Packing for Mars

[sawyl]

I'm a member of the post-space generation. Sure I had a paper craft model of the space shuttle and, thanks to my grandparents, a Brooke Bond Race into Space wall chart. But I wasn't into space. None of us were. Space wowed our parents; all we cared about were peeks and pokes and Z80 machine code. So I learnt a lot from Mary Roach's Packing for Mars, a short and very funny scoot through the psychological and technological challenges of manned space flight.

What I particularly enjoyed was the way that the book completely demolished my view of space as a clean, crisp, almost clinical environment. Instead I discovered that space makes almost everyone motion sick, that everyone is sweaty because showers don't work in space and that zero-g lavatories are miracles of engineering in their own right — as are NASA's lists of engineering euphemisms. So it seems that space isn't so much the spotlessness of the Enterprise as the claustrophobic squalor of the Nostalgia for Infinity.

What with the horrors of poor personal hygiene, the terrifying prospect of crashes, the tedium, the lack of autonomy, and the dreadful career path — someone at one point notes that they've been an astronaut for 15 years and only spent 8 days of that in space — I'm pretty sure I want to remain planet bound. But I think I'm now starting to understand why people still believe in the magic of manned space flight. Now, where did I put that wall chart...