(With apologies to Roberta Flack, 1969)

I recently spent an entertaining hour and a half at a “wet shave meet-up” speaking about NASA space biomedical research in general and shaving in space in particular.

That sentence begs at least two separate explanations.

First, a wet shave meet-up is not a variation on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League.” I didn't know it but wet-shave meet-ups are a national phenomenon where aficionados, enthusiasts and artisans can buy, sell and discuss blades, brushes, sharpeners, etc. It sounds a little crazy but there is actually a community of wet shaving aficionados who enjoy shaving with a razor and related tools as opposed to an electric razor. “Wet Shave Meet Ups” is a resource page (1) put together by Doug Smythe and Matthew Broderick to keep the community informed. Individual meet ups are organized by people in the community when and where the spirit moves them. The “mother ship” of meet ups was held April 23 in Pasadena, California: “Big Shave West” (see it at “The Heart of Shaving: Big Shave West 2”) (2). It had about 250 men and women in attendance, including manufacturers, YouTube “celebrities” and just-plain-fans from all parts of the globe.

I didn’t go to Pasadena, California, or even Pasadena, Texas. The Space City Meet where I spoke was organized by Adam Lindberg, artisan soapmaker for Stubble Trouble in Houston, a local meet-up at Rosewater, a new bar here in Clear Lake, Texas, co-owned by Pasha Morshedi, a colleague at NASA, and coincidentally where Adam is a bartender. There were about 30 wet shaving fans in attendance from as far away as Boston, along with manufacturers of small batch shaving products. It was organized by Gail Wells, the US brand manager for Edwin Jagger, an English company (3). She asked me to speak about shaving and grooming in space, and anything else of interest to the group.

This talk was arranged through the Johnson Space Center Speakers Bureau (4) so I had planned to give my usual 60-plus slide presentation on NASA’s Human Research Program and our work on resolving the risks to astronauts on future deep-space exploration missions, with a few interstitial slides on the history of shaving in spaceflight. Technical problems spared the attendees my full presentation, but luckily the shaving part could be retrieved. Being a NASA scientist, I use PowerPoint for all my presentations. The figures in this article are most of the charts I used at the meet up. Their text reveals the maturation of my approach to this topic.

Second, and contrary to my wife’s expressed disbelief, there is actually at least 30 minutes’ worth of presentation material on the topic of shaving in spaceflight.

I was substituting for Neal Pellis who wasn’t available, but leaped at the excuse to explore this little appreciated aspect of everyday life in human spaceflight.

When I said “yes,” I already knew a few facts (remember: I'm a space geek): the first in-flight shaving was done on Apollo 10; Frank Borman requested an electric razor be waiting for him on the recovery helicopter after Apollo 8; some of the Skylab astronauts grew bushy beards while in orbit. But I had about three weeks to do some more research, so the first thing I did was contact some astronauts I know and ask them about wet shaving in flight. They responded almost apologetically that they used the electric shaver but without the vacuum attachment that featured in early designs. Instead, they just shaved near the inlet of the air conditioning system and let the spacecraft’s filters catch their whiskers.

If you are old like me, you remember the bearded faces of pioneering astronauts, beaming but exhausted, on the aircraft carrier after splashdown. In particular, the men on NASA’s second, third and fourth Gemini missions in 1965 extended our experience base of manned spaceflight stepwise to four, then eight and finally 14 days (figures 1), demonstrating that astronauts could come through the planned duration of the upcoming Apollo lunar landing missions with no debilitating physical effects. (The longest of seven previous American flights was 34 hours and the average was just under eight and a half hours.) Their beards confirmed what we already understood: that they had returned from the frontier, at no small risk to their lives and health, and had pushed back the boundary of the unknown just a little bit farther in man’s conquest of space, and in particular, America’s race to beat the Soviet Union to the moon.