The Backstory: The Secret NASA Test That Almost Ended the Space Race

In December of 1903, the Wright brothers made the first powered flight with a pilot in history. That’s only 122 years ago and yet here we are flying around the moon in Artemis 2. But the unknown dangers explorer types faced then... and still face... is mind blowing. In fact, manned space flight almost got stopped in its tracks by a secret government test. I’m Patty Steele. How much can the human body withstand as we attempt to explore the universe?

Feel free to DM me if you have a story you’d like me to cover... on Facebook it’s Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Trip Around the Moon by Artemis two this week
has really inspired a whole new interest in the exploration
of deep space. What's out there beyond our atmosphere, beyond
our moon, and even beyond our Solar system. It's as
thrilling to consider as it must have been five hundred
or a thousand years ago for explorers heading into the

(00:21):
open sea, not knowing where or how it ended. I'm
Patty Steele, but here's the thing. Heading into unknown territory
can also be incredibly dangerous. That's next on the back story.
We're back with the backstory. When the Wright brothers piloted

(00:42):
the first successful powered flight of an airplane a week
before Christmas in nineteen o three, they changed our world.
That first flight was only ten feet off the ground,
going six point eight miles per hour for just one
hundred and twenty feet, but they might as well have
launched to the moon given what it meant to human transportation.

(01:03):
But danger was and is a constant. The first person
to die due to a powered airplane accident was actually
just along for the ride. In September of nineteen oh eight,
Army aviation researcher Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge was riding along with
Orvill Wright as he flew his right Model A plane
when it crashed due to a broken propeller. While Orville

(01:26):
suffered a broken leg and broken ribs, he did survive. Unfortunately,
Selfridge had a nasty and fatal head wound, and he
died three hours later. There were lots of air crashes
that followed, but his flight. In the twentieth century evolved,
we moved beyond just flying around in Earth's atmosphere and

(01:46):
started thinking seriously about space. After the Soviet Union launched
Sputnik in nineteen fifty seven, there was panic in the
United States about which nation was more advanced in the
space race. By the early nineteen sixties, America was fixated
unracing the Soviets to the Moon. The stakes were global, political,

(02:08):
and existential. Then, when Yuri Gagarin became the first human
in space in nineteen sixty one, America felt humiliated by
the Soviets. NASA was under enormous pressure to move fast
Mercury missions, Gemini missions, Apollo on the horizon. The technology
was improving rapidly, rockets were getting stronger, capsules more advanced,

(02:32):
but there was a quiet question behind the speeches and
rocket launches. NASA discovered a problem so alarming it was
kept quiet, not from the public, but from history itself.
It wasn't a rocket flaw, it wasn't a guidance failure.
It was the human body, and it almost stopped the
space race cold. The question was could the human body

(02:55):
survive what these machines were about to do to it.
To find out, NASA ran a series of brutal ground
tests using centrifuges, machines that spun astronauts at extreme speeds
to simulate the crushing forces of launch and re entry.
The goal was simple, measure how much g force the

(03:15):
human body could tolerate. The results were not reassuring. The
willing astronauts began losing vision, then consciousness, then control of
their bodies. And this wasn't happening at the edge of possibility.
It was happening within the limits NASA had already designed
its spacecraft to withstand. In some tests, astronauts, including John Glenn,

(03:38):
the first American in space, were subjected to sickening pressure
and blacked out for several seconds, long enough to miss
critical flight operations during re entry. Think about it, if
this happened in space there would be no second chance.
NASA engineers realized something unnerving. The rockets weren't wrong wasn't wrong,

(04:01):
It was the assumption that was wrong. Engineers had designed
the capsules based on what machines could handle, not on
what humans could handle. Yikes. If those findings became public,
it would change everything, maybe even blow up the program.
It would mean that astronauts might not be able to
control their spacecraft during the most dangerous moments, that the

(04:23):
Moon missions could be delayed indefinitely, and that the Soviet
Union could pull even further ahead if they were less careful.
So NASA did what governments often do in moments like this,
They just went quiet. Instead of redesigning the rockets, they
turned inward toward biology. Doctors, physiologists, and engineers worked together

(04:45):
to understand what was actually happening inside the body under
extreme force. They realized blood was being pulled away from
the brain. Vision failed first, then consciousness. What they discovered
was the solution wasn't strength or endurance. It was posture.
NASA figured out that how astronauts were positioned made a

(05:08):
massive difference. Upright seating was found to be incredibly dangerous
incline seating hugely improved blood flow to the brain, so
they redesigned everything. They changed seat angles, control placements, and
restraint systems. In effect, the astronaut's body became part of
the spacecraft itself. But here's the thing. NASA never made

(05:32):
a big announcement about this vulnerability. There was no press conference,
no dramatic pause in the space race. The fixes were
implemented quietly, simply folded into new capsule designs. The thing is,
they knew that admitting the truth that astronauts might pass
out at the worst possible moment could have ended public

(05:52):
support for the space race literally overnight. The Moon landing
depended not just on courage, but on careful omission. From
a marketing standpoint, Had those early tests gone just a
little worse, NASA would have faced an impossible choice send
astronauts knowing they might lose consciousness, or pause the program

(06:14):
and risk losing the space race entirely. Either option would
have changed history. But because they caught the problem early
and solved it quietly, without the noise of the press,
missions like Apollo eight and Apollo eleven became possible. Imagine
getting away with that today. Because of how that moment

(06:34):
was handled. Neil Armstrong didn't just walk on the Moon
because of rockets. He did it because somebody realized the
human body couldn't be treated like cargo. It's funny when
we think of the Space Race, we picture fire steel
at crazy speed, but one of its greatest threats was invisible,

(06:55):
measured in heart beats and blood pressure, not explosions. The
space wasn't nearly lost to failure or fear. Who was
nearly lost to biology? And the reason we don't remember
this test is because it worked quietly. Hope you're enjoying
the Backstory with Patty Steele. Please leave a review and

(07:16):
follow or subscribe for free to get new episodes delivered automatically.
Also feel free to dm me if you have a
story'd like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele
and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The
Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis

(07:38):
Duran Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser.
Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday
and Friday. Feel free to reach out to me with
comments and even story suggestions on Instagram at real Patty
Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening
to the backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history

(08:00):
you didn't know you needed to know.