Testing the Limits: Aviation Medicine and the Origins of Manned Space Flight (review)

Almost immediately upon launching their first large rockets in the late 1940s, researchers in the United States and the Soviet Union stuffed the nose cones with a petting zoo's worth of animals just to see if they would survive the trip. The health of mice in space was not an idle concern in the years after World War II; physiologists preparing for World War III wondered which lethal mechanism—weightlessness, temperature, insanity—would fell future space pilots first. Soviet space dog Laika, a stray mutt launched into Earth orbit in November 1957, spent three days in abject terror, a feeding tube crammed down her throat, until she died of heat exhaustion. American researchers trained chimpanzees to mimic the human pilots who would soon follow them into space, pulling levers in pretend cockpits.

Such experiments were only one small (and much-mocked) part of the research program of "aviation medicine," a field of study that, shortly before World War II, expanded from a fringe pursuit into a thriving international research discipline. Aviation medicine could not have found a better champion than Maura Phillips Mackowski; her new book, Testing the Limits, faithfully recounts the efforts of American and German research physicians who, at the dawn of the space age, saved more than a few pilots' lives by perfecting life-support equipment and quantifying the physiological and psychological effects of aviation. It is a telling statement about this research that Mackowski follows it through personalities rather than institutions: in the mid-twentieth century, aviation medicine flourished under the stewardship of a handful of dedicated scientists who tirelessly lobbied skeptical superiors, scrounged for funds, and experimented on themselves.

These pioneers include Harry Armstrong, who founded the first U.S. aeromedical research laboratory in 1934 at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, and his German counterpart, Hubertus "Struggie" Strughold, who, like the Führer, was a wonderful dancer. Germany's wartime experience with high-speed airplanes made its aviation physicians particularly valuable at war's end, and Strughold, the least Nazified of the group, found a warm reception in the United States when American spies smuggled him and many other scientists out of the Reich in Project Paperclip. In America, the "Paperclips" and native-born colleagues like Randy Lovelace and Paul Stapp established human tolerances for acceleration and altitude and the medical implications of transformative wartime technologies like ejection seats and rocket planes.

American aviation medicine of the 1950s emerges in Testing the Limits as a research frontier populated by hands-on iconoclasts quite content to abuse their bodies for science, exposing themselves to supersonic wind blasts or jumping from stratospheric weather balloons. Some intrepid physiologists dreamed of taking their work literally to the Moon, but until the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, space remained a dirty word in the air force, under whose auspices most American aviation physiologists worked. The years 1958 through 1961, however, quickly became space medicine's heyday, with the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) calling on the physicians to help select the military pilots who would become America's first astronauts. Ultimately, though, NASA wanted the physiologists' reassurance, not their research. Mackowski is charitable toward the doctors, but their "examinations" were often worthless experiments masquerading as evaluative tests. As it turned out, nude anthropometric photography couldn't distinguish good pilots from bad ones, and aviation medicine's influence over astronaut selection quickly waned. Mackowski's final chapter, on the group of unqualified civilian women Lovelace unsuccessfully promoted as potential astronauts in 1961, reveals, ultimately, only the physiologist's naivete about the military foundations of "big science."

Testing the Limits is a thoroughly researched work making excellent use of archives and oral history; only Soviet space medicine is noticeably shortchanged. Mackowski's account resounds with the kind of thrilling stories for which basic cable was invented, but evaluating aviation medicine's scientific legacy remains tricky. Nazi experiments were...