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Photo: Kris Aguero
Location: Rehoboth Beach, Delaware USA
In 1965, the US Air Force proposed the launching of a secret Space Station…
to be named the Manned Orbiting Lab (MOL). Of prime concern to Gary Graham (he's the man holding the bucket of popcorn) and a team of other bioscientists was the effect on an astronaut’s cardiovascular system during the long exposure to the zero gravity of space.
The Bioastronautics team proposed subjecting the astronauts to intermittent positive and negative acceleration forces parallel to the long axis of the body as a way of taxing their cardiovascular system and maintaining their orthostatic tolerance. That's a lot of big words - and a long way of saying that the astronauts would lie down on a carriage that would bounce back and forth between vertical trampolines located at the head and the feet. They named it the Cardiovascular Conditioner.
Perhaps the following video will give you some sense of what they were trying to accomplish:
Think of the astronaut as a ping pong ball with the paddles representing the vertical trampolines. Of course, the carriage and astronaut wouldn't move all over the place like the ping pong ball - they'd just bounce back and forth between trampolines - giving the astronaut's cardiovascular and muscular systems a decent workout prior to their re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.
While good in theory, the Cardiovascular Conditioner never saw the light of day - the government ended up scrapping the MOL Project. However, twenty years later, while working in a different industry, Gary decided to resurrect the idea of a Cardiovascular Conditioner. With a little bit of research and development, he patented his new horizontal rebounding machine. He called it the CMC (CardioMuscular Conditioner) Shuttle 2000.
And Shuttle Systems had lift-off....
