![]() ![]() With her fourth book, “Packing for Mars,” she has turned her probing curiosity and wit to man’s quest to launch humans into space, and the massive physical, psychological and engineering challenges of a three-year Mars round-trip. In her books, Roach has tackled the odd worlds of sex research (“Bonk”), cadaver research (“Stiff”) and afterlife research (“Spook”). That reverence for vanguard human feats, and irreverence in the variety of feats she explores, has garnered Roach acclaim as a popular science writer with a waggish fascination for the human body. “He said, ‘I have to wear the hat saying I got sick in space. ![]() Schweickart was the first to admit getting sick in space, and he left the flight rotation to become a nauseous guinea pig for NASA researchers. “Throwing up and down in zero gravity,” is how she put it. Then she mentioned Schweickart - and his vomit. Oakland author Mary Roach was drawing howls in the next conference room, describing the perils of body odor, burping and other physical complications of close-quarters space flight. ![]() As he spoke, swells of laughter seeped through the wall. At a convention of space junkies in Santa Clara last weekend, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart was giving an earnest PowerPoint lecture on the threat of asteroid impacts on Earth. ![]()
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