Packing for Mars

Life beyond Earth means doing without nearly everything taken for granted at home, including breathable air, the pull of gravity, a long shower, crisp produce, a bit of solitude, and a cold drink. Mary Roach asks how far a person can be stripped of these comforts, what the body does after a year of bed rest, and whether intimacy is workable when nothing has weight. Her answers come without leaving the ground. She visits the mock-up toilets used in shuttle training and follows a crash test that hurls a NASA capsule-sized object at roughly 17,000 miles per hour.

The book is a close look at the practical and biological problems of living in orbit and on long voyages, written as a tour of the research that tackles them. Roach gathers material from engineers, physiologists and the astronauts who have to live with the solutions, and she brings a light, curious touch to subjects that are usually treated with great seriousness. Readers who enjoy popular science and want to know the unglamorous details behind space exploration will find much of interest here.