Book Review — Packing for Mars by Mary Roach

This morning, I finished Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. Mary Roach is an American author who specializes in the writing of popular science. The book was written in 2010.

Say you are an enthusiastic student who is curious about what the life of an astronaut is like and what it takes to keep them alive in space, Roach reads your thoughts and puts all the right questions to space experts. Roach strips away the glamor and valor attached to space travel to reveal the grittier, dirtier aspects of humans in space as it relates to the human body. Food, sex, personal hygiene, motion sickness, claustrophobia, physiological changes, and faeces are all covered. The book focuses on NASA missions and others taken by countries like Russia and Japan. But they will apply to missions undertaken by celebrity companies like SpaceX too.

oor instance, did you know that 90% of a typical mission on the International Space Station (ISS) is devoted to assembling, repairing, or maintaining the spacecraft itself? And that while in official glossies, astronauts wear spacesuits and hold their helmets on their laps, in reality, 1% of an astronaut’s career takes place in space, and 1% of that is done in a pressure suit?

Many people have made it their life’s goal to travel to space, but only a small…