View transcript
- There we go. Hello! Happy early Apollo birthday, everybody.

- Woo hoo!

- Okay. This is so beautiful. Do you guys need me to store this when you're done with it? I'll put this up outside the cave. Oh yeah.

- So if you had a pin, would that pop?

- I think it's inflatable.

- It's inflatable.

- But it's really convincing, even this close. I so wanna climb that and touch it.

- Ah.

- I probably shouldn't. Okay, so Mary, I have a question for you.

- Yes.

- I am leaving town on Monday to go to D.C. to participate in the celebrations that are happening for the 50th celebration of Apollo, and I'm getting to go through the Smithsonian, and they're giving us access. I had this experience at Johnson a couple years ago, where I visited for the day and I saw some old space gloves. And I got so excited about them. They said well, let's take you to the cabinet of really old space gloves. And it was like this cabinet no one had opened in years. As I was looking at it, I was thinking this is the kind of shit that Mary gets to see. And so I'm curious if you're, like, if someone says you have total access to the Smithsonian, what is your advice for me about what I should ask to do?

- At the Smithsonian?

- Yeah, I know, see? It's an embarrassment of riches.

- Oh, you know, the Smithsonian has this, it may be off site, but it's, there's two collections, a wet and a dry, of all the mammalian penises in the universe. Yes.

- The most Mary Roach answer I can possibly imagine.

- There's the baculums, baculi.

- Baculi.

- Which is the bone, the penis bone.

- I have a couple.

- What? You have a couple?

- It's actually a replica.

- Oh, oh, yes.

- I was getting a tour--

- I have one too.

- Do you?

- Yes. I have two. I have two, what are yours?

- I was getting a tour of behind the scenes at the Museum of Natural History in New York, and there was a walrus baculum. It was about 20 inches long that had been used as a pointer by a professor for 40 years. And it was written on it. So I took a close-up photo of the inscription and spent months finding an exact match for it. And I bought a Bone Clone walrus baculum, but it's shit. And I eventually found one at a thrift store in Valencia, and then I carefully hand lettered the same inscription on it, and I made a prop replica of a walrus baculum.

- Of course you did. I actually have, I was told it was a walrus penis bone, and in fact it was the columnist Jon Carroll's penis bone, and I got it at a white elephant party. And his wife tried to get it back at the end of the night, and my husband's like, no, I got this for Mary. It's Mary's penis bone now. And then I heard the oosic was a war club, and mine, my penis bone, it's like that. And I found out later it's a seal. It's like a harbor seal or something. I was sold a false bill of penis-bone goods. Anyway. And I have a rat penis bone as well. It's very tiny.

- A rat?

- Rat, yeah, a rat.

- With little rat lipstick.

- Yeah.

- Okay. So now you're reminding me, we were ostensibly supposed to come up here and talk about spacesuits, and you're reminding me of my favorite spacesuit story that I have, and it's the kind of story NASA doesn't like to tell. I got to fly--

- There are a lot of those.

- Oh, I know! You've told me a couple. So I got to fly in the U-2 spy plane, and I got to wear one of the David Clark suits. And I wore a UCD, a urine collection device.

- Yes, right on your leg, right?

- No, it actually was a tube that connected and went out. Oh, yeah, you're right, inside pocket, yeah. Right here. So they give you this conical rubber condom, and they ask you to cut it where it will fit right over you, and they actually have a speech where they say don't cut it on the pride side.

- Yes! Yes, yes!

- They said you want a good fit.

- Yes.

- And so then I wore it on the plane. I did not use it while I was on my flight, but afterwards I told, I know Chris Hadfield, and I was telling him about it, because I felt a little like an astronaut. And he said well, we don't use those anymore. And I was like, why not? He said because after five or six hours, you can't tell if it's on. And then there was an astronaut who it had fallen off and he didn't know, and he urinated into his spacesuit during a walk, and the urine of course vaporized inside his suit and coated the inside of his visor. And so he had to use his own face as a squeegee in order to be able to see to complete the spacewalk. That is a mission!

- Wow. I heard, and I'm told that this is true, that the urine collection device, the UCD, the condom part of it came in small, medium, and large, and that no one would order a small. And astronauts were like yeah, I'll have the large, right? And they were leaking all over. So they changed them to large, extra-large, and extra-extra-large. Swear to God.

- Once you put on the UCD, in order so that it has clear flow, you wear this large phallic thing over that velcros to your underpants. So you're standing there in long underwear with this giant rubber thing sticking out, and everyone's looking each other in the eye. All the pilots. And my crew is like ah! I'm curious, we had talked earlier, before you were doing the book about our guts.

- Gulp.

- Gulp, sorry. I knew it was a G word. And I told you the story that George W's poop, that I had heard that the American president's poo is a state secret.

- Ah, yes.

- And you were not able to confirm that story.

- No, I have now.

- You have?

- I have now. Yes, there was actually an entrapment device installed for, now I'm forgetting which head of state, but I'll give you the details. But yes, that in fact, there's a whole paper on the intelligence service and biomedical collection and what they can learn by entrapping the feces of a visiting head of state in their hotel room, yes.

- Wow.

- Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- This is my entry to ask you about other stories you weren't able to corroborate to put in books. Is there a future Mary Roach book of all the unconfirmed, really awesome, weird stories you've collected?

- You know, there's not, but there will be. There should be. But I just yesterday, okay, I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. You know what, I need to, okay, Adam was going to bring, as you know, Adam makes these amazing high fidelity, super accurate, replicas?

- Replica spacesuits, yes.

- Replica spacesuits.

- Not good for space, but they're awesome for me.

- Yeah, yes. And he was going to, but they're on display in the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, so we're shit outta luck. But anyway, because he was going to bring one of the amazing made suits, I made my own replica of, okay, this is an Apollo-era, I'm not very good at replicas, but--

- Oh, I'm so psyched.

- I've made something. Hold on.

- I love that your backpack also matches my Apollo jacket.

- I know.

- Was that on purpose? No. Yes.

- Okay, this is an Apollo, this is a replica. It's not very good because I don't have the finger caught, but this is Apollo-era fecal collection bag, all right?

- Wow.

- And I made it myself.

- That's beautiful!

- And, okay, it's peel and stick. And the way it works--

- You actually used double stick?

- Yes. No.

- It's a functional replica.

- Yes, you can put it on, yeah. So what the astronaut, because in the Gemini and Apollo era, there was no toilet. There's no space toilet. So this is what you had. And you would peel off the sticky, and you would stick this on there, and then I didn't do the finger caught because it's too complicated. You would have done the finger caught, which is just basically a place to stick your finger. Because when you don't have gravity, you don't have good separation. And that, good separation, is the holy grail of the NASA waste management team.

- It's the holy grail of every morning for me.

- So you needed to put two fingers in and coax it down, away from your body, and then mix in some germicidal material. And I also didn't do that, which you would have done as well. It looks like a little soy sauce packet. And they would open it and put it in--

- It's like an enzymatic thing?

- Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I just adjusted my bra strap on livestream. Anyway.

- That is magnificent, I love it.

- So yeah. And there's a photograph in my book, from the 1970s, of some dude in plaid pants bending over with his ass sticking out, showing how it's done. Well, obviously you wouldn't have pants on, but you would stick this to your bare ass. And it never stuck well, and it pulled hair, and they hated it, and they would do everything they could to constipate themselves and just not crap for the entire mission.

- Wow!

- Yeah.

- Two things. I have pooped into a bag before. It is one of the least dignified things I've ever done, and that's a fairly low bar. It turns out the trick is, right, I'm trying to remember.

- Why did you need--

- Like that. Holding it open like. We had to test my poo for its methane content for our episode about farts.

- Okay, yes, yes.

- We had a, nah, I won't tell that story. But I was at Johnson a couple of years ago, and astronaut Chel Ingram was giving me a tour, and I got to climb in the shuttle, which is totally amazing how tiny it is.

- Yeah.

- And you see the bathroom there, and he says have a seat on the toilet and I'll show you something. I sit on the toilet, and he turns on the videocamera that you use--

- Oh, I've sat on that.

- To guide.

- Yeah, no, I know. Yes.

- I'm watching this videocamera and I'm like wow, and I look up, and I see this look on his eyes, and he goes yeah, you get to know yourself real well.

- There's one of those toilet cams in the training area, because you're not, if you sit on that toilet, you're not sitting, you're hovering in close proximity, and you need to get your angle of approach right. Otherwise, and it's a small hole, it's not--

- It's a difficult docking maneuver.

- Yes, it is. Yes, it is. So they have a closed-circuit TV. So you sit on the toilet, and there's the TV, and there's a light. You're seeing your asshole right there. It's like something you're really familiar with but have never really seen from that perspective, and I imagine kind of like seeing the earth from space.

- The most curious part is that they autoplay the Blue Danube while you're doing it.

- Yes, it's soothing. Encouraging.

- I love that you've made this beautiful craft project.

- Thank you, thank you. And I did it myself. You know, my husband Ed is a very talented maker. Tidy, measure five times, cut once, and I'm not. And he kept trying to, he was like, you know, you should, you might wanna, and I'm like, I'm doing this myself. So this is actually just Scotch tape.

- It looks very good.

- Thank you.

- I also have difficulty. A round of applause.

- Thank you. Thank you very much.

- For Mary's self-stick poop bag.

- Foop, the fecal bag, yes. Yes.

- What do you want to bet there's already a YouTube channel of people using those?

- You know, I didn't look for that very reason. I didn't need to feel shamed about my fecal bag. I wanted to feel good about my fecal bag. And this was such, the astronauts hated this. But in fact it wasn't the worst. The worst design, and they never did this, but it was called the fecal glove. And that was kind of--

- A big catcher's mitt?

- That was kind of like when your dog takes a crap and you pick it up and then you turn the sleeve inside out? It was basically that. You put it on your hand, crap in your hand, and then pull it inside out, there you go. That was--

- I'm comforted by the warmth of my dog's output every day. I mean, I love him. I find it, you know, oh, it's a nice one Huxley, well done.

- It's a nice one. Do you know what I found? And we're gonna get off this tangent real soon now.

- I don't see any reason to.

- The reason, what I was starting to say before, when I felt like I had to introduce and show off my fecal bag was that yesterday, because I was looking for a photograph of this, I came upon this amazing thing on the NASA website, which is documentation of all of the turds from the Apollo mission by whether it was command module pilot, lunar module pilot, or commander, and how much they weighed. I mean, it's all there. It's kind of astounding. And they brought them all back, and they already--

- They had to have weighed them on earth. 'Cause you can't weigh them in space.

- That's right! He is so smart. They brought 'em back, yes. They're not on the surface of the moon, which I had assumed they just dumped them with the camera and everything else.

- Do they still exist? Are they in some refrigerator?

- Yes. There's this guy at NASA who told me one time he was wandering around Johnson Space Center, and they had given him the code to go into one of the labs, and he realized that code worked on a lot of different doors, so he wandered around, and he went into this room, and there was this freezer with a blinking light, and he opened the freezer, and there were the Apollo archival turds. They were all there. And he said he tried to go back, but he never found the door. It was like Narnia. Anyway, yeah, they're there, they're all there.

- You could unpack what they had eaten days before. It was like polar ice cores. You could determine the diet from the '60s.

- Yeah, totally. I know. So. Okay, enough about that. Talk about some suits or something.

- Well, yeah, as you said, my four best suits, my Mercury, my ACES, my 2001, and what's the last one? Jesus, I'm forgetting all of a sudden. Oh, my EMU, which I haven't actually even shown publicly, are all now installed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for an exhibit that opens on the 17th, next Wednesday night, called Far Out. And it's all about the architecture of space habitats.

- Oh, cool.

- And the coolest thing about a spacesuit is it's a spaceship.

- It's a habitat.

- It is.

- It's a really tiny, human-shaped room, yeah.

- And I love the fact that when they make the bladder, which is the actual bladder layer, the airtight layer, they call it an anthropomorphic balloon.

- They do?

- Yes!

- That's fantastic.

- It's the line item as listed. Of course that's what it is.

- Are they doing, as the exhibit, are they doing layer by layer? Can you see the anthropomorphic balloon blown up?

- They are not. It's more about the cultural perspective of what space might look like, the way we have perceived the way it's going to be, and then there are some real and some fake suits there in the middle. Frankly, putting things on mannequins is one of the worst things I do. It is so hard to make something look natural. And I don't think I've ever actually fully succeeded at it. And so that was one of my requirements is like, I can't mount these, you guys have to take that on.

- You know what's harder than that?

- What's that?

- What I heard when I was, and I'm sorry to interrupt you.

- Oh no, no. We're up here having a conversation.

- When I was working on Stiff, my first book, someone was doing a cadaver test, and the cadaver was wearing a leotard, like tights, and I said how do you dress a cadaver? And he said it's very, very hard. Because they're--

- Yeah, they don't want to move in the way that you--

- Yeah, they're floppy. Probably, well, maybe as hard as dressing a mannequin.

- I have had to dress a couple of Rescue Randys. They are the fully movable, 180-pound fireman dummies, and they're a nightmare to dress.

- Yeah, right.

- That's why it's really great to give that to the young people to do. They can manhandle that. So yeah, this exhibit, I just saw it yesterday, I went over and saw it, and it's just really exciting to have people working on my stuff.

- Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

- It legitimizes it in a way, 'cause all of this is just, like, my emotional support costumes, you know? They just sit near me, and I'm happy that they're there. So it's really exciting that they're going out into the public and kind of becoming their own thing.

- They're amazing. I mean, when you do a replica, it's exact.

- The thing is is that I don't ever finish. So it's exact enough for this Comic-Con, but then when it comes back, I remade all the connectors on my Apollo. In fact, actually because I'm taking my Apollo suit to D.C., I actually installed a cooling system, and I connected it to one of the front connectors, the air connector, and I ran a set of five tubes, the same way NASA does, back to the upper back to blow air through my bubble helmet and keep it cool.

- Holy crap, yeah.

- We're gonna try it out in D.C. in July. We'll see how it goes.

- Yeah, amazing.

- I could just end up being a sweaty ball, using my own face as a squeegee for my urine.

- The visor thing, there was a, you know NASA just what-iffed everything, including if you got space motion sickness, and you're in your EVA suit, your spacewalking suit, and you threw up, that's a serious thing. First of all, when you don't have gravity, surface tension, so it clings, and it tends to cling to nostrils, and you can't--

- Was there an emesis port on the helmet? There wasn't.

- No, that's why it was so dangerous. They would scrub an EVA, they would cancel it, if somebody was feeling they might vomit. But they simmed it, using, I love this, the simulated vomit was Progresso vegetable soup.

- Absolutely perfect.

- Yeah, there you go, yeah. But they what-iffed it all. They what-iffed everything.

- During MythBusters I got my diving certification, and I got it specifically to host Shark Week, and so I certified down in Monterey, like a lot of Northern Californians do, and then my sixth dive was in a great white shark cage in South Africa, where the swells were like five feet, so it was kind of like being in a dice cup. And just before I went in, oh, and we're wearing these masks called AGA masks, and they're built so you can actually talk in them. So they have a microphone, and you can communicate with other divers, and they're terrible masks to wear as a diver, because they have all this extra buoyancy, and they kind of pull your head up, and they make your neck sore. Just before I went in, Jamie said, because he knows I have a weak stomach, just so you know, you can throw up right into that thing. And so I'm in the cage, I see a shark a little bit, but then these swells are really bad, and sure enough, it happens. And so I fully let go into the AGA mask, and just at the end of that exhale, I guess you could call it, I'm thinking boy, I hope Jamie was right. And then I take this beautiful breath of clean air. It was stunning.

- They sucked it out?

- That mask is built to take it.

- Wow.

- It was fabulous.

- Amazing.

- I was totally, and then I was like, time to get me out! Get me the hell out of here, please.

- On the fighter jet, did you get sick on that?

- On the, yes, in the F-18? Yeah.

- Oh Jesus, I wouldn't even do it. 'Cause of that.

- Oh, no, no, no. That is the one experience I had, I threw up seven times.

- On the fighter jet?

- On the fighter plane.

- Fighter plane, yes. Seven times?

- Seven times each flight. I flew three times.

- Geez!

- And I pulled seven and a half Gs, and I didn't pass out. I pulled seven and a half Gs and did pass out, but I also pulled seven and a half Gs and didn't pass out. This is the one experience I've ever had that throwing up constantly did not detract from my enjoyment one iota.

- I have a question.

- Yeah.

- Is it, when the stuff you're throwing up weighs seven times as much, is it harder to throw it up, number one, and number two, when it hits, is it really heavy?

- I had a lot of bags.

- What?

- I had a lot of barf bags.

- Oh, barf bags.

- And it turns out that's what all those pockets on the flight suit are for.

- Oh, that's what they're for?

- Yeah, there's one here, one here, one here, one here. And the one thing I did notice is when I'm pulling seven and a half Gs, I have a picture of this, at that point I weighed fifteen hundred pounds, and my face looked exactly like my dad.

- Yes. Yes.

- But specifically my dad in the throes of Alzheimer's. Like, the worst possible dad image to see in yourself. And then I passed out.

- Wow. Seven and a half, wow.

- I've never been in, the F-18 is, Chris Hadfield flies over 200 different airplanes. I know, he makes the rest of us look lazy. And he said the F-18 is the one that is so intuitive to fly you can actually forget that you're flying. It's just an extension of your body. And I've never been in a more precise, amazing machine. My pilot was telling me, my last flight was as a chase plane instead of the lead, which was really neat, 'cause you got to, when you're watching these maneuvers happen from one plane back and you can see these two planes moving in perfect tandem, I'm like, how do you do this? And he's like, I'm just lining up the eye of the Hornet with this part of his wing.

- Yeah, right, I've heard that that's, you're just looking at the--

- Yeah.

- Which if the lead guy passes out and flies into the earth, that's bad.

- All of you are going the same direction, yeah.

- It doesn't happen very often.

- Actually, Hadfield had a story about flying with the Thunderbirds, and passing out in a roll. And I was like, what was that like? And he goes well, you know sometimes you wake up from an afternoon nap, and you have that kind of great feeling of like, oh, that was a really satisfying nap? And he said I opened my eyes, and I was going 600 miles an hour. And the fact was he was heading on an upward trajectory, which is the reason he's alive.

- Yeah.

- And he took back control of the aircraft and landed. I know, the rest of us feel, it seems lazy.

- Did you take some good drugs to not throw up?

- Dramamine. Dramamine works great for me. I tried scopolamine, but that's too intense.

- For the vomit comet, they give you scopolamine.

- It didn't work for me. I vomited the moment we were done with all of the necessary footage.

- On this one?

- Yeah, and the one requirement for getting to fly for free was that we weren't allowed to call it the vomit comet, use the word vomit at any time during the shoot.

- I know, they tell you that. They take you aside, and they go, we're calling it, this is the plane that they simulate weightlessness, right? Zero gravity. They said, we're calling it the weightless wonder. Which pretty much makes you vomit.

- Did you throw up?

- I did, yeah. I did, and then I wrote about it in the book, and I called it the vomit comet.

- I had this experience, I finished the footage we had to do. I was wearing a spacesuit. It was amazing. And then we were finished, and I was like, oh, here it comes. I grab the barf bag, and I threw up into it, and then I looked down and realized there's nothing keeping my vomit in this bag. I'd better physically close it, because we're weightless.

- That's right. In fact, that's a problem with the toilets, because, here we go again, all right, but it's--

- It's always back to the fundament for you.

- There is technical terminology. Okay, say, on the shuttle toilet, 'cause the way that it closes when you're done, there's a sliding door. But if you aren't being vigilant, the hovering material can make its way up, and it's called fecal decapitation. Yes it is, ladies and gentlemen.

- This has gotta be the title of your book for uncorroborated stories. I think we have reached the end of our time.

- Probably.

- Please give a hand to my friend and amazing writer Mary Roach.

- Adam Savage!

- Thank you guys so much!