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While this book is crammed with fascinating facts and tidbits from the space program, it's also hysterically funny. The author goes into great detail and interviews involving all the designing, preparation, testing, rehearsing behind the most mundane and bizarre space equipment. She covers everything from space suits to space toilets and bizarre topics ranging from brainstem detachment due to high G forces, to the hysterically named "fecal decapitation".

Don't misunderstand, while the book is funny as hell, this is a very detailed explanation of all the bizarre research and testing that has to be done in order to certify equipment for space.

There are great excerpts from mission transcripts that you've never heard of before ("Houston, standby, there's a turd floating by me..."), and wonderful interviews with personnel and astronauts.

I've been listening to the audiobook, and the reader is a woman with a great dead-pan delivery. There was one section of the book where the author spends some time running down reports of an adult film reputedly featuring the first and only zero-G sex scene made in a plane performing hyperbolic flights to simulate weightlessness, and I was laughing like a hyena for 20 minutes.

http://www.amazon.com/Packing-Mars-Curi ... 10&sr=8-1\

“America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) returns to explore the irresistibly strange universe of life without gravity in this New York Times bestseller.

Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much can a person give up? How much weirdness can they take? What happens to you when you can’t walk for a year? have sex? smell flowers? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk? Is it possible for the human body to survive a bailout at 17,000 miles per hour? To answer these questions, space agencies set up all manner of quizzical and startlingly bizarre space simulations. As Mary Roach discovers, it’s possible to preview space without ever leaving Earth. From the space shuttle training toilet to a crash test of NASA’s new space capsule (cadaver filling in for astronaut), Roach takes us on a surreally entertaining trip into the science of life in space and space on Earth.

Oh I must check this out.

ok, FP, ~ based on what u've written, i have ordered this for hubby for christmas. here's hopin' he'll enjoy it : )

Finally listened to this recently & it was quite good. In fact, even my wife liked it & she's not normally into sciency stuff.