Rick B. (bup) - , reviewed on 8/8/2011 + 165 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 3

A better title for this book might have been "Gross Stuff in Zero Gravity."

I love Mary Roach's approach to friendly science subjects - it's blunt, humorous, and in-your-face while somehow avoiding prurient appeal. Learning about corpses and sex with Ms. Roach was just great.

But this book was all about the scatological. What did I learn about going to Mars? People throw up in zero gravity. Going to the bathroom is problematic in zero gravity. Then a chapter ostensibly on food became a chapter on what sort of fecal matter that food produces. Then the possibility of recycling urine into drinking water.

Sure, these are real issues that will have to be understood and addressed, but so is, you know, having enough oxygen on the spacecraft, or growing crops on Mars or whether engineers will want to get astronauts to the moon first, collect supplies and stuff there, and then launch that to Mars, or just launch straight from earth, or send humanless rockets first that have robots to set up some sort of chamber that collects oxygen, or...

Anyway, the point is, besides talking about the space programs in the 60's and the continuing problems of human waste in space, there's a lot more that could be talked about. And wasn't.

Still, 4 stars. How can you go lower with Mary Roach?

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