On mice and astronauts

>>> Jan/Mar 2018, Bio Magazine

It was 1970, the world divided between the “West” (led by the USA) and the “East” (led by Russia), and the so-called “space race” was a way of measuring strength without “resorting to ignorance”.

Between 1958 and 1967, Russia had placed in Earth orbit the first artificial satellite (Sputnik), the first living being (the dog Laika) and the first human being (the pilot Gagarin), and was evidently taking the lead. However, it was surpassed by the USA when NASA placed the first human being on the Moon in 1969. NASA was the American Space Agency and, because of that, gained enormous prestige.

The Amazonian-Carioca engineer Constantino Arruda Pessoa, a specialist in sewage treatment, taught the 5th year of the civil engineering course at UFRJ, specialty Hydraulics & Sanitation, and told of the trip he had made with other colleagues to the USA, before man went to the Moon, with emphasis on a visit to NASA, where his attention had been drawn to an experiment being carried out in a large hermetically sealed glass dome, that is, with no communication with the outside world, divided in half horizontally by a screen where there were two little mice.

The lower part had plenty of water, almost reaching the horizontal screen with the little mice on top. The little mice did their business and their excrement went into the water, feeding the growth of algae introduced there, which, besides serving as food for the little mice, carried out photosynthesis to generate the necessary oxygen, in short, a closed circuit, fed externally by light and nothing else.

Constantino told the students that he had been told that the experiment aimed to train the little mice to become astronauts, and had already been going on for almost a year. Would it be like that in space? Sewage treatment was, philosophically, to help keep our spaceship clean...

Suddenly he stopped, looked at the class and said, with that sly smile and that characteristic little voice, more toward the high-pitched side: “I do not know whether they were training little mice to become astronauts or the astronaut to become a little mouse...”

Miguel Fernández y Fernández, engineer, chronicler and columnist, member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the Institute of Engineering # written in Jan/Mar 2018 R2026 Jan, 2,181 characters.