Skip to main content

Packing for Mars – Mary Roach ****

The rating on this book is a real head versus heart thing. I went with my heart. If I’d listened to my head, I would have given it a lower rating, or even not reviewed it at all. Because Mary Roach’s book contains very little science – and actually surprisingly little technology too. If I can draw a parallel, to call this popular science is a bit like calling a travel book that happens to be about an area of great geological interest ‘popular science’. The ‘place’ Roach explores – space travel and astronauts – is indubitably very much about technology, but the book itself is really a travel/personal experiences book and for that reason sits rather oddly here.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book and that’s why it got four stars. It is mostly very enjoyable to read, with fascinating material from the NASA archive plus interviews with the people involved in spaceflight, both astronauts and on the ground. It just ignores much of the science and technology and concentrates on the people and their experiences. You will, however, find out about all the hazards of zero g. About eating and going to the toilet in space. About surviving (and not surviving) disasters and much more.
If I am honest, there were a couple of chapters I mostly skipped as they concentrated too much on medical issues and on ways people get broken by extreme conditions, which really didn’t interest me. But there is much to savour. Although vaguely aware of the difficulties, I really hadn’t thought about just how many problems there were with going to the loo in zero gravity – or how embarrassing many of the solutions are. And there’s some fascinating material on the apes who went into space just before the first American astronauts.
I’m not sure everyone will like Roach’s chatty and sometimes eyebrow raising tone, but I did. I was, however, a bit disappointed with the very shallow analysis of the costs and benefits of human spaceflight. I personally find the risk (and cost) hard to justify for the dubious benefits over unmanned flight, and I think she could have done more to defend her position that it’s all worthwhile.
There are also a number of dangling stories. For example, she teases us with the fact that in 2010 Felix Baumgartner was due to perform a freefall jump from space that, in part, would act as a test of whether it was possible to bail out of an ailing space capsule. As it happens the real story gets even stranger as the jump never happened because of a lawsuit from someone else claiming to own ‘certain rights to the project.’ I suppose the biggest dangling story is the ‘Will they, won’t they?’ for an expedition to Mars – that is certainly one that’s going to run and run.
Overall, then an often funny (particularly the footnotes – do read the footnotes), informative and entertaining venture into the experiences and minds of astronauts and those involved in the space industry. Just not a lot of popular science.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune )   underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about. Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography? Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on...
Post a Comment
Read more