Eating, sweating, shedding, peeing, shitting, barfing, farting - the entire budget of the space program appears to be spent dealing with human bodily functions in a place where they have the potential to really screw things up. “To a rocket scientist,” she begins, “you are a problem,” and the rest of the book bears her out. Instead, Roach focuses on the enormous amounts of research and development that go into sustaining human life off Earth. She’s not even really interested in what’s out there. Roach is not out to write a history of the space race, or a philosophical disquisition on off-world exploration. If all those questions seem a little earthbound, that’s the point. The book answers the questions the world’s four-year-olds have about space flight - what do astronauts eat? how do astronauts pee? - and some that they probably haven’t thought of yet: Can you get it on in zero gravity? How exactly do you die if your spacecraft breaks up at thirty-four hundred miles an hour? Does orbit make a man’s penis look bigger? What’s it like to view your own anus through a closed-circuit toilet-cam? (Actually, they may have thought of that last one, but unlike NASA, they don’t have the technology to answer it.)

LIKE HER PREVIOUS BOOKS exploring cadavers, coitus, and the afterlife, Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars offers lots of taboo-busting fun, this time on the subject of space travel.

Packing for mars book