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

by Mary Roach

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.

Everything one takes for granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed—full-grown men and women toilet-trained, a chimpanzee dressed in a flight suit and

Vexillology is the study of flags, not the study of vexing things, but in this case, either would fit.

A telegenically inferior plan to use a boxed set of miniature flags of all nations was considered and rejected. The flag would fly.

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?

“To tell you the truth,” Tachibana says, “astronaut is a kind of college student.” He is given assignments. Decisions are made for him. Going into space is like attending a very small, very elite military boarding school. Instead

of sergeants and deans, there is space agency management.

and the way he blows out a pressure lamp or drops his boots on the floor or eats his food becomes a rasping annoyance.”

Venting your frustration at Mission Control personnel is a time-honored astronaut tradition, known in psychology circles as “displacement.”

An appendage like a gangplank protrudes from the front of it. Laveikin gets up to unlock a liquor cabinet and sets down a bottle of Grant’s whiskey and four crystal shot glasses on the plank. It’s a bar.

In Russia you can buy a desk with a built-in bar!

People can’t anticipate how much they’ll miss the natural

world until they are deprived of it.

Submarine captains dispense “periscope liberty”—a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines* and remind themselves

that the natural world still exists.

He believes a Mars crew should be made up of couples, to help ease the tension that builds during a long mission. According to Norbert Kraft, NASA has considered sending married couples into space. When they asked his opinion on the matter, he discouraged

told me he advocates sending nonmonogamous couples—straight and/or gay—to Mars.

It wasn’t until 1974 that the McMurdo Station winter-over personnel included women. One was a spinster biologist in her fifties who appears in photographs wearing a gold cross over her turtleneck. The other was a nun.

(As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.)

To get a very mild sense of what it’s like, climb a telephone pole (while wearing a safety harness), and then try to stand up on the flat, pie-sized top of the pole—as self-empowerment seminar attendees and phone company applicants are sometimes made to do. “Phone companies lose about a third of their trainees in the first few weeks,” says Oman.

When I went off to use the ladies room at the museum, an employee ran after me, waving a pink bloom of scrunched toilet paper, for there were no dispensers.

(John Charles says NASA has not embraced the “extraterrestrial codpiece,” or not yet anyway.)

“What use,” he replied, “is a newborn baby?”