Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (audiobook) by Mary Roach



Enjoyable - offbeat, funny, informative, thought-provoking

9 CDs
approximately 11 hours
Read by Sandra Burr


NASA Artist's conception of a Mars rover

The point of Mary Roach's Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void is not the technical challenges of sending an object to Mars. We have demonstrated that we can send a probe to Mars, operate it and do a bit of exploring.

No, this is about sending a human to Mars, a much more difficult proposition. Mary Roach deals with the following (and more) in her Packing for Mars:

-We eat, drink, and create bodily waste. How do we store enough food to make the trip to Mars?

-How do we deal with expelling bodily waste in a zero gravity environment (no toilets - everything would just float out!)

-What do we do with the waste? Can you recycle it back into food? Who would want to eat that?

 -Can people actually live together in cramped quarters for months at a time with no break and not kill one another?

-What will zero gravity do to the human body during this trip?

-Can people actually have sex in a zero gravity environment? What if a pregnancy results - what will the fetus be like if it is developed in zero gravity?

 -Zero gravity tends to create lots of nausea. How do we deal with it?
Mars, the red planet
-Can you propel yourself in space with flatulation? (sure, not a serious question, but now you want to know, don't you?)

 -Personal hygiene in space. How stinky will that capsule be?

-What about dust that comes from sloughed off skin and hair? It is just going to accumulate all over the capsule.

 -Can you bail out of a space capsule or shuttle if it has a bad take off or landing?
In this book you learn that the biggest challenge is, in Roach's words, "gravity and life without it." The 2nd issue, and it is a big one too, is size. The vehicle to Mars will be, by necessity, small. This means little storage, little elbow room and no place to go if nausea or escaping bodily waste become issues (her inclusion of the transcript of a space capsule conversation about free-floating "turds" is hilarious and serves to highlight that this has already been an issue that NASA has dealt with in the past).

 I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

 This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Packing for Mars.

 Reviewed on October 21, 2010.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

THE BOYS: A MEMOIR of HOLLYWOOD and FAMILY (audiobook) by Ron Howard and Clint Howard

Image
Highly Recommended. Published in 2021 by HarperAudio. Read by Ron Howard, Clint Howard, and Bryce Dallas Howard. Duration: 13 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Ron Howard and his brother Clint Howard practically grew up on America's television screens. Ron Howard starred in the  The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days for a combined 15 years of his early life. Ron has since gone on to become a prolific director. His credits include Cocoon , Willow , Cinderella Man , and Solo: A Star Wars Movie . His movies have won 9 Academy Awards. Clint Howard starred in the TV show Gentle Ben when was a little kid and has since gone on to become the quintessential model of a working actor. He has more than 200 acting credits, including the original Star Trek series, Austin Powers , The Waterboy , and a recurring role on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful . The Howard brothers are the sons of a working Hollywood actor named Rance Howard. Rance's credits look a lot like his son Clint'
Read more

GHOSTED: AN AMERICAN STORY (audiobook) by Nancy French

Image
Published by Zondervan in April of 2024. Read by the author, Nancy French. Duration: 9 hours, 56 minutes. Unabridged. My synopsis: Ghosted is an autobiography of Nancy French. Nancy French had a career as a Conservative political columnist and ghost-writing for people in Conservative circles. She helped Conservative politicians write opinion pieces, helped them come up with clever lines for radio and TV interviews, and even books. She worked with such Conservative stars as Sarah Palin and Ben Sasse. She even worked with the Romney campaign.  The book starts with her childhood in Kentucky, including an awful story of sexual abuse at the hands of a manipulative youth pastor and how that sent her life into a spiral into she met her future husband while she was in college. Nancy French is married to David French, a well-known Conservative political columnist, commentator, and attorney. He worked for two organizations that defended the rights of Christian groups and Conservatives on colleg
Read more

SAINT PETER: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
Published in 2021 by Hourly History. Hourly History has a series of short histories and biographies. As the name implies, they are designed to be read in about an hour. Some of the best offerings in this series are the biographies and this biography of Saint Peter was no exception. Saint Peter, of course, is one of the main figures in the New Testament, probably tied with Saint Paul for the second most important after Jesus himself. But, he's kind of a mystery in many ways because the references to Peter are scattered. This biography gathers together all of those scattered references and puts them in a narrative format so that it reads like a traditional biography. It takes care to note when stories are from the Bible and when they come from tradition (the description of how Peter was executed comes to mind.) The general outlines of Peter's life are laid out with only a token discussion of the implications of his theology, such as the decision to not require converts to Christ
Read more

MALAYAN CAMPAIGN: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
  Published by Hourly History in 2021. Hourly History writes short histories and biographies that take the average reader about an hour to read. Sometimes they try to explain too much in a short book (such as the Mayan Civilization, for example.) But, an hour is plenty of time to explain the basics of a military campaign that lasted 2 months and 8 days. When the Japanese Navy attacked the American naval forces at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941 it was actually part of a much larger, highly coordinated push against all Western forces in the Pacific and in East Asia. American forces were also attacked in the Philippines, for example. This push also included the British-held Malay Peninsula and Singapore that started on December 8. Britain had not provided much of a defense for this area, which was understandable considering the dire threat Britain itself faced from Nazi forces in Europe. The Japanese landed with a slightly smaller force than the British had, but the British w
Read more

THE WAITING (Ballard and Bosch book 6)(audiobook) by Michael Connelly

Image
Published in October of 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by Christine Lakin, Titus Welliver, and Madison Lintz. Duration: 10 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. LAPD Detective Harry Bosch first showed up in a novel in 1992. The Waiting is the 25th book in the series, but he has appeared in more than 30 books and short stories. Bosch is aging. He has aged right along with the series. He would be about 74 years old in this book and he is no longer the detective that goes out and finds the bad guys, but he does contribute from time to time. His protégé Renee Ballard is in charge of the cold case unit of LAPD.  Her unit is almost entirely made up of volunteers and they go through unsolved serious crimes and see if modern technology (like DNA comparison) can help to solve them. This book is mostly a Ballard novel, but Bosch does play a critical role in one of the three mysteries that are dealt with in this novel. I have a feeling that the "Bosch" in the Ballard and Bosch books
Read more

COST of MALICE by H. Mitchell Caldwell

Image
Published in 2024 by Nine Innings Press. Cost of Malice is the third novel featuring attorney Jake Clearwater. Jake is an on-again off-again law professor who is often tempted to trade the classroom for the courtroom.   Clearwater is offered a chance to sit on an informal council of leaders in the prosecutor's office. Cases that may be tough to win are brought to this council and they brainstorm possible strategies and determine if they are even worth the effort. The book deals with three of these cases.  Case one is a murder case in which the two primary witnesses are jailhouse snitches. Case two is a horrific child abuse case in which one spouse literally beat a child to death at the direction of the other spouse. Clearwater wants to convict them both equally despite the fact that one of them literally never laid a finger on the victim. Case three is a school shooting case modeled heavily on the Oxford, Michigan case that ended in April of 2024. It feels right that Clearwater g
Read more

A MAN CALLED OVE by Fredrik Backman

Image
Published by Dreamscape Media in 2014. Read by George Newbern. Duration: 9 hours, 9 minutes. Unabridged. Ove (pronounced ooo-vah) is a 59 year old grump in Sweden. His wife has passed away, he has no children, no pets and no job since he has been forced to retire. He keeps himself busy by keeping an eye on the neighborhood - he yells at the neighbor lady that lets her dog pee in front of his house, he yells at people who drive through the neighborhood (it has a parking area so that the entire area is pedestrian friendly), he yells at bureaucrats, bad drivers, hipsters, immigrants and...well, he just yells. Ove has determined that the best thing about his life left when his wife passed away. He was filling in that hole in his life, at least a bit, with his work. But, since his forced retirement, he has nothing. So, he is planning his suicide to join his wife. Then, a tough old homeless cat shows up. After that, a hipster father with an immigrant wife and two little girls moves in acr
Read more

COST of ARROGANCE (Jake Clearwater #1) by H. Mitchell Caldwell

Image
Published in October of 2021 by Nine Innings Press. Cost of Arrogance features Jake Clearwater who used to be a prosecutor. However, rough and tumble office politics encouraged him to take a job as a law professor. He is happy with his choice, but he decides to take on long shot death penalty appeal after being asked by an organization called Death Penalty Project. The argument in the appeal is that the man on death row is there because of an incompetent defense lawyer in the original trial. The trial was for the murder of a married couple.  The client knew that his lawyer was not doing a good job so he made a spectacle of himself - cursing, yelling and more in front of the jury. Considering that he had already served serious prison time in the past, the jury was only too happy to put this angry felon on death row - after all, if he's this crazy during the trail, it's not hard to imagine that he killed two people.  Clearwater successfully argues that the defense was incompeten
Read more

SUN MOON STAR by Kurt Vonnegut and Ivan Chermayeff

Image
  Highly Recommended Originally published in 1980. A mutual friend in publishing approached artist/graphic designer Ivan Chermayeff and author Kurt Vonnegut with a proposal. He wanted them to work together on a book. His proposal was that Chermayeff work up some illustrations and present them to Vonnegut and then Vonnegut would write a book based on those illustrations. Vonnegut, even then, was an internationally celebrated author. Chermayeff created many of the images Americans see every day - the corporate logos for such companies as Chase Bank, National Geographic, Scholastic Books, Univision, NBC, PBS, and more. Chermayeff presented Vonnegut with a series of simple, childlike paintings of the moon, star, and the sun. They came with no explanation. There is also a diagram of an eyeball. I do not know if that was part of Chermayeff's art or if Vonnegut added it, but I would imagine that Vonnegut added it. Vonnegut took the drawings and made Sun Moon Star , a beautiful children
Read more

Pete & Pickles by Berkeley Breathed

Image
Fantastic - and yes, I did read it to my children Published in 2007 by Philomel Books. Pete and Pickles is the story of a lonely, widower pig and an exuberant, outgoing elephant that escaped from a circus. According to the back flap, it was inspired from a drawing that Breathed's five-year old made in a restaurant. She drew an elephant hugging a pig in its trunk. Breathed asked why the elephant is holding the pig. "The pig's sad." "Why?" "Because he's lonely, Dad...But he doesn't know it," she whispered. Pete is indeed lonely. He misses his wife who has died. Pickles comes into his life unexpectedly and turns it all over and, in a way, saves it. Or, at least makes it worth living. I cannot imagine the adult that does not tear up at the end of this book (I've got no qualms with it - this 40 year old Republican darn near cried!). Berkeley Breathed On top of a great story you've got great pictures. The ar
Read more