Ms. Roach's quirky insight have served her well in the past. I found Stiff particularly delightful in its exploration of the various uses society has for the human cadaver. Consequently, I'm disappointed to report that Packing For Mars, an investigation into the nitty-gritty of human space travel, is disappointingly trivial and, at times, even surprisingly puerile.
If the human race is not to become extinct, we will eventually have to travel to other planets. Short of discovering some Star-Trek-like piece of technology which can replenish the Earth of all its finite resources, we will plunder Earth's reserves of metals and oils until there is nothing left to consume. Fortunately for us, there are other planets in the Solar System which have abundant resources we can put to our use, but it's the getting there to retrieve them that's slightly tricky. Enter Ms. Roach who has focused her inquisitive mind upon NASA and its efforts to work out some of the basic problems of interstellar travel. But Ms. Roach isn't so much interested in phasers and photon torpedos. She wants to know about the real challenges that never seem to make it into Star Wars. How will astronauts go to the bathroom? How will they not shrivel up into pretzels from lack of gravity? How do we solve for that pesky vertigo thing anyway? These and other basic questions dominate Packing For Mars which is, at root, an inquest into the plumming of space travel.
To the extent that Ms. Roach has investigated and publicized an under-represented aspect of space travel, her book is a success. It educates us on many of the problems future astronauts will have to face, particularly those which present in a weightless environment. And yet there's something juvenile about the pleasure Ms. Roach takes in all the shit and the vomit. The former, apparently, have been known to escape their containers to float around the cabins of spacecraft in zero-G, while the latter can spill around the inside of a spacesuit helmet if not properly dealt with.
Really? Space travel has to be reduced to this? I understand and respect Ms. Roach's attempt to speak to the real science of space travel, but she has over-shot realism and wound up in the gutter. I'm always up for a realistic discussion of the challenges of journeying to the stars, but maybe just a bit less puke next time.(2/5 Stars)
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