Quoting the astronaut Jim Lovell, Roach exposes NASA’s untold sanitation woes. They are a potent combination of scopolamine (an anti-emetic sedative) and dextroamphetamine (a stimulant). The heroin imagery, I suspect, has as much to do with the motion-sickness meds as with the microgravity. “Weightlessness is like heroin, or how I imagine heroin must be.” “It’s like the Rapture in here every 30 seconds,” Roach declares. Violently ill, they have had to be belted into their seats. Other passengers - NASA regulars call them “kills” - are not so fortunate. But over the parabola’s crest and during the half-minute journey downward, fliers “rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave.” Having taken Scop-Dex, NASA’s anti-motion-sickness drug, Roach is euphoric. Its cabin is padded, and on its upward path, passengers are pressed against the floor with a force of roughly twice their body weight. In a wry account, Roach herself braves motion sickness on NASA’s “Vomit Comet,” a C-9 transport plane modified to fly in parabolas - the only means of experiencing weightlessness outside of orbit. With an unflinching eye for repellent details, she launches readers into the thick of spaceflight’s grossest engineering challenges: disposing of human waste, controlling body odor without washing, and containing nausea - or, if containment fails, surviving a spacewalk with a helmet full of perilously acidic upchuck. Soon, however, Roach has left all decorum behind. In Japan, psychologists evaluate astronaut candidates by, among other things, their ability to fold origami cranes swiftly under stress. Roach eases us into the story, with an anecdote that reveals the cultural differences among spacefaring nations. Anyone who thinks astronauts ply a glamorous trade would do well to read Mary Roach’s “Packing for Mars.” The book is an often hilarious, sometimes queasy-making catalog of the strange stuff devised to permit people to survive in an environment for which their bodies are stupendously unsuited.

Packing for mars book