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

by Mary Roach

“Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts…. Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.”

There was concern that wearing a spacesuit for two weeks in a space the size of the front seat of a VW Beetle might be unendurable.

These days there are no space showers. Astronauts wipe themselves with moistened towels and rinseless shampoo.

(The water in a hot tub is hot, but not hot enough to kill bacteria. An undertreated hot tub is essentially, quoting University of Arizona microbiologist Chuck Gerba, “E. coli soup.”)

Hibernating bears have high “bad” cholesterol levels. (They also have very high “good” cholesterol—which probably explains why heart disease is unknown in bears.)

Felix Baumgartner. This evening finds Baumgartner

Weinstein is also in charge of galley training—how to eat in space. His is a one-of-a-kind teaching position: taking the most skilled, credentialed, highest-achieving individuals in the world and putting them back in nursery school.

Apollo 10 mission transcript, starring Mission Commander Thomas Stafford, Lunar Module Pilot Gene Cernan, and Command Module Pilot John Young, orbiting the moon 200,000-plus miles from the nearest bathroom.

Animal protein and fat have the highest digestibility of any foods on Earth. The better the cut, the more thoroughly the meat is digested and absorbed—to the point where there’s almost nothing to egest (opposite of ingest). “For high-quality beef, pork, chicken, or fish, digestibility is about ninety percent,”

“Few foods,” writes Franz J. Ingelfinger, a panelist at the 1964 Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems, “are digested and assimilated as completely as a hard-boiled egg.”

(The Soviet space agency did not traditionally give cosmonauts steak and eggs before launch; it gave them a one-liter enema.)