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

by Mary Roach

moon. According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.

Pilot astronauts are the ones at the controls. Mission specialist astronauts carry out the science experiments, make the repairs, launch the satellites.

Volunteering for a simulated mission is a way to show the space agencies you’ve got at least some of what it takes: A willingness to adapt to a situation, rather than trying to change it. Tolerance for confinement and stripped-down living conditions. Emotional stability. An accommodating family.

Admiral Richard Byrd preferred to carry out his winter-long weather observations in Antarctica by himself, in perilous conditions and twenty-four-hour darkness, rather than face, as he put it in Alone, the moment when “one has nothing left to reveal to the other, when even his unformed thoughts can be anticipated, his pet ideas become a meaningless drool, and the way he blows out a pressure lamp or drops his boots on the floor or eats his food becomes a rasping annoyance.”

Irrational antagonism