Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
This month, we’re looking at the stars, making this weeks book Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. So lets do this.
This book takes us through mans history in space, touching briefly from mans first flight….and I don’t mean the Wright Brothers, I mean the first hot air balloons that lifted mankind off the surface of the earth, through the space race of the 1960’s and into present day Nasa…present day as of 2010 when this book was published.
So the book starts with how astronauts are chosen…in Japan. Which is definitely different from how America chooses their astronauts. We look more for superman types….you know, truth, Justice, and the American Way.
But the Japanese…their astronauts are chosen from volunteers, who undergo rigorous analysis, under literally constant, camera surveillance as they work their way through the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s course of challenges, and EVERYTHING They do is analyzed and judged. Do they eat every bite of every meal? If they do not, what aren’t they eating? And why? How perfect are their origami cranes? That last one is literal…not a joke. One of the assigned tasks is to literally fold 1,000 origami cranes. This is not as random as you may think. What Japan’s psychiatrists are looking for is level consistency. They’re not necessarily timed on it, but they don’t have forever to make the cranes either. So is the last crane as well made as the first? This test is designed to see if the applicants can perform consistently under pressure and against a deadline.
Not just the cranes, applicants are judged on things they can’t necessarily control. Like snoring. Which makes sense. You’re going to be in extremely confined spaces, the International Space Station, for weeks or months on end, with literally no where to go if you get on each others nerves. And snoring…well, if you’ve ever slept next to a snorer….it makes one contemplate Very Dark Thoughts.
From how astronauts are selected, Roach delves into what it’s like being that isolated. She talks with the Russian Cosmonauts who beat America to Space in the 1960’s. And while neither Alexandr Laveiken nor Yuri Romanenko would say anything bad about each other now, and whatever happened on their mission is in the past and they embraced each other like brothers, Roach was able to see the shuttle on which and the extremely close quarters made it easy to see that tensions would explode, it no exactly why.
She explores isolation chambers, and how participants in the isolation chambers did not do well psychologically, many becoming violent. This is the real challenge of a trip to Mars. While it’s unlikely any space agency would send a single person to Mars, it would be an incredibly small group sent. This chapter actually made me realize just how prescient Robert Heinlein was, with Stranger in a Strange Land, when he talks about the failure of the Mars mission due to jealousy, infidelity, and murder. Man…the more I read and learn about the world, the more I peg Heinlein as one of those authors who had his finger on the pulse of humanity. If we would all just follow his lead…we could be living on the moon by 2050. Hopefully, we avoid the war.
She explores the various mental effects of finding yourself in space, from the euphoria of seeing nothing but blackness, to the very real but misleading sensation that you’re falling towards the earth when on a space walk. You are, in fact, falling…but parallel to the planet, not towards the planet. At some alarming speed, like 17,000 mph or something like that.
This book discusses very serious subject matter with a tongue in cheek sang froid…like when she’s talking about cosmonaut Leoniv having been given a suicide pill, in case he couldn’t make it back into the shuttle and his crewmate, Pavel Belyayev was forced to leave him floating in space forever. Roach says “Given that death from cyanide, the poison most commonly associated with suicide pills, is slower and more ghastly than death from having one’s oxygen supply cut off, there would have been little call for the pill. As brain cells die from oxygen starvation, euphoria sets in, and one last, grand erection.”
So yeah…painful death by cyanide…or blowing one last load in the stars. Pretty sure I know which ones most would pick.
She goes into great detail on what life is like without gravity, which explains A LOT about why NASA does the things they do. In space….it’s not just your hair that floats. Your internal organs also float. And don’t quite function the way you’re used to. Carbonated beverages…you won’t burp. You’ll regurgitate a sweet stream of cola. Because your organs are floating too. It’s not just that NASA spent millions developing a pen that would write in space. It’s that if graphite broke off a pencil, it could fly into an astronauts eye, causing a medical emergency. Ditto for breadcrumbs from a sandwich.
Pooping…oh yeah. They have to poop in a bag, and then mix in an enzymatic digester to break it down. Or the bag will expand with gases…and explode. Like a giant poop bomb in zero gravity.
Vomiting in your helmet could possibly be a death sentence, since gravity, or rather lack of it, ensures it does not fall down but rather hovers near your face, covering your mouth and getting in your eyes, effectively blinding you. Not just because you can’t see, but because the stomach acids can cause retinal damage.
Like gravity….most people don’t realize this how important gravity is to their dignity. I mean, most of us will fall victim to physics eventually, with gravity as the villain in the story, but gravity is what anchors your bladder where it is. Like in space, you don’t know you have to pee, until it’s already running down your leg. She transcribes flight logs from command center where someone, no idea who because no one ever owned it, pooped. Because without gravity, they were not aware they HAD to poop. Until a random turd floated by.
She discusses the use of animals in the early space program, how Russia used dogs because their lead researcher liked dogs, the US used monkeys…specifically chimpanzees. And the massive PR bomb the US dodged by making sure our chimps at least came back to earth. Maybe not all alive, but Russia dealt with some shit when they left the first dog launched into orbit…well, in orbit. As far as we know, she’s still up there. And yes Laika was a girl. Because girl dogs don’t have to life a leg to pee, and boy dogs kept peeing on the equipment. And FYI…when I was googling the dogs name to make sure I had the right one, google is staunchly maintaining the US launched the first animals into space….because we launched fruit flies first. I feel like bugs don’t count, but whatever.
They studied what happens when you don’t wash for two weeks. Because in space, you may not be ABLE to wash for two weeks. Which leads us down the rabbit hole of where most BO comes from (your armpits, groin, and feet). Almost everything else gets wiped off on your clothing.
She talks to a lot of people who perform a yeoman’s service for these studies, those who volunteer to not wash for the two weeks for science. Those who agree to stay in bed for three months so that NASA can study the effects of zero gravity. That may seem like a non-sequitur, but it actually isn’t. In space, there’s no gravity to push back against. And while practice in water is a good way to practice for a space walk, from a buoyancy perspective, laying in bed non-stop lets doctors study the effects of atrophy on muscular development. And pooping. Because of course they need to know this too.
She discusses how they get that practice, practice, practice to ensure that if or when something goes wrong, the astronauts know what to do about it. There’s an island in the far northern reaches of Canada, Devon Island, which shares several geological features with the Mars and is being used to practice Martian exploration.
And while a lot of the book is lighthearted, tongue in cheek, experimentation of sanitizing urine for ingestion, some of it is not nearly so fun. Like when she talks briefly about the Columbia disaster, and how exactly those astronauts died. Columbia is the sole topic of next weeks book, so I’m not going into it now, but it’s fucking gruesome.
This book was a lot of fun. It covers a lot of ground in a very relatable manner, imparting a lot of information, it covers how serious the tasks at hand are, as well as the incredible amount of general knowledge that has been contributed as a whole as a result of the space program. And as I was reading this book, as it wound down, I realized we’ve really only had four major space catastrophes in the nearly 70 years of NASA’s history, we’ve had remarkably few catastrophe’s, which speaks absolute volumes to the preparedness of NASA and how hard they work to ensure the safety of those they send up. To give you the perspective, in 67 years, we’ve had four notable catastrophes, which is an outstanding safety record by any metric. Apollo 1 fire in 1967 killed three, Apollo 13 oxygen tank explosion, no casualties, Challenger Disaster in 1986, no survivors, Columbia Disaster in 2003, no survivors.
It's the no survivors that really stands out. But it’s the repeated practice and preparation that allowed Apollo 13 to land safely in the end. And believe me, going over the safety record is not intended to down play the insane courage it takes to allow yourself to be launched into space. Because any given mission COULD experience that catastrophe, and astronaut is NOT a safe job. And given how much they are watched when on mission, and everything is recorded…including bowel movements, which are apparently cataloged in cold storage in Johnson Space Center in Houston...for who knows why….the job has a lot of indignities attached to it. And you still have to be a modern day hero to be willing to do it.
Review is up on YouTube and Rumble.
