So tonight it's Jon (not Stephen) who gets to talk about astronaut stuff. Perhaps coincidentally, he appeared on a panel with tonight's author at the Book Expo a bit ago. Columnist/Science popularist Mary Roach is promoting her latest, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. I think just reading the titles of her previous books gives enough background:
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005) (published in some markets as Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife), and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008)
Here's the publisher's description:
Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. How much can a person give up? How much weirdness can they take? What happens to you when you can't walk for a year? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk? Is it possible for the human body to survive a bailout at 4,000 miles per hour? To answer these questions, space agencies set up all manner of quizzical and startlingly bizarre space simulations -- making it possible to preview space without ever leaving Earth. From the space shuttle training toilet to a crash test of NASA's new space capsule (cadaver filling in for astronaut), Packing for Mars takes us on a surreally entertaining trip into the science of life in space and space on Earth
Of the handful of reviews I found (several posted but not linked on the booksite), this is my favorite:
"This completely awesome book's awesomeness is so awesomely awesome that it's difficult to get across just how awesome it is. It's a fun, intelligent, and engrossing read, something that a dude can get excited about. As a bonus, it considers sex in space, something I think only Kim Stanley Robinson and Barbarella have done...In reality, space stuff is smelly, hot, and gross. Roach insightfully researches and chronicles all sorts of topics, like what happens when you sneeze in a space suit or how NASA uses cadavers to test how crashes affect the body. Roach's greatest plus is how quickly she gets to the proverbial donkey punch on the varying experiments. For example, when NASA tested astronauts' ability to withstand a 20-day mission, they put men close together in a room with no bathing. They found that after about day eight, astronauts' noses sort of stopped working-it went beyond "smelly." Roach tells readers why: B.O. combines with "bodily emanations that have built up on the skin: grease, sweat, and scurf, to be specific." Scurf? It's shed skin. Nice!
Awesome. Not sure that's a word that needs to be in my vocabulary, though.
An excerpt (at NPR) begins by discussing the difficulties of 'flying' a flag in lunar gravity, passes through an Apollo-era hypothetical discussion of how to deal with an astronaut dying on a spacewalk ("cut him loose"), and ends with this:
Early in my research, I came across a moment — forty minutes into the eighty-eighth hour of Gemini VII — which, for me, sums up the astronaut experience and why it fascinates me. Astronaut Jim Lovell is telling Mission Control about an image he has captured on film — "a beautiful shot of a full Moon against the black sky and the strato formations of the clouds of the earth below," reads the mission transcript. After a momentary silence, Lovell's crewmate Frank Borman presses the talk button. "Borman's dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute."
Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, "What a sight to behold!" We don't know what he's referring to, but there's a good chance it's not the moon. According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.
Expect 12-yr-old humor.
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