By Mary Roach. A Review by Armando Linares. There are quite a bit of hoops to
jump through in order to safely propel a human being from the safety of our ...
Packing for Mars By Mary Roach A Review by Armando Linares
There are quite a bit of hoops to jump through in order to safely propel a human being from the safety of our gravity infused atmosphere in to the orbit of even our closest neighbor, the moon. In “Packing for Mars” by Mary Roach, the reader is encouraged to jump through these hoops along with NASA’s finest. Whether it be the psychological implications of zero-gravity isolation, motion sickness, the ability to bathe, or even sex in space, Mrs. Roach approaches each topic with enthusiasm and the gumption to explore them to their fullest necessity. Mary Roach has had a good track record for entertaining her audiences. In the book “Stiff”, she finds the sometimes frightening but often humorous side of cadaver storage and usage. She does find a place in “Packing for Mars” to remind her audience that she has indeed written other books in the chapter titled, “The Cadaver in the Space Capsule”. Her colorful description of NASA’s attempt to get information on capsule crashes made me laugh till my sides hurt. Despite all of the humorous stories, I often found that Roach was not always staying on topic. The first few chapters deal with the most important questions regarding a manned space mission to Mars. Will the astronauts be able to mentally deal with being in a sealed capsule for 6 months? How easy is it to curb depression in space? Are drugs really answers to these problems? Roach has done her homework, seemingly reviewing all of NASA’s data files on each of the subjects she approaches. But does motion sickness (discussed in Roach’s most elaborate chapter) really pose that big of a problem in the grand scheme of things? Perhaps, but to tell stories ad nauseam (pun intended) distracted me from the bigger picture. For example, Roach gives a possibly ingenious solution for Cosmic Shielding, joking that human feces (rich in the hydrocarbons needed for proper radiation shielding) could solve NASA’s long term radiation exposure problem. Yet she does not elaborate on this topic. Roach’s 50 billion dollar manned space mission has its merits, but as a reader, the title of her book implied to me that she’d be discussing this multi-billion dollar mission in full, and she only dedicates a few chapters to this topic. It’s unfortunate that such an entertaining writer did not necessarily grab her readers early on in her book. Starting with the proposed space mission and elaborating on it within the subsequent chapters could have pulled me in and really made all these stories blend together, allowing for a more complete read. Despite these continuity issues, Mary Roach has cemented herself as an entertaining storyteller, brave journalist, and a no-topics-barred writer. She’s not afraid to ask the burning questions, and for that, it was an unexpected pleasure to read “Packing for Mars”.
