at the 1959_65ya Symposium on Space Psychiatry: “Separation from the earth with all of its unconscious symbolic significance for man,…might in theory at least be expected…to produce—even in a well-selected and trained pilot—something akin to the panic of schizophrenia.”

There was worry that Gagarin might come unhinged and sabotage the history-making mission. It was enough of a worry that the powers-that-be locked the manual controls of the Vostok capsule before liftoff. What if something went awry and communications went dead and Pilot-Cosmonaut #1 needed to take control of the capsule? His superiors had thought about that too, and seemingly turned to game show hosts for advice. Gagarin was given a sealed envelope containing the secret combination to unlock the controls.

The concerns were not altogether fatuous. In a study published in the April 1957_67ya issue of Aviation Medicine [Clark & Graybiel 1957_67ya], 35% of 137 pilots interviewed reported having experienced a strange feeling of detachment from Earth while flying at high altitudes, almost always during a solo flight. “I feel like I have broken the bonds from the terrestrial sphere”, said one pilot.

The phenomenon was pervasive enough for psychologists to give it a name: the “breakaway effect”. For a majority of these pilots, the feeling wasn’t one of panic, but of euphoria. Only 18 of the 137 characterized their feelings as fear or anxiety. “It seems so peaceful, it seems like you are in another world.” “I feel like a giant.” “A king”, said another. Three commented that they felt nearer to God. A pilot named Mal Ross, who set a series of altitude records in experimental aircraft in the late 1950s, twice reported an eerie “feeling of exultation, of wanting to fly on and on.”

The year the Aviation Medicine article ran, Colonel Joe Kittinger ascended to 96,000 feet in an upright, phone-booth-sized sealed capsule suspended beneath a helium balloon. With his oxygen dangerously low, Kittinger was ordered by his superior, David Simons, to begin his descent. “COME AND GET ME”, replied Kittinger, letter by letter in Morse code. Kittinger says it was a joke, but Simons didn’t take it that way. (Morse code has always been a tough medium for humor.) In his memoir Man High, Simons recalls thinking that “the weird and little understood breakaway phenomenon could be taking hold of Kittinger’s mind,…that he…was gripped in this strange reverie and was hellbent on flying on and on without regard for the consequences.”

Simons compared the breakaway phenomenon to “the deadly raptures of the deep.” “Rapture of the deep” is a medical condition—a feeling of calm and invulnerability that can steal over a diver, usually at depths below 100 feet. It is more prosaically known as nitrogen narcosis, or as the Martini Effect (one drink for every 33 feet below 65 feet). Simons speculated that one day soon aerospace physicians would be talking about a condition “known as the deadly rapture of space.”

These breakaway effects do not include all the other psychological effects of air travel, such as spatial disorientation, Charles Bonnet syndrome, hallucinated gremlins (reported by many pilots, such as Charles Lindbergh on his transatlantic flight⁴, who also reported hallucinating entire landmasses⁵), sensory deprivation, UFOs, or outcomes of the crash (eg. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is often connected to his post-crash hallucinations in the Sahara recounted in Wind, Sand and Stars).

Space Euphoria & Overview Effect

Roach 2010_14ya, continued, on the overview effect:

He was right, though NASA preferred the less flowery term “space euphoria.” “Some NASA shrinks”, wrote astronaut Gene Cernan in his memoir, “had warned that when I looked down and saw the Earth speeding past so far below, I might be swamped by space euphoria.” [see also the “overview effect”] Cernan would soon be undertaking a spacewalk—history’s third—during Gemini IX. The psychologists were nervous because the first two spacewalkers had expressed not only an odd euphoria but a worrisome disinclination to go back inside the capsule. “I felt excellent and in a cheerful mood and reluctant to leave free space”, wrote Alexei Leonov, the first human to, in 1965_59ya, float freely in the vacuum of space, attached to his Voskhod capsule by an air hose. “As for the so-called psychological barrier that was supposed to be insurmountable by man preparing to confront the cosmic abyss alone, I not only did not sense any barrier, but even forgot that there could be one.”

Four minutes into NASA’s first spacewalk, Gemini IV astronaut Ed White gushed that he felt “like a million dollars.” He struggled to find the words for it. “I’ve…it’s just tremendous.” There are moments when the mission transcript reads like the transcript of a 1970s encounter group. Here are White and his commander, James McDivitt, a couple of Air Force guys, after it’s over:

WHITE: That was the most natural feeling, Jim.
McDIVITT: …You looked like you were in your mother’s womb.

NASA’s concern was not that their astronaut was euphoric, but that euphoria might have overtaken good sense. During White’s twenty minutes of bliss, Mission Control repeatedly tries to break in. Finally the capsule communicator, Gus Grissom, gets through to McDivitt.

GRISSOM: Gemini 4, get back in!
McDIVITT: They want you to come back in now.
WHITE: Back in?
McDIVITT: Back in.
GRISSOM: Roger, we’ve been trying to talk to you for awhile here.
WHITE: Aw, Cape, let me just [take] a few pictures.
McDIVITT: No, back in. Come on.
WHITE: …Listen, you could almost not drag me in, but I’m coming.

But he wasn’t. Two more minutes passed. McDivitt starts to plead.

McDIVITT: Just come on in…
WHITE: Actually, I’m trying to get a better picture.
McDIVITT: No, come on in.
WHITE: I’m trying to get a picture of the spacecraft now.
McDIVITT: Ed, come on in here!

Another minute passes before White makes a move toward the hatch, saying, “This is the saddest moment of my life.” Rather than worrying about astronauts not wanting to come back in, the space agencies should have been worrying about them not being able to. It took White twenty-five minutes to get back through the hatch and safely in.

…After Ed White’s spacewalk, reports of space euphoria were rare, and soon the psychologists stopped worrying. They had something new to worry on: “EVA height vertigo.” (EVA is short for “extravehicular activity”, meaning spacewalking.) The image of Earth rushing by some 200 miles below can cause paralyzing fear. Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger wrote in his memoir about the “dreadful and persistent” feeling that he was “plummeting earthward…at ten times or a hundred times faster” than he’d experienced during parachute free falls. Which he was. (The difference, of course, is that the astronaut is falling in a huge circle around Earth and doesn’t hit the ground.)

“White-knuckled, I gripped the handrail…”, wrote Linenger of his agonized moments on the end of Mir’s 50-foot telescoping arm, “forcing myself to keep my eyes open and not scream.” I once listened to a Hamilton Sundstrand suit engineer tell the story of an unnamed spacewalker exiting the hatch and then turning to wrap both spacesuited arms around a colleague’s legs.

…Aerospace biologists had established that humans can function for a few seconds without gravity. But what about an hour, a day, a week? “People ask, Why?” says Britz of the era of the spacefaring chimp. “Mary, we just didn’t know.” What were the longer-term effects of space travel—not only of weightlessness, but of cosmic radiation? (High-energy atomic particles have been zinging through space at ferocious speeds since the Big Bang. Earth’s magnetic field protects us by deflecting cosmic rays, but in space, these invisible bullets smash unimpeded through cells, causing mutations. It’s serious enough that astronauts are classified as radiation workers.)

Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration. Eskimo hunters traveling alone on still, glassy waters are sometimes stricken by “kayak angst”—delusions that their boat is flooding or that the front end is either sinking or rising up out of the water. Of related interest: “A Preliminary Report of Kayak-Angst Among the Eskimo of West Greenland” [see also Amering & Katschnig1990] includes a discussion of Eskimo suicide motives and notes that 4 out of the 50 suicides investigated were elderly Eskimos who “took their lives as a direct result of uselessness due to old age.” No mention was made of whether they cast themselves adrift on ice floes, as you sometimes hear, and whether travel by ice floe has its own unique anxiety syndrome.

In Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth (review), Smith 2005_19ya, Smith was able to interview almost all of the surviving Apollo astronauts and discussed with them the psychological experiences & effects of space travel, ranging from euphoria to religious epiphanies to musical hallucinations to divorce:

On the flight from England, I was lost in a brilliant collection of J. G. Ballard short stories called Memories of the Space Age. Written between 1962_62ya and 1988_36ya, most of them revolve around the Cape, and Cocoa Beach in particular, which is where the space programme’s human cargo lived in the run-up to missions. Ballard’s thrillingly jaundiced view of the Space Age is that it constituted a crime against evolution, a blind, hubristic leap into a realm where we do not belong, where all we can do is sow our disease and spread the human stain ever more thinly across the Universe. Accordingly, in his stories we find the Cape abandoned, laid waste by microbes from Mars as dead astronauts circle the earth in their capsule coffins, or serving as a beacon for falling space debris, roamed only by irradiated scavengers seeking icons in mangled bits of spaceship or spaceman bones. We find space explorers going insane midflight, haunting a whole world with their “nightmare ramblings.” In “A Question of Re-Entry”, Ballard’s protagonist hunts for a capsule lost in the Amazon forest, amid growing anxiety that “the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the Western technocracies … the missing capsule [was] itself a fragment of a huge disintegrating fantasy.” In “News from the Sun”, I find: “Certainly, the unhappy lives of the astronauts bore all the signs of a deepening sense of guilt. The relapse into alcoholism, silence, and pseudo-mysticism, and the mental breakdowns, suggested profound anxieties about the moral and biological rightness of space exploration.”

…Swaddled in the cosmos on the way back from the Moon, Edgar Mitchell had what he describes as an “epiphany”, in which he glimpsed an intelligence in the Universe and felt connected to it, like a lamp suddenly plugged in and switched on after an age hidden in darkness. In that moment, the void seemed to him alive and his description of it reminds me of the English poet-artist William Blake’s ecstatic vision of a Universe in which “every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.” And what he said to himself was, precisely: Wow.

He was fascinated with it, with this feeling of transcendence, which he intuitively related to the euphoric states other civilizations have conjured with ritual, drugs, contemplation—gods—and when he got back, he left NASA and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), named for the Greek-derived word meaning “of, relating to or based on the intellect.” His aim was to reconcile science with religion—and the point at which they met, or at least the bridge between them, he postulated, consists in that greatest of all mysteries, consciousness itself. Thus, the key to the Universe is contained in our own minds, and vice versa, the result being that for 32 years now, the Moonwalker Dr. Mitchell, who has two bachelor of science degrees to add to his doctorate from MIT, has been searching for this key. People who pass through his gravity field frequently characterize IONS as a kind of New Age cult, with Mitchell the Space Age Colonel Kurtz, the hero who entered into the heart of a darkness even Conrad and Coppola couldn’t conceive, and never came back.

He didn’t experience the “comedown” that some of the other Moonwalkers did?

“No, I tend to think that what I’ve done in the thirty years since is more important than going to the Moon. The Moon—okay, that was powerful, it’s history, groundbreaking stuff of the twentieth century. But for me personally, I think pioneering what I’ve done here with noetics will in the long run be a more important advancement.”

Strange, I observe: Charlie Duke says the same thing about his church work. Edgar Mitchell’s eyes light up.

“See, the point is, Jim Irwin, Charlie Duke, myself and others had the same experience, I think. But you express it in terms of your own belief system, your own experience and your training. And me being more of a philosopher and scientist, I looked beyond the easy explanation of religion. Alan Bean—a lovely fella—he expressed his in his artwork. And even the ones who haven’t shown outward signs of change”—he leans forward and jabs a finger at the space just beyond my right elbow—“that doesn’t mean they didn’t feel it, too.”

Test pilots, he goes on to note with a smirk, “have never been noted for introspection or spontaneous eloquent expression”, but he does believe that “it’s significant that many of the men pioneering space flight began to express more openly a more subtle side of their personalities after returning home.” Even Shepard loosened and a LM deputy programme manager is also on record as saying that the lunar astronauts did change; became less outgoing, more pensive. Wouldn’t their training as test pilots, with its emphasis on self-control, have militated against being affected by what was happening around them? Mitchell thinks this is a misconception, saying:

“My experience taught me to open up my emotions, or at least to become more aware, to become more sensitive to what’s going on in the body. It’s quite true that in that business you have to learn to manage your emotions. But of course, that’s what the mystic disciplines are about, too. That’s what’s taught by the Tibetan Buddhists—and I greatly admire their scholarship … it is about learning to manage your emotions.”

We talk about family and the huge divorce rate in the Astronaut Corps. At the beginning of the Sixties, marital breakdown still came with shame; worse, NASA considered it bad for the image of the programme and it was made clear that divorces would cost flights. Yet even NASA couldn’t resist the social revolution that was ushered in by the contraceptive pill. By the end of the 1970s, the divorce rate would be five times what it had been in 1961_63ya, with the highest rates in the nation settling on the Cape Kennedy area of Florida.

…As with subsequent flights, Apollo 8 bowled along sideways, like a silver rolling pin, spinning slowly to distribute the sun’s intense heat. From the craft’s angle of approach the Moon was in darkness, so for the first two days the astronauts saw only the Earth shrinking behind them and a coy black void ahead, bereft of stars and growing, until finally they were drifting engine-first around the far side, preparing for the ‘burn’ that would slow them into lunar orbit. Still they saw nothing—until suddenly and without warning an immense arc of sun-drenched lunar surface appeared in their windows and the three men got the shocks of their lives, as the ethereal disc they and the rest of humanity had known up to then revealed itself as an awesome globe, cool and remote, without sound or motion, magisterial but issuing no invitation whatsoever. So shocked were the crew that commander Borman was forced to rein in their excitement for the sake of the burn, and while the astronauts have forgotten much about the journeys they took, none has any trouble recalling this dramatic moment: indeed, those who are temperamentally disposed to acknowledging fear will tell you that it was an eerie and intimidating sight, which the crew of Apollo 8 seemed haunted by. Upon their return, they described a forbidding and inhospitable world. It was the Earth that sang to them from afar.

…The best bit—and this is one of my favourite bits of the whole space programme—is when Cap-Com Gus Grissom, the voice of Mission Control that day, orders White back into the craft and the spacewalker just can’t bring himself to go. Broadcast live to radio at the time, the exchange captivated listeners. The third person involved is Commander Jim McDivitt, speaking from inside the spaceship. We come in at the end, which goes like this: [transcript; some EVA footage; Apollo 11: Flight to the Moon, full album; track “A4: Ed White—Walks In Space”, 4m56s-7m30s: ]

• GRISSOM: “Gemini 4—get back in!”

• (White pretends he hasn’t heard. He’s looking at the Earth.)

• WHITE: “What are we over now, Jim?”

• MCDIVITT: “I don’t know, we’re coming over the west now, and they want you to come back in.”

• WHITE: “Aw, Cape, let me just find a few pictures.”

• MCDIVITT: “No, back in. Come on.”

• (Pause.)

• WHITE: “Coming in. Listen, you could almost not drag me in, but I’m coming …”

• (A few more minutes of stalling by the reluctant spacewalker, who finally relents.)

• WHITE: “This is the saddest moment of my life.”

• MCDIVITT: “Well, you’re going to find a sadder one when we have to come down from this whole thing.”

• WHITE: “I’m coming.”

• (Not coming.)

• MCDIVITT: “Okay … Come on now.”

The saddest moment of his life! Who wouldn’t feel for him? But he had to go back in, because NASA didn’t yet know what floating in space would do to a human being. That he and Grissom had the breath snatched from their lungs in the Apollo 1 fire only months later gives his words an added poignancy. He didn’t have long to live, but he had this, and that it should become music is not so very surprising: Story Musgrave, the experienced shuttle astronaut who trained with the Apollo crews and developed a mystical bent afterwards, claims to have heard music up there. “It was a noble, magnificent music”, he told a Space.com reporter in February 2000. “I was a little on the margin … I was walking the edge.”

…One of J. G. Ballard’s stories [“News From The Sun”] contains the striking line: “The best astronauts, Franklin had noticed during his work for NASA, never dreamed …” But before his flight, Charlie had a dream that he and John Young were driving the rover across the lunar surface, when they found another set of tracks. They asked Houston if they could follow them and wound up confronted by another rover, in which sat two people who looked exactly like them, but had been there for thousands of years. The dream was so pure and so vivid that Charlie is apt to call it “one of the most real experiences of my life.” In the event, however, the reality was exciting for Duke but not mystical or spiritual as it was for some. On the flight before (Apollo 15), Jim Irwin had found the crystalline “Genesis Rock”, a 4.15-billion-year-old relic of primordial crust formed in the Moon’s infancy—in geologic terms, mere moments after the solar system itself was born. It just sat there on a rocky pulpit at the edge of a crater, as if it had been waiting for him all that time and he said he felt the presence of God then, heard His voice, and upon returning, he quit NASA to found the High Flight ministry. A year later, he embarked on the first of several expeditions to search for Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey, which the novelist Julian Barnes used as a template for one of the short stories [“Project Ararat”] in his book A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. He almost died after a bad fall on Ararat’s slopes in 1982_42ya, but lived on until 1991_33ya, when a second massive heart attack finally took him. The thing was, everyone had known this was coming, because NASA medics discovered alarming irregularities in his heartbeat while he was on the lunar surface. Despite all the monitoring and all the tests, these had never shown up before. It seemed that the Moon, with her bardic sense of mischief, was playing the equivocator again, revealing Irwin’s calling while simultaneously foretelling his death.

…I ask whether Schmitt thinks that going to the Moon changed him, repeating Alan Bean’s view that all the Moonwalkers came back “more like they already were”, and his face lights up. He says he didn’t know that Bean had said that, but it’s exactly what he, too, has felt for the last thirty years. The only one who went in a direction no one could have imagined, he suggests, was the Apollo 15 commander, David Scott, whose lustrous career was destroyed by the “stamp scandal” which overtook him a few months after his return…

“That’s an interesting question, though, because Jim was deeply affected. For instance, before the Moon, he was a good speaker, but afterwards he was a great one. He really believed. Something real happened to him.”

He then speaks about something which he called his “left seat-right seat” theory, referring to the fact that the commander stood to the left in the lander with the Lunar Module pilot on his right. He sounds reflective for the first time as he notes:

“The six guys in the left seat went down paths you’d have expected, but the six in the right seats went off in all kinds of unexpected directions.”

And I suddenly recall Ed Mitchell saying something similar. In fact he had a name for it. I’d asked whether he thought some of the Moonwalkers had been more open to the experience than others and he answered:

“Well, one thing to note is that most of the guys who were vocal about the depth of the experience were Lunar Module pilots. It’s known phenomenon, from military studies, that the guy in the rear seat of a two-seater aircraft and the guy actually doing the flying have different experiences, because they’re focused on different things. It’s the command phenomenon. The view of the guy who has to be alert and on top of things is different from the guy who’s just along for the ride. So those of us coming back from the Moon who were LM pilots, we weren’t just along for the ride—we had chores—but we didn’t have major responsibilities, because the spacecraft was functioning well. We could take it in and contemplate what we were doing more thoroughly.”

He further added:

“I think that was also true for people back home on Earth, though obviously in a different way. Those pictures of the Earth from the Moon are the most published pictures in the world. And so one has to ask the question: Why is that so? What is that? And to me, it’s because they speak to that spirit of quest that humans have. And to the question ‘Who are we?’”

Yes. Now Scott is talking about Ed and his noetic quest, and Buzz Aldrin with his postflight breakdown … and Alan Bean with his Close Encounters Moon art … and of course Charlie Duke and Jim Irwin, who were directly or indirectly led to their faiths by the Moon. Only Jack Schmitt followed a straight and normal path, and then only if you consider a desire to enter the Senate normal. And for the first time, I fall to reflecting on my own encounters with these men; on the LM pilots’ eagerness to communicate what they’d felt up there and the way it seemed to still live inside them, as against the by-turns maddening and amusing imperviousness of the surviving mission commanders. Armstrong, Young, Cernan, Scott: I can admire them all in different ways, but wouldn’t want them near me if I were a talk-show host or composer of sonnets. Afterwards, I go to find Scott, because I want to know whether he thinks this postflight divergence is attributable to the different experiences of the Moonwalkers—as he seemed to be implying—or whether Deke simply assigned them roles according to character type, with focus and singularity seen as the stuff of leadership. Disingenuous to the last, he pretends not to remember me, while being unable to suppress the spark of recognition in his eye. He nevertheless confirms the first view straightaway.

“No, character doesn’t come into it”, he says. Really? I ask, but he shakes his head firmly. “Character was never an issue.” So he agrees with Ed Mitchell that there was something primal in the experience, at least for those who had the time and mental space to be affected by it? “I think so. Yes.” He leaves a short gap, as though considering this for the first time.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it?”