Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Talking With Mary Roach, Author of Packing for Mars

Episode Date: August 16, 2010

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Author Mary Roach packs for Mars this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. She has been called the most entertaining science writer in America. Mary Roach may also be the funniest. The author of Stiff, Spook and Bonk has now written Packing for Mars, a delightful and surprisingly informative book about how really, really hard it is to live in space. I think you'll have as much fun listening to our conversation as I did.

Bruce Betts will entertain us with a what's-up look at the night sky as he recaps a busy week in space history. And Emily Lakdawalla is just seconds away. Bill Nye the Science Guy is on vacation. He'll return with a new commentary next week. Emily, visual wonders abound in several of last week's blog entries. Let's start with some terrific images from Cassini and sort of a visual riddle that you post for people at first. It's a shot that looks like somebody firing phasers at Enceladus.

Yeah, you can see the edge of Enceladus' crescent. Then there's this weird streak of bright light. I like the phaser analogy. I was thinking a lightsaber myself. But what we're actually looking at is the barely sunlit limb of Saturn, where the spacecraft is practically behind the planet as seen from the sun. So you only see the tiniest crescent. And Saturn's so much bigger than Enceladus that you only see a tiny little sliver of its crescent sitting behind the moon. It's a pretty amazing shot. tiny little sliver of its crescent sitting behind the moon. It's a pretty amazing shot.

Followed by an animation, which is beautiful in itself, more of those plumes on Enceladus, but backlit. It's quite spectacular. But you also demonstrate a little bit of what you had to do to create the animation. Well, that's right. Making animations and mosaics and color views of all these pictures that come back from spacecraft has as much to do with art as it does with science. And especially with animations and a spacecraft like Cassini that's flying around as it's taking all the frames for an animation, you have to make choices about how you want to position the frames relative to each other. Do you want to line things up so that you're zooming in on one object at the center of the frame? Or do you want to let the camera seem to sweep by as it goes along? So you have subjective choices to make as you put together these kinds of animations.

There's a nice before and after, and much more to read about in this Cassini entry. Below that, a much smaller entry, but quite beautiful in itself. It's flying away from Mars's North Pole. Well, the color of Mars just makes it a very scenic place, and Mars Express has a great view on it. Right now, as it recedes from Mars, it's flying over the North Pole, and we see the sort of curly-hue canyons that go into the Martian permanent North Polar Cap that we can see in the summer. It's permanently lit now because it's somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, and it's just

very pretty, and I'm always happy to see these new pictures show up on the Mars Express website. And another example of the animations that you were'm always happy to see these new pictures show up on the Mars Express website. And another example of the animations that you were able to put together from these still images. No mean feat. By the way, George Lucas called. He wants to talk to you about industrial item magic. One more thing. You have an image from the Stardust website, which looks kind of like a board game.

It does, but it's actually a visual index to a database of all of the tiny little samples they've pulled out of the aerogel from the Stardust sample return capsule, which is really important because those samples have gone all over the world to hundreds of different scientists. And, you know, these scientists aren't all emailing each other to tell each other about their results. So this database is a new way for them to share all of the analyses that they've done on all these tiny little samples and really get even more science out of the incredibly tiny amount of matter that that spacecraft actually returned from Comet Belt 2. We'll put up a link to your blog entry about the Stardust Catalog and all the rest of this. You can find it at planetary.org and then just click on the show page or just above it, Emily's picture, where you can go directly to the Planetary Society blog. Emily is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing

editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Emily, thanks once again. Always a pleasure, Matt. Author Mary Roach has written Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook, Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Bonk, Her First Person Dive into Science and Sex. Now she examines human spaceflight from a viewpoint that will leave you both laughing and in awe of the challenges men and women face when they slip the surly bonds of Earth. Her investigations are not for the squeamish, but they sure are fun, awe of the challenges men and women face when they slip the surly bonds of Earth. Her investigations are not for the squeamish, but they sure are fun, and they end with a ringing endorsement of space travel, with all its indignities.

Mary sat down with me at Planetary Society headquarters to talk about Packing for Mars, the curious science of life in the void. Mary, thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Well, thanks for having me on. I knew when I saw you not long ago on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that we had to try and get you here, and we lucked out because you happen to be in Southern California on the book tour. But please tell me, you're not going to make me talk about space poop? I don't know if I can guarantee that.

Something comes over me, and it just comes out. All right. Oh, really? So to speak. I'll start with two aphorisms that I came up with reading the book. And the first one is, in space, there is no Pepsi generation. Absolutely. Yes, they tried very, very, very hard to have the carbonated beverages in space and, in fact fact made it work. Sadly, forgetting that the human body is also has to be considered and the human stomach does not deal well with the gas inside. Gas doesn't rise to the top. So the stomach, you know, can't get rid of the gas in there because it's down in the middle. Burping was a difficult thing. The line that Charles Borland,

who's the retired director of space food, basically said that the burps were often accompanied by a liquid spray. So you can imagine Coke and Pepsi, not very popular. How appetizing. Of course, you know, we used to do that in college on purpose or try to get our friends to. Here's the other one. Do floating people dream of sore feet? Yeah. Floating, this was the most amazing thing to me. Well, one thing that was amazing. I had so much fun during my little 20-second bursts of zero gravity. I was so surprised to learn that if you spend weeks and months in zero gravity, it becomes irritating. That you can't put anything down, that your arm's going to float away, you can't just get, you can't walk

across the room. That was incredible to me. I just thought, wow, how could you ever get tired of flying around? I envy you, many of your experiences that you had in putting this terrific book together. Extremely entertaining and highly recommended, by the way. But of course, the thing I envy you the most about is your ride on the vomit comet. And I just haven't pursued it. And I think part of that is I'm afraid I'll be one of that one in five, like that poor student. One of the kills, they put it. I got two kills. Yeah, yeah. No, you wouldn't be because they give you good drugs. You get very good drugs, which the astronauts don't want. Of course, they need to adapt. So they have to muscle through it

and get over the first few days of feeling yucky. But if you're just going up on the vomit comet, they would give you good drugs. You would have a blast. I heartily endorse it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to get around to it, and everybody should. Nausea rears its ugly head a number of times in the book. I mean, really, you kind of raise barfing to sort of a

tragic art, or maybe space did that for you. One of the interesting questions that you answered, and you answer many. I mean, your research is tremendous in the book, and it's kind of fun to trace how you learn things. For example, will I or will I not die if I barf in my helmet? This is a space urban myth. And you see it even in some of the astronauts' oral history transcripts. There's a belief that if you vomited in a suit. Well, I talked to Tom Chase over at Hamilton-Sunstrand. He's a suit engineer.

I got this long email back. We've carefully considered this. In fact, there's these channels of air coming down over the top of the forehead that would essentially blow the blow into the suit, which is disgusting but not life-threatening. Also, if you inhale your own hurl, you have a cough reflex. You would cough it up. It would be possibly painful because there's a lot of acid in it. Disgusting. Here again, not life-threatening.

The worst, the most life-threatening part, what I am told by this suit dude, is that you would be dealing with a visor splatter. Could potentially blind you, disorient you. And, you know, on a spacewalk, that would be bad news. Yeah. I would hate to be the poor guys who, when the shuttle returns, have to clean the spacesuits. Or worse yet, maybe the Apollo and Gemini guys. Oh, yeah, the Apollo and Gemini guys.

That was because you had no bathroom. A bag was your bathroom, and there were escapees, as they say. Jim Lovell has described it, not to me. He was very gentlemanly when I interviewed him. He described the smell of Gemini 7 when they came down, you know, when the frogmen opened it up. He said, it was different than the fresh ocean breezes outside. But elsewhere, I heard him describe it as two weeks in a latrine. Poor Jim Lovell and Frank Borman on Gemini 7. They come up several times during the book. Because of this ordeal that they had to go through, did you get the impression they had it

like the worst ever? It's hard to say because he was so kind of good natured and it was so long ago. I couldn't get him to rant about how awful the experience was. I just thought that the claustrophobic nature of it, and they had them in suits. Initially, they wanted them to be wearing the suits the entire two weeks to see if that could be done. They were concerned, you know, they don't want to take the suit off in case there's an emergency. They eventually allowed Lovell to take his suit off, and that's why his kid was all saying, Dad, orbited the Earth in his underwear. But they wouldn't let Frank Borman out, and finally, I mean, Frank was going to just lose it. So they finally, they were both eventually out of their suits for a short

period of time. Charles Berry, I interviewed, who was sort of involved in that, he said if they hadn't come out of their suits, I don't think they could have finished the flight. You couldn't even stretch your legs all the way out. It was so cramped. Plus, the hygiene issues, not being able to bathe and having to use the dreaded fecal bag. I don't know how they got through it.

I knew a poop would come up. See, sorry. Yeah. Have things really improved much? I mean, as you've talked to the astronauts who travel up to the ISS and of course on the shuttle, is it a better situation or do they still face a bewildering array of challenges? Oh, I think it's improved tremendously. Just, just, you just have so much more room for one thing. And you have a toilet. When it works. When it works, yes. And the contingency, when it doesn't, fecal bag.

Fecal bag. So you've got, yeah, I think it's not having been up there, hard to say. I think I can imagine that the schedule is just a killer. I mean, every part of the day, everything is planned. The pre-sleep phase will begin at 8.57. The sleep phase will begin, you know, to the minute. I mean, it's like a book tour. Everything.

That's pretty unbearable. You know, this is like almost a page-by-page theme in the book of how difficult, if not spaces, how difficult space agencies make it for people in space. And it comes up over and over. I mean, the psychologists alone giving you, you know, reason to be terrified that it may turn out there was no reason at all. Right. Well, yeah, that whole, I'm sure you've heard about Earth out of view phenomenon that psychologists have published papers about the whole idea that, you know,

when we go to Mars for the very first time, the astronauts won't be able to see the home planet. And will they just, will it blow their minds? Will they leave behind the moral structures of Earth, et cetera? And what will happen? They'll kill each other. And I talked, I read this description out loud to Krikalev, who's, I think his first name is Sergey, I forget his first name, in Star City. And,

and, you know, he's been up six or seven times. And he on the ISS, and he, he said, Yeah, well, that's a psychologist saying that and psychologists need to write papers. So he wasn't buying it. That was one of my favorite quotes, by the way. You know, my favorite picture in the book, and the pictures at the heads of the chapters are which are really fun. It's the one of my favorite quotes in the book, by the way. You know my favorite picture in the book? And the pictures at the heads of the chapters, which are really fun. It's the one of Gilligan from Gilligan's Island, looking absolutely deadpan serious. He's got a table radio around his neck and a jetpack. And it just seems so appropriate. Yeah, just staring straight ahead. It's a sort of funky looking

it almost looks like a walker upside down. Jetpack. Yeah, I love that. Finding the photos for the book is one of the most fun parts of it. More to come from Mary Roach, author of Packing for Mars. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages,

and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We are visiting with author Mary Roach, who has written an examination of life in the void, as she calls it. Packing for Mars is just the latest in a string of very entertaining science books from Mary. It traces her series of adventures that didn't take her into space, but got her just about every place else,

from the Devon Island Mars Analog Station in the Arctic to NASA's Zero-G airplane, known affectionately as the Vomit Comet. It is very well researched, and it is hilarious. You talk to so many astronauts and the people who have worked on making space livable for them to the degree that it can be, and it does seem like space is just like an endless demonstration of how poorly evolution prepared us to live up there. Oh, right. We evolved for life with gravity, air, nature, water. Yeah, it's kind of an insane pursuit, but it is for that reason so utterly fascinating. And so to me, know to look at the moon and think

we did it we've got people up there i i've just when it is just every little thing every step of the way everything has to be rethought redesigned trained simulated because nothing nothing works up there like it works down here including the human body and just the enormity of that challenge setting aside even the engineering challenges, it's pretty inspirational, even though it's kind of nuts. You know what I mean? Well, yeah. In fact, you finish the book with that after giving us this litany of torture and humiliation.

What else have I got here? Cramped, smelly living space, nausea, pain, bad food, boredom, danger. And yet you conclude we need to be up there. Well, it's like backpacking. Can't bring the comforts of home, restricted hygiene conditions. It's uncomfortable. You're, you know, you're physically uncomfortable, but you get where you're going and there's just nothing like it and it's worth it. And you don't really care that you can't change your underwear very often. And the food is sort of horrible. Who cares? Because it's an unbelievable place to be. So I'm a backpacker. I understand that. I could understand why astronauts don't care. The inconveniences

and all that, they just seem trivial, I think, compared to the thrill and awe of being up there. Even to the point where you apparently got the strong impression that there's no shortage of astronauts and others of us, maybe, who would make a one-way trip if that was the only way to go. Yes, I think that that's true. I can't give you a lot of... Bonnie Dunbar says that in the New Yorker. I think it was Jerome Grootman writing about the physical challenges, physiological challenges of a Mars mission.

And she says it. Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, told Putin not long ago that Mars was always the dream of the cosmonaut corps. And she said she's in her 70s now. She said, I'm ready to go. I would go now. I would go now. Because you're in your 70s.

If something you've dreamed of your whole life is an astronaut or a cosmonaut, I could imagine thinking if that's, like Bonnie Dunbar said, if that's the way I'm going to go, that's not a bad way. Yeah. We haven't talked enough about food. And then we have to get to the other subject of sex. And then I'll finish with those. Why was it that at least early in the space program, if not later on, so much of the cuisine was basically put together by veterinarians? Well, I'll tell you, because they had similar goals. With people who design pet food,

they have a couple of goals. Well, one is you want the food to be at least passably edible. But more than that, you want a low residue situation, meaning food that is not going to create a lot of trips to the fecal bag in the case of the early days of space. And the astronauts were initially not eating because it was so unpleasant to use the facility such as it was. So they were trying to come up with heavily processed foods, low fiber, like steak and eggs. There you go, steak and eggs, protein.

Very little leftovers to be egested is my new family euphemism. Yes, I do. That was why. And plus it had the further kind of repellent nature of because you don't want crumbs floating around, that it was coated with these kind of oily, waxy coatings that were extremely, apparently coated the roof of the mouth and the tongue. And those foods back in the Gemini Apollo era tended to fly into space and then fly back down.

All right. We finished with sex. My own limited research, I think people are not just curious about whether it's happened. I think most people want to think that it has already happened in space. I think that's the common view. I'm not so sure because, well, there are two missions that get all the gossip and the speculation. One is that Elena Kondakova and Valery Polyakov, and then here in the U.S., the couple who married on the sly before they went up.

And I talked to cosmonauts about the Russian couple, and it was pointed out to me that she was married to Valery Ryuman, who was another cosmonaut. So that would have been a tricky situation because they all knew the husband of Yelena Kondakova. Who knows? And he said he himself, this guy I'd interviewed, it was Alexander Levakin, he said, we would always ask him, so did you have sex? And he'd go, don't ask this question. So if he can't get it out of them, then I don't think anyone can. And I guess lots of policy and other reasons to avoid that kind of behavior.

I think for a shuttle, I think if it were going to be a pair of astronauts in the U.S., it would have to be their last mission because it would be. If they hadn't planned on it being their last mission, it surely would be because it's going to leak out. Don't you think? Who can keep that a secret? Human beings cannot keep a secret. And I think if you're an astronaut and you wanted to fly again, you wouldn't take that risk.

I think it would be a tremendous... I told my agent this story and he goes, yeah, might be worth it. Right. Could I get you to read the last paragraph? Oh, absolutely. I would be happy to. The nobility of the human spirit grows harder for me to believe in.

War, zealotry, greed, malls, narcissism. I see a backhanded nobility in excessive impractical outlays of cash prompted by nothing loftier than a species joining hands and saying, I bet we can do this. Yes, the money could be spent better on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered.

Let's squander some on Mars. Let's go out and play. Amen to that. Nicely done. Thank you so much for joining us. And for this terrific book. Thank you very much. Mary Roach has joined us at Planetary Society headquarters.

Her newest book is Packing for Mars, The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Thank you very much. Mary Roach has joined us at Planetary Society Headquarters. Her newest book is Packing for Mars, The Curious Science of Life in the Void. It's published by W.W. Norton. I can assure you that it's available everywhere. And if you enjoyed her previous books, Stiff, Spook, and Bonk, you got away from single-word titles with this. We just couldn't come up with a good one. Somebody said I should have called it Packing,

but then it would have sounded too NRA. No, I think it's perfect, and I love the cover of the fellow with his suitcase and the spacesuit. It's out there, as I said, highly recommended, and I think you guys listening to this show, you'll have an especially good time

reading Packing for Mars. And I hope you'll stick around and study the night sky with us as we visit once again with Bruce Betts for this the Skype Connection. He's the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. And as most of you know, he joins us every week for What's Up to tell us about the night sky and sometimes give stuff away. In fact, every time give stuff away. Hi, welcome back. Thanks. Good to be back. How are you doing, every time give stuff away. Hi, welcome back. Thanks. Good to be back. How you doing, man?

I'm good. I am also good. And when I say welcome back, I mean it because you were just in our nation's capital. I was. Is there music like that all the time there? Yes. What were you doing? I was attending NASA's Exploration near-Earth objects objectives workshop. That's a mouthful. Does that become some kind of nice acronym? Explore Now. Oh, see? God,

they're clever. People can read about it in the Planetary Society blog. It did. They were gathering people from all sorts of fields talking about where things are and where things should go and what objectives should be for human missions to near-Earth asteroids. I talked to him about involving the public in such things. Which they certainly should. Well, thank you for that. Tell us about the night sky. Involve the public. Okay, public.

Go out there in the evening, look to the west shortly after sunset, and you'll still see super bright Venus looking like a very bright star-like object. And just above it is Mars looking about one percent as bright and kind of reddish. And over to their right is Saturn, maybe looking a little yellowish, also a similar brightness to Mars. And then Jupiter on the other side of the sky should be coming up then or a little bit thereafter over in the east, looking like a bright star-like object. You can also look to the south and split the difference and check out Scorpius constellation. And the reddish star almost due south in the early evening is Antares.

By the way, I wanted to tell you that I actually went with my wife to a spot near Orange County, in Orange County, Silverado Canyon, nice and dark, reasonably clear skies, on the night of the Perseids, the big night. Didn't see one. Didn't see a single meteor. Maybe we came in too early. We were only out there until like 9 p.m. Well, it does get better later, but also you do know you have to look up, right? Oh, shoot! Did I have to take to look up, right? Oh, shoot! Did I have to take off my sunglasses, too?

Eh, would have helped. Would have helped. Well, other people did see them, and in fact, even now, there's still a somewhat increased meteor rate, although, you know, not for you. Apparently not. We move on to this week in space history. A lot of launches this week.

Pick out a couple of them. 1975, Viking 1 was launched on its way to Mars. Two years later on the same day this week, Voyager 2 was launched. 1977, heading off on its grand tour. And just a ton of other stuff launched. Also, 1976, Luna 24 returned soil samples from the moon. Mm-hmm. And we were talking about that just recently.

We move on to random space fact. You haven't just been assimilated or something. Okay, random space fact. Resistance is futile. No, resistance is never futile. But tell us the random space fact. I will. From former astronaut Tom Jones, planetary scientist kind of guy, was at this meeting, and I enjoyed this.

And so those on my Twitter feed, random space fact, have seen this, but I can't resist sharing it with everyone else. The surface area of Itokawa, the asteroid visited by the Hayabusa mission, is approximately equal to the surface area of Vatican City. The point being, even for a very small asteroid, as asteroids go, that we visited, there's still a lot for a human to explore if you send one out there. Don't know about the location of the Pope, though. The trivia contest, we asked you, what's the name of the star, which is really a three-star system, in Perseus known for its variable brightness? It becomes only 30% as bright on a roughly three-day period.

What is the name of that star, Matt? How did we do? A really interesting and very good response. And we got a very entertaining entry from our winner. He's a first-time winner, Anders Brolin. Anders Brolin in Sweden. Enskede? Enskede? Who said, and he was pretty funny with this,

the name of the stall, Lilliatlital system in Perseus, that is probably the most famous valuable stall. Anyway, it goes on. We're substituting a lot of L's for R's, is Al Gore. Al Gore. And he says it's like the name of the former American vice president, Al Gore. That's where it was going.

Very clever, Anders. And you didn't have to be that clever, but just the same, you've won yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt. We also, from our friend David Kaplan, regular listener, got this. I guess Algol is sometimes called the Demon Head, the Demon Star, or the Mischief Maker. David said it's probably appropriate that Bruce picked out Mischief Maker as his trivia question. Thanks for focusing on the Mischief Maker part instead of the Demon Star, I guess.

He doesn't know you as well as I do, I guess. Oh. Still, despite that comment, we're going to have another trivia contest, surprisingly enough. What was the asteroid Lutetia named for? Lutetia, of course, the asteroid visited recently

by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, the largest asteroid visited to date. But where did the name come from? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. You've got until the 23rd of August at 2 p.m. Pacific time for this chance to win a Planetary Radio t-shirt. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up in the night sky,

and use a mirror if you're looking for meteors as you look downwards. So think about mirrors. Thank you, and good night. That's my topsy-turvy world, as described by my friend Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. A visit to SETICON. That's next week on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up! Thank you.