^{Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
Mary Roach
W. W. Norton & Company
334 pages
August 2, 2010}

    I was excited for Packing for Mars, Mary Roach's foray into the logistics of human space travel. I mean, really, “Packing for Mars”? Sign me up. I have a suitcase ready, just tell me what to bring and where to catch a flight.   
    I’m a Mars nerd, or at least that’s one of the kinds of nerd that I am. The idea of traveling to and maybe eventually colonizing Earth’s nearest, and most similar, planetary neighbor is one that has captivated me since my childhood introduction to the works of Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury.
    My souvenir “University of Mars” T-shirt, purchased from New York’s Hayden Planetarium, has long since ceased to fit. I have had full-color NASA photo landscapes of boulder-strewn red sand vistas tacked to my wall. Other than the the pink-hued sky and unnaturally close horizon, which make the image unmistakably and intriguingly alien, they look not unlike parts of the Utah desert that I think of as my own.
   When it comes to Mars and the prospect of travel thereto, I’ve done some reading. One of the best is The Case for Mars, by Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, an international organization dedicated to the proposition of sending humans to Mars. It is one of those books I frequently loan and repurchase with evangelical zeal. It talks heavy-lift boosters and escape velocities and resupply logistics in an accessible yet hefty way that makes a layperson like me feel satisfied in having a little more science behind my science fiction reading. He talks tech — engineering, which is obviously important to the notion of space travel.
    Roach has Zubrin in her bibliography, too, but she’s more interested in the human side of the problem. Packing for Mars opens with the line, “To the rocket scientist, you are a problem.” She goes on to catalogue the engineering problems posed by the human machine and its delicate maintenance. You know, all the extra fuel required to boost the food and various devices required to keep a soft human body alive inside a metal tube in the vast black nothing of outer space.
    She drinks booze with old cosmonauts while they lament the lack of vodka on the now-defunct Soviet space station, Mir. She touches on the hypothetical notion of losing an astronaut during a spacewalk and leaving the body to drift in a wholly dignified “burial at sea”. She discusses vomit and poop slightly more than your average ten-year-old boy.
    This approach is the book’s strength and its weakness. The idea of Mars is necessarily approached from oblique angles. As there is currently no official plan for a crewed mission to the Red Planet, by NASA or any other space agency, Roach ends up filling most of the book with relevant, yet frustratingly past-tense research into prolonged space travel in general, to, you know, somewhere. Or not really to anywhere at all, but simply the perpetual falling around the Earth by space shuttles and stations that has occupied humanity’s envoys to the void for nearly 40 years now.