‘Space guinea pig’ reveals hidden human experiments to get America to the moon

The U.S. government drilled a hole into retired Air Force Col. Robert Lindseth’s heart more than 60 years ago because the country wanted to go to the moon and it was not sure how to get there and back.

Col. Lindseth volunteered to help America win the space race over the Russians because of his patriotism and desperate hopes for a better future.

As a guinea pig for the burgeoning space program, he withstood a battery of tests to determine what a human being could endure in outer space.

Col. Lindseth survived. America, in 1969, got man to the moon first. Now 82 years old, he has a pacemaker to help account for his atrial fibrillation, commonly understood as an irregular heartbeat.

He suspects the demanding human experiments performed by the U.S. military contributed to his health complications, but he is far from bitter and remains proud of his country. His story offers a small window on how those willing to serve as human experiment subjects in uncertain times made their own small but real contribution to scientific progress and national achievement.

“Sixty years ago, they didn’t know that I would have AFib today because of this,” Col. Lindseth told The Washington Times. “But if I was asked to go through this test again today, I’d do it just because it was worth it.”

Preparing for the final frontier

The first time Col. Lindseth passed out, he was briefing a South Korean general during a military exercise. He woke up in the hospital.

He got used to it over time in the military. Every now and then, he’d fade out.

“I could be sitting there and just pass right out. My heart would decide, ’Well, I’m going to take a nap’ and that was it,” he said. “Now if I laid down for about a half hour, my heart would recover. Everything starts going back to normal.”

He knows he has outlived many of his colleagues. He is an electronic warfare professional with more than 50 years of service in the defense and intelligence establishment, including time spent mentoring the next generation of military and intelligence officers.

As a young airman in February 1964, he was selected for participation in “Biomedical Studies in support of the National Space Program,” according to military orders reviewed by The Times.

Provided a choice between food service and participating in a medical experiment with NASA, Col. Lindseth said he chose the latter, with the promise of more career opportunities afterward.

He transferred to Brooks Air Force Base in Texas to engage in “tilt table experimental acceleration stress.” He said government officials explained they observed some deterioration in the cardiovascular system of participants in America’s first man-in-space program, Project Mercury.

To mimic and understand the effects of zero gravity on the body, the government told Col. Lindseth he would receive a left-heart catheterization and undergo tests in a centrifuge, on a tilt table, and work an ergometer before a period of bed rest. The colonel recalls spinning around at accelerating speeds while he gripped a kill switch, which would shut off the machine when the test subject passed out and released his grasp.

While on the tilt table, Col. Lindseth said he had a tube in one arm with dyes running in and doctors observing the other arm to measure various vital signs.

He said he was also instructed to use an ergometer to measure his respiratory ability, pedaling on a stationary machine while doctors examined how his body processed oxygen.

After completing the tests, the participants underwent bed rest with strictly set rules. Laying flat on a bed with no pillow, he said the participants were able to watch a television bolted to the ceiling or turn their head to read a book. They could make phone calls, but smartphones were decades away from becoming a fixture of American life.

The participants sat up to use a bedpan as a toilet, to eat an identical diet of 600 calories per day, and to weigh in each day. Col. Lindseth said he dropped from 215 pounds to 128 pounds during the study.

“They wanted to find out what you were: You were a body of data,” Col. Lindseth said. “They knew what was going into you, they knew the food that went into you, they knew the crap that came out of you. The water that went into you, the water that came out of you.”

He does not remember clearly how long the bed rest period lasted, estimating that the weeks-long examination felt like 10 years. Col. Lindseth’s orders indicate the total period he was moved for the experiment ran about two months.

Upon completing the bed rest, the doctors put him through a battery of tests again. He said participants showed a degraded ability to endure the spinning centrifuge before passing out, and everyone failed the ergometer, with little strength to pedal and breathe.

Having completed basic training just before the medical study, he exited the program and went off to pursue a career in military and intelligence. He said he learned some results of the program only when he saw U.S. astronauts reaching their lunar destination alongside his fellow Americans.

“It was for me, for me an honor — pardon me — to do this because it was a contribution,” he said, getting emotional. “It worked out.”

Experimenting in the shadows

Col. Lindseth and his colleagues did not seek recognition. They did not win much fanfare for their efforts.

Their work was kept quiet at the time and NASA’s chief historian Brian Odom told The Times he did not find the young airman’s information in the agency’s catalog, technical reports or other publications.

That may not be much of a surprise. Public perception viewed the space race of the 20th century as a competition between the Soviet Union and the U.S., but a contrasting view held that it was also a “lengthy skirmish” between NASA and the Air Force, according to a May 1964 issue of the Air & Space Forces Association’s magazine.

A magazine article shared by Mr. Odom revealed that at the outset of Project Mercury, NASA had “virtually no aerospace medical capability,” while the Air Force and Navy had major capabilities in labs across the country.

As Col. Lindseth participated in human experimentation, the Air Force’s contributions to NASA were deliberately hidden in keeping with the policy of the Johnson administration, according to the magazine.

The government even directed reporters to hide the Air Force affiliations of primates bound for outer space.

“The contributions of the Air Force to the NASA program were so underplayed that, for example, touring reporters visiting the Air Force’s “monkey farm” at Holloman AFB, New Mexico, where the first orbiting chimpanzee was trained, were asked not to mention that the simians were Air Force types,” the article said.

NASA is much more open now and willing to share credit. Mr. Odom said the Air Force personnel at Brooks Air Force Base’s work led directly to spacesuit designs for early astronauts.

While Col. Lindseth believes his heart complications are linked to his “space guinea pig” days, the government is mum on making any such determination.

“As far as negative health complications endured by study participants, we are aware of none,” Mr. Odom said in an email.

Mr. Odom said additional records of health complications for study participants may reside with the Air Force. The Air Force did not answer questions, but the Air Force Personnel Center confirmed Col. Lindseth’s name and rank.

The government has made major changes to human subjects research and space exploration in the intervening decades since Col. Lindseth volunteered for experimentation.

For example, NASA’s Human Research Program collaborates with external groups to address risks of human spaceflight, including through the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) run by the Baylor College of Medicine.

TRISH chief operating and communications officer Rachael Dempsey told The Times all of the contributions made by human subjects add up, including from Col. Lindseth. She said space research will benefit everyone in growing humanity’s health knowledge.

“We’re learning more about how each individual body is going to respond in such extreme environments,” Ms. Dempsey said. “That’s a bridge towards personalized medicine, that’s a bridge towards remote care, it’s a bridge towards medical training on the fly. It really is the future of health care just by looking at what we can make possible in space exploration.”

Ms. Dempsey is eagerly hoping humanity will reach Mars by the end of the 2030s.

Col. Lindseth is excited by what America has already accomplished and fascinated by new advances such as SpaceX’s Starlink.

He told The Times he watched a Starlink launch in June with a tear in his eye, as he has outlived many of his aging colleagues.

“To have been a very small, some say infinitesimal, piece of this great adventure was an awesome honor,” he said. “I’m sure that my brother space pigs feel the same — that is, those who [have] survived.”