Race and the Astronaut Body: The Mount Evans Acclimatization Experiment

• In Event: Biomedicine and Difference

Abstract

In 1958, USAF space medicine physiologist Bruno Balke led a team of young cadets to the summit of Mount Evans—one of the highest peaks in Colorado—to perform a series of high-altitude acclimatization experiments aimed at improving the oxygen efficiency of future astronauts. The five-week expedition reveals cold war military anxieties about the perceived weakness of American minds and bodies placed “in the loop” of technological systems required to function in newly strategic extreme environments—arctic, desert, tropic, and outer-space. This paper focuses on the experiment’s colonial roots and racialized character. Balke wanted to see if “sea-level Americans” being sent into outer-space could be conditioned to show the same physical endurance as “barrel-chested, stocky-legged Peruvian mountain men”. This paper will place the experiment, which Balke saw as critical to “training and selecting crews for extra-terrestrial flight”, in the context of his pre-World War Two life as a German ski instructor, sports medicine physician, Wehrmacht infantry doctor, and Luftwaffe researcher. Of particular interest is Balke's role in the 1938 Nazi-funded Nanga Parbat mountaineering expedition to Tibet, where he conducted a series of self-experiments on altitude acclimatization with Luftwaffe life scientist (and future NASA psychologist) Ulrich C. Luft. This episode will reveal the impact of ideas about race, colonialism, physical “fitness”, and the concept of “the superman” from early twentieth-century Germany, on the creation of American astronauts. I suggest that in addition to the storied military test-pilot, the complicated figure of the nationalistic mountaineer played a key role in making astronauts.

Author

• Jordan Bimm, York University