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.