Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

This is my third Mary Roach book, after Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. She writes about some interesting perspectives on science, especially about the personalities of the researchers, now choosing the topic of space travel. She gives her version of the history of the space program and the personalities involved, and her anecdotes are worth reading. Did you know about Rusty Schweickart who flew in Apollo 9 to specifically test the life-support backpack that the Apollo 11 crew would make in August 1969 when Armstrong landed on the moon, was so nauseated and vomited so much that the astronauts thought about just faking the experiments and tell Mission Control that it worked? They didn’t fake it, and after his return, Schweickart then embarked on extensive earthborn studies on nausea that benefited all subsequent space travelers, but he was never allowed back in space. She gave a most interesting account of the decision of what to do with a body if someone died during a spacewalk. The decision, just “cut him loose.” She writes, “All agreed: An attempt to recover the body could endanger other crew members’ lives. On a person who has experienced firsthand the not insignificant struggle of entering a space capsule in a pressured suit could so unequivocally utter those words.” The discussion of how they got to that decision was great. “In orbit, everything gets turned on its head. Shooting stars streak past below you, and the sun rises in the middle of the night.” She talked about the publicity that the monkeys, Ham and Enos, got before Shephard and Glenn went into space, and the fact that the humans were jealous of them. Ham got more publicity than “Enos the Penis” became Ham was a ham, and Enos was a dick. Glen “told a congressional audience about the humbling experience of having been asked by President Kennedy’s young daughter Caroline, while her father stood by, ‘Where’s the monkey?’” She wrote about the studies on human elimination, as in pooping and peeing – problems that I had not considered before. There are a number of stories about sex in space, but that material was minimal and not graphic enough. Mary Roach is clever, but despite the fact that the book is short, I found myself skimming, a lot. Although what she chronicles was important to the development of space flight, and while there were some great tidbits, I fairly quickly got to the point that enough was enough.