Shared Opinion | 8 August 2009

It’s the blood, muck and goo that makes space travel so interesting

Should one wish to become a taikonaut in the Chinese space programme (and one does not, fervently, but one is just saying), here follows a short list of the things that Chinese military doctor Shi Bing Bing will be checking that one absolutely does not have.

Bad breath. Body odour. A family history of serious illness in the past three generations. Scars that ‘may burst’. An unpleasant disposition. An unenthusiastic wife. Drug allergies. Ringworm. Indeed, probably any sort of worm. Tooth cavities. Athlete’s foot. Haemorrhoids. Excessive snot. Yep, he’s quite the body-fascist, is ‘Chandler’ Bing Bing. (One also has claustrophobia and vertigo. One wouldn’t have a hope.)

Across the East China Sea, meanwhile, a Japanese chap by the name of Koichi Wakata has just returned from the International Space Station. ‘I haven’t talked about my underwear to crew members,’ he shared, upon landing. ‘I have been wearing it for about a month.’ A couple of weeks in, he ate a curry.

Score one, I’d say, to the Japanese. For ever since man first thought of wedging a goldfish bowl over his ears, there have been two competing visions of how life in space ought to be. Some look up, and essentially see a dentist’s surgery. Others see an abattoir. Clean, sterile perfection versus grit, blood and dirt.

On the one side, along with the Chinese, we would find a thousand bits of dated sci-fi in which everybody wears tin foil and only the villains have beards. This would include most of Star Wars, Buck Rogers, Doctor Who, Lost in Space, most of Star Trek, and the persistent pop-culture notion that aliens are small antiseptic creatures with fantastic skin (albeit green) and no genitals.