Author: Mary Roach

Title: Packing for Mars

Publisher: Norton

I can describe Packing for Mars in three words, Too Much Information. It's fun (for a while), interesting (mostly), and informative (boy howdy, is it), but while I consider myself a curious person, enough is enough. In the case of Packing for Mars, I reached "enough" about halfway through the sixteen meticulously researched chapters it contains.

Here's the general idea:  who knows if NASA will ever actually send a manned mission to Mars? But it could happen, and a visit to the red planet is not exactly your average road trip. There's a lot of planning and practice that needs to take place before shipping people that far for that long. Who knew you could preview space without ever leaving the home planet?

This is NOT a book for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. There's an entire chapter devoted to vomit, plus much discussion about research on cadavers and the story of a space chimp with a propensity to . . . well, this is a family site, and the story turned out to be a rumor anyway, so we'll leave that one well enough alone.

Author Mary Roach writes with the casual, conversational tone of a good dinner companion. She manages to take literal rocket science and make it both understandable and interesting to ordinary mortals. Yes, I am insanely jealous that she got to experience weightlessness as part of her research. However, while due diligence in the name of research may have required her to watch a certain "adult" film that was supposedly filmed in zero gravity, I could have happily lived out my days without learning the specifics of how she could tell that it wasn't. I feel grubby just thinking about it.

Fortunately, not all of it was that disgusting. Generally speaking, my favorite parts of Packing for Mars are the footnotes. No, really! There are a lot of footnotes, they tend to be lengthy, and that's where most of the really interesting stuff seems to have ended up. Roach talked to a lot of astronauts, met with an impressive number of scientists, and appears to have been granted unprecedented access to NASA research projects. She paints a vivid picture of life in space in all its dirty, mildly disgusting, glory.

The sheer number of factors that have to be taken into account just to go into orbit, let alone all the way to Mars, is mindboggling. The fact that people are actually methodically dealing with all those factors is amazing. The knowledge that I don't personally need to be "Packing for Mars" any time soon . . . priceless.

** This review first published on September 24, 2010.