Medical thriller author and physician Dr. Tess Gerritsen discusses her novel Gravity, which Art describes as the most absorbing book he has ever read. She recounts how the 1997 collision between a Progress module and the Mir space station inspired the story and details her research at NASA's Johnson Space Center, where engineers confirmed that payload inspection loopholes could allow unauthorized experiments aboard the station.
Gerritsen explains the physiological dangers of space travel, from bone calcium loss and kidney stones to the terrifying mechanics of decompression death, where blood progresses from boiling to frozen solid as pressure drops to vacuum. She reveals that NASA internally estimates one in fifty shuttle missions will end in disaster and describes psychological breakdowns among crews, including a two-week communication blackout by a grieving Mir commander.
Key Moments
The genesis of Gravity, the Mir collision: Gerritsen recalls watching news coverage of the 1997 Progress-Mir collision and being haunted by the thought that three men were dying in a tin can while loved ones on Earth could hear them take their last breath.
How Gerritsen got NASA's cooperation: Gerritsen tells how she cold-called the Johnson Space Center public affairs officer, admitted her novel kills nearly everyone aboard the ISS plus the shuttle crew, and won his cooperation by pinning the blame on the military rather than NASA.
What dying in a vacuum actually does: Gerritsen walks through the medical sequence of decompression death: ear pop, then the bends as nitrogen bubbles in brain and spinal cord, then lung rupture, then blood boiling and freezing solid in an instant - all while comms stay open and Earth listens to the last scream.
The orbiting coffin scenario: If a shuttle crew dies or is incapacitated in orbit, Gerritsen says NASA told her flatly they cannot land it - the shuttle stays in orbit for several months as a coffin circling overhead until the orbit decays and it burns up in the atmosphere.
Mir commander locked himself away for two weeks: Gerritsen says flight surgeons consider emotional breakdown the biggest risk on a Mars trip, and that it has already happened on Mir: when his mother died, the cosmonaut commander locked himself in a module and refused to speak to Russian mission control for two weeks.