Roach is much more enthralled by scientists' curious and curiouser efforts to replicate space conditions on Earth as they analyze every last quirk of the human body. That's about as serious as 'Packing for Mars' gets.

This group analyzed NASA's engineering efforts to plant a flag on the Moon despite an absence of flag-fluttering wind (no atmosphere), extreme heat (2,000-degrees Fahrenheit generated by the nearby descent engine) and a lack of flag-anchoring Moon topsoil. Vexillology is the scholarly study of flags.

Roach would have done anything to work the word vexillological into her reporting, and in this case it wasn't even a stretch. A stricture against astronauts' sharing 'undue preferential treatment' is NASA's way of banning sex in space.Īnd she cares about one-of-a-kind efforts like the one that the North American Vexillological Association studies in her book's first chapter. ('If you carry a bathroom scale to the top of Mount Everest,' she says, 'you may see that you actually weigh a tiny bit less, not counting the marbles you have obviously lost.') She also cares about the linguistic acrobatics used by space scientists when they address things they don't want to talk about. She's interested in borderline mental states too. Roach's main focus in 'Packing for Mars' is scatological. It would be only slightly unfair to say that Ms. Here's why: The topic of astronauts' bodily functions provides as good an excuse to ask rude questions as you'll find on this planet or any other. Yet her fluffily lightweight style is at its most substantial - and most hilarious - in the zero-gravity realm that 'Packing for Mars' explores. Each time, what has interested her most is the fringe material: exotic footnotes, smart one-liners, bizarre quasi-scientific phenomena. Roach has already written zealously nosy books about corpses ('Stiff'), copulation ('Bonk') and charlatans ('Spook').

From packing for mars