Packing for Mars

It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking.

Packing for Mars is a deep dive on the minutia of what has been considered for space travel. I feel that current technologies and processes can be taken for granted but the effort to take it from a whiteboard to space offers a challenge at every turn.

I once read an Air Force technical report that lists the desired attributes of edible paper: "Tasteless, flexible, and tenacious."

How do you test the first zero gravity toilet? How do you fit the flagpole in the moon lander on the Apollo 11 mission?

Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much normalcy can people forgo? For how long, and what does it do to them?

Packing for Mars was an easy read that allowed me to casually drop in and out of the story. Mary Roach has an inquisitive mind and I appreciated the amount of research and depth she went into for these topics.

"That's what we do for a living. We don't fly in space for a living. We have meetings, plan, prepare, train. I've been an astronaut for six years, and I've been in space for eight days."

I took a week to write this review so am a little light on comments.

If you got a copy of this book by reading the title and neglecting to read beyond that, you may not be in for what you expect. Mars specifics are not really spoken of at all. This book is an investigation into the more mundane but necessary requirements of human space flights lasting longer than a brief jaunt around the world and back. How long can a human stay in the same clothing without turning into a fungus, what's the best way to take a dump, is it possible to then eat those feces to save on launch weight? These kind of questions.

In general, this is a great foray into some of the more eyebrow raising aspects of the early to present-day design and engineering of space bound systems, including eye witness testimonies and interesting quips from historical transcripts that idiosyncratically brings some of the heroes of the Apollo and earlier eras, back down to earth.

This is my first introduction to Roach's writing and I can't say I liked it all. Indeed, I think that a great deal of the content here is unique and interesting. It's just that it's peppered throughout the rest of this muck. Much of the baseline of the book is humble-bragging, name dropping and elaborations on just how hard the hardest job in the world is (i.e. journalism).

Let me explain my position a bit here. Roach likes to get into her topic viscerally. So a ride on a parabolic flight in an attempt to greater appreciate weightlessness is really a great step for a non-astronaut to take. Mix that with a forced attempt at constant humor to keep a reader engaged and it comes out shallow. Meeting and interviewing some of the greats from space history is an excellent thing to do for a work like this. I'm impressed by the meeting with Felix Baumgartner and the insights there - this was before his stratos jump. I'm less impressed by some non-sequitur about the ride with Tom Cruise in his convertible. It's difficult to hear about peoples heads turning to a jelly-like mass due to excessive centripetal forces, or brains detaching from the spinal cord, then drudging through an expose about the grueling ordeal that is people not responding to emails or having to deal with antisocial archive clerks.

Mary Roach's books are just like her TED talk. They're smart, funny and charm you with a total affection for her subject matter.

I've read all her books and so far Packing for Mars is the best. She is writing about the insane goal of shipping a few bubbling meat bags through an irradiated vacuum for 500 days so that we can visit a lifeless planet.

She covers it all from a people perspective, looking at the glorious business of being a person. How do we handle the boredom, the food, the farting? She covers the serious problems with poop, pee, vomit and also sex. The book is worth reading for the chapter on Space Hygiene alone. It's called "Houston We Have a Fungus".

Near the end, a final quote from Ben Franklin, on someone who sees the Montgolfiers' maiden balloon flight and calls it frivolous:
What use is a newborn baby?

This was the year of Mary Roach for me: I had always been hesitant about her books - Bonk seemed to flippant, Stiff irreverant and she was altogether too popular - always a sign that a pop science author doesn't know what she or he is talking about.

So I picked up Packing for Mars because one of my friends was insistent that Mary Roach was actually a great author, and by the title it seemed the least likely to offend, and, to be perfectly honest, there needs to be a new law of physics to describe the force that over time pulls me in to any book on astronomy.

To say I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement. Roach is clearly a scientific writer, rather than a scientist, which is a niche in need of more authors: she writes with a fluidity that is lacking in some popular science books written by scientists, but more than that, she functions in this odd way as an audience surrogate - bringing with her the curiosity (sometimes scatological) of her readers and commenting along the way about her anticipation for meetings, her rationale for her questions and a description of how she finds out the information that she shares. It is a unique authorial voice and one that I enjoyed thoroughly.
The content itself is a complete exploration into the NASA space program - short on hoopla and long on (sometimes scatological) details. Roach is complete, explaining, for instance, every type of food tried, the nutritional assessments, texture and composition of astronaut food, followed up by how it is actually eaten, including concerns about the ability to swallow in space, and which were substantiated and which were not.

Yes, she is a little long on the scatology, but I think that bothers me more than it does the average reader. And while there is a heavy dose of humor, it is mostly witty and tongue-in-cheek, more than gross-out humor. I've been converted: Long live Mary Roach!

1) ''To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with.''

2) ''It's hard to say why I find Devon Island beautiful. But there are these moments when you're tromping along, head lowered against the wind, and your eye lands on a hump of moss with tiny red flowers like cupcake sprinkles, and you're just walloped by the sight. Maybe it's the unlikely heroics of something so delicate surviving in a place so stingy and hard. Maybe it's just the surprise of color.''

3) ''I was looking at the Columbia patch. The seven crew members' last names were stitched around the perimeter: MCCOOL RAMON ANDERSON HUSBAND BROWN CLARK CHAWLA. Clark. Something clicked in my head. When I had first arrived on Devon Island, I'd heard that the spouse of one of the Columbia astronauts would be here. Laurel Clark was Jon Clark's wife, I now realized. I didn't know whether to say something, or what that something would or should be. The moment passed, and Clark kept talking.''

4) '''The test of a good friend was to hand the bag to your crewmate and have him get that germicide completely mushed in with the fecal material,' Gemini and Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell told me. 'I'd go, 'Here, Frank, I'm busy.''''