Mary Roach goes to Mars!

Well, ... of course, she did not go to the planet; it is her new book--the title is Packing for Mars!

With an unflinching eye for repellent details, she launches readers into the thick of spaceflight’s grossest engineering challenges: disposing of human waste, controlling body odor without washing, and containing nausea — or, if containment fails, surviving a spacewalk with a helmet full of perilously acidic ­upchuck.

In other words, everything gross, or absolutely intriguing, about space travel that you (at least I) wanted to know :)

Roach persuades a Russian astronaut to explain ground control’s reason for nixing his request for a blowup sex doll: “We would need to put it in your schedule for the day.” And a bone-loss-study participant, forced to lie in bed for three months to simulate the effect of weightlessness on his skeleton, divulges where and how study participants conduct their auto­erotic lives.

A blowup sex doll up in the space station?  Hilarious!