This decidedly nonheroic observation comes during a chapter on motion sickness, or, more specifically, how astronauts from Gemini to the space shuttle have struggled to keep their cookies untossed, with decidedly mixed results.
It’s only one stop on Roach’s tour of zero-gravity bodily functions. Over the course of several frank chapters, Roach explores the nitty-gritty details of life in space that filmmakers and historians tend to gloss over: fetid underwear caused by weeks without bathing, condom-based urine collection devices, and a curious quirk of weightless solid-waste management known as “fecal popcorning.’’
Roach’s deep-space potty talk is supposed to highlight the more, shall we say, earthly challenges facing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other space agencies when planning a manned mission to Mars — a journey that would require astronauts to eat, sleep, and excrete for years at a time in a very confined space millions of miles from Earth. Such a mission, at least for now, is only a pipe dream.
“Mars has been off the official planning tables for a while,’’ Roach admits while drinking her own treated urine over lunch at NASA’s Ames research facility, “but it’s always at the back of the collective NASA mind.’’
Luckily for Roach, “Packing for Mars’’ works just fine as an offbeat chronicle of the hidden, unglamorous prep work that has gone into missions since the days of Alan Shepard and John Glenn. With no knowledge of how space travel would affect humans and machines, early NASA engineers resorted to some truly bizarre measures to test their life-support equipment on terra firma. Roach tells of volunteers crammed into simulated spacecraft for weeks at a time at an Air Force base in Ohio, and vagabonds pulled off the street to be used as real-life crash test dummies lest anyone at NASA suffer the indignity of using a dead body to do the job.
