Painting 31 is another mystery. It appears to show a pilot suffering a common indignity of spaceflight: space motion sickness. (One hopes its proximity to the food sequence is just coincidence.) Space motion sickness was unknown among American (but not Russian) astronauts until the early Apollo missions in the late 1960s, when crewmen had enough room to float freely inside their spacecraft, and thus to induce provocative motions and visual scenes. It would probably have been a serious problem on MOL missions, at least during the first few days as the men adapted to weightlessness. But during early 1968, when I assume these paintings were produced, space motion sickness was not a topic of discussion outside of the medical community, so perhaps #31 illustrates a different malady altogether -- food poisoning or even a sneeze.

Nonetheless, this picture is so at odds to the sanitized, larger-than-life images of astronauts in the popular mind that it might even have been done only as an inside joke.

Jacobe added details as suggested at by the company reviewer on the cover sheet (below) to the bump hat and the tunic. The suit details apparently were to add the color patches on the helmet (blue), torso (red) and right arm (orange), which are not present in earlier paintings and have no obvious functional purpose. The reviewer might also have commented on the precarious nature of the communication system, with the thin wires from the microphone connecting directly to some sort of module on the man's belt, in an arrangement sure to break from continuous use for a month or from the inevitable snagging.