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The Body Electric
from the bones. This might occur not only through chemical/metabolic
processes, but by a change in the electromagnetic binding forces, allow-
ing the pegs to "fall out." It's possible that this could result from a
change in the overall electrical fields throughout the body or from a
change in those surrounding the body in the environment.
Osteoporosis has been a major worry of the American and Russian
space programs. As flights got longer, doctors found that more and more
apatite was lost from the bones, until decalcification reached 8 percent in
the early Soviet Salyut space-station tests. Serious problems were known
to occur only when apatite loss reached about 20 percent, but the trend
was alarming, especially since depletion of the calcium reservoir might
affect the nervous system and muscular efficiency before the 20-percent
level was reached. Although the immediate cause was their inability to
get a malfunctioning air valve closed before all the cabin air escaped,
weakness from muscle tone loss might have contributed to the death of
the three cosmonauts who succumbed while returning from their
twenty-four-day flight aboard Soyuz 11 at the end of June 1971.
Space osteoporosis may result from unnatural currents induced in bone
by a spacecraft's rapid motion through the earth's magnetic field, with a
polarity reversal every half orbit, or it may be a direct effect of the field
reversal. This abnormality, which may change the activity of bone cells
directly, would be superimposed on abnormal responses of bone's natural
electrical system, which is almost certainly affected by weightlessness.
The unfamiliar external field reversals could also weaken the copper
pegs, at the same time that the bones are in a constant state of "re-
bound" from their earthly weight-induced potentials, producing a signal
that says, "No weight, no bones needed." We know that the more even
distribution of blood caused by weightlessness registers in the heart as an
excess; as aresult,
fluid and ions, including calcium, are withdrawn
from tht blood. However, the effect probably isnt't due to weightlessness
alone, for the Skylab astronauts did rigorous exercise, which would have