Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: Oneworld Publications 2010
Price: £12.99
Isbn: 9781851687800

Mary Roach is an essayist in the Susan Orleans tradition, but perhaps more like Orleans’s dark twin. Her unerring taste for the offbeat and mordantly macabre found its purest outlet in her best-known book Stiff, which looks at what happens to corpses. (The person next to me on a plane back from the US asked me to put it away. I had been reading the chapter on air crash forensics.)

Here she concentrates not on space flight itself, but on what happens on the ground (the testing, the simulations and the preparations), all of which she approaches with an eye for the absurd.

Anyone who wants to be an astronaut should read this book first: glamorous it is not. They are no longer looking for gung-ho adventurers. Instead, psychologists will glean insights into your personality from photos of your used dinner plates. (She spent time at the Japanese Space Agency, where they do this and more, including making trainees fold lots of origami cranes).

She still has an eye for the gross detail and gleefully pursues it. She systematically hunted down the truth about Enos (“the Penis”), the second chimp in space, to find out whether he really spent his time in orbit wanking furiously. (He didn’t, nor did he do it in front of the press on his return.) She dwells on the joys of urine disposal and zero-gravity vomit. By the end, you know way more about bodily functions in unusual environments than you had ever thought you would want to, and some of the information will haunt your thoughts for days. She goes on a quest to find out whether anyone has actually had sex in space. Official agencies and ex-astronauts are tight-lipped, but it seems likely. In the end, she has to settle for a zero-gravity porn film, shot on a private jet in parabolic flight (Uranus Mission, featuring Silvia Saint, should you feel moved to explore it).

Roach sees the space race as one long vista of eccentricity, and she’s probably not far wrong. You have to be pretty strange to get through all the tests, and the requirements of such an extreme activity as going into space are going to look weird to the average person. And she’s certainly not the writer to play down the weirdness.

She can barely contain her excitement about Lisa Norwak, the astronaut who went spectacularly off the rails and drove across the States to kill a love rival wearing space nappies so she didn’t need bathroom breaks. Roach loves space nappies. She is also a joy when talking about horrors such as “fæcal popcorning” and the design of space toilets.

As well as all the grotesquery, she does get to some genuinely strange corners of the space business, finding facilities where volunteers are locked away for months on simulated Mars missions, or lie in bed for weeks to explore what happens to immobile bodies.

She also has an eye for the glorious weirdness that surrounds the space programmes. The Gravity Research Foundation was set up by multimillionaire Roger Babson to oppose gravity after his sister drowned, his reasoning being that without gravity to pull her down, she’d have been fine. And the immaculately sinister von Beckh, an Argentina-based ex-Nazi, had an interest in zero gravity research that involved doing bizarre things to turtles.

There are also the scary physiology experiments, which have involved people parachuting from the edge of space and rats being flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen while being spun on high velocity centrifuges in order to get an idea of what high gravity can do to internal organs. I get the impression Roach has sympathy for the animals in the space programme, particularly the chimps, who, for once, get the credit they deserve for their early contributions to space science.

Packing for Mars is delightful, one of those rare beasts: a successful humorous science book. It is also one that throws fascinating light on some of the more obscure corners of space travel. Never mind packing it for Mars: pack it for your next long haul flight and see if you can manage to freak your air-sick neighbour with one of the many amusing chapters on vomiting.