Book review: Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach

Published on Friday 10 September 2010 19:32

Oneworld, 312pp, £12.99

In conducting research into the physiology of astronauts in space, Mary Roach found out that one man on a Space Shuttle flight wore a sound monitor on his belly for the duration of his voyage. "Don't feel bad for him," she writes about that awkwardly wired astronaut in Packing for Mars. "Feel bad for the Air Force security guy assigned to listen to two weeks of bowel sounds to be sure no conversations including classified information had been inadvertently recorded."

Roach has already written zealously nosy books about corpses (Stiff), copulation (Bonk) and charlatans (Spook). Each time, what has interested her most is the fringe material: exotic footnotes, smart one-liners, bizarre quasi-scientific phenomena. Yet her fluffily lightweight style is at its most substantial – and hilarious – in the zero-gravity realm that Packing for Mars explores. 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.

She also cares about the linguistic acrobatics used by space scientists when they address things they don't want to talk about. A stricture against astronauts' sharing "undue preferential treatment" is Nasa's way of banning sex in space.

And she cares about one-of-a-kind efforts like the one that the North American Vexillological Association studies in her book's first chapter. Obviously Roach would have done anything to work the word "vexillological" into her reporting, and in this case it wasn't even a stretch. Vexillology is the scholarly study of flags. This group analysed Nasa's engineering efforts to plant a flag on the Moon despite an absence of flag-fluttering wind (no atmosphere), extreme heat (2,000F generated by the nearby descent engine) and a lack of flag- anchoring Moon topsoil.

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

Here's a book that will tell you exactly how bad a stuffy space capsule can smell ("different from the fresh ocean breezes outside," the astronaut Jim Lovell tells her) and what happens when astronauts can't bathe for long periods of time. In a book full of smooth segues and clever chapter headings, this section is called "Houston, We Have a Fungus."

The chapter entitled "The Horizontal Stuff" is devoted to human guinea pigs who spend months in bed so that the deterioration of immobilised bodies can be studied. One such "terranaut" tells Roach that he loves the meals he's given, particularly the jam. And "One Furry Step for Mankind" talks about the chimps who are sent into space. Because Roach shares every last aspect of her adventures, she describes being sent to what she calls a "PCLP," or Person in Charge of Lying to the Press, when seeking chimp-in-space information. On the grave of Ham, designated the "World's First Astrochimp," she finds both a basket of flowers and a plastic banana.

Good story. But that's not what Roach's readers will be chuckling about. The wildest parts of her book involve various forms of human egesta, which is one of her favourite new words (another is "steatorrhea"). Suffice it to say that for every measurable aspect of human digestion there is a scientist to quantify it, sometimes with a name like Nevin S Scrimshaw (the benefits of a liquid formula diet) or Kanapathipillai Wignarajah, called Wiggy (human faecal simulants). Some research devoted to astronauts is not as different from commercial nappy testing as you would think.

As Roach has shown in earlier books she is completely embarrassment-proof. There is no biological situation she will not visualise, no anatomical question she will not ask. So Packing for Mars is as startling as it is funny, even if its strategic aim is to tell you more than you need to know.

As ever, Roach finds her best material in unexpected places. When she experiences zero gravity on a McDonnell Douglas C-9 military transport jet (Nasa's preferred phrase is the Weightless Wonder but it's better known as the Vomit Comet), she comes back with notes that say "WOO" and "yippee".

When she rises off the floor and floats, she thinks, "It's like the Rapture in here every 30 seconds". Then she stows away these memories until, later in the book, she considers the implications of zero gravity for porn films.

It takes someone with Roach's dedication to look at one star in what's supposed to be space and realise that the actress is faking it. This isn't zero gravity. "Her ponytail is hanging down her back," Roach writes, "and other things are hanging down her front."