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Speaker 1: And Amanda jam Nation. Someone's read a fantastic book called

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Speaker 1: Packing for Mars. It was by a woman called Mary Roach,

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Speaker 1: and she looked at the human side of what it

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Speaker 1: takes to get people into space, at the very beginnings

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Speaker 1: of space exploration, and the research and the tests that

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Speaker 1: were done on the ground before we ever sent and

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Speaker 1: men as though were it was only men in space

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Speaker 1: then in the sixties into space. I'll just read the

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Speaker 1: introduction to this book, or this is a review of

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Speaker 1: the book. Space is a world devoid of the things

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Speaker 1: we need to live and thrive air, gravity, hot showers,

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Speaker 1: fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways

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Speaker 1: an exploration of what it means to be human. How

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Speaker 1: much can a person give up? How much weirdness can

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Speaker 1: they take? What happens when you can't walk for a year,

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Speaker 1: when you can't have sex, when you can't smell flowers?

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Speaker 1: What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a spacewalk?

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Speaker 1: Is it possible for the human body to survive a

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Speaker 1: bailout at seventeen thousand miles per hour? To answer these questions,

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Speaker 1: space agencies set up all manner of quizzical and startlingly

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Speaker 1: bizarre spaced simulations. And the book is full of how

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Speaker 1: they went about that. And they're the other movies and

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Speaker 1: you just think, oh, they go up there and they

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Speaker 1: dig around and they come back. The research that went

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Speaker 1: into how we get people into space. We'd spent millions

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Speaker 1: of years evolving to live here and then we look

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Speaker 1: up there, and in just a few decades we go,

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Speaker 1: you know what, let's go there, Let's go there. But

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Speaker 1: what did it take to get us there? And this

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Speaker 1: book is full of all the small details the NASA

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Speaker 1: men and women who used weird toilet facilities, who had

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Speaker 1: strange spinning experiments, who weren't the astronauts, they were as

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Speaker 1: human beings who volunteered for these tests. And here's something

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Speaker 1: I don't know if this is in the book, but

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Speaker 1: I saw it. Yes. The other day a scientists was

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Speaker 1: talking about some of the quirkiness of the toilet stuff

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Speaker 1: that happened in those early studies. And during the set

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Speaker 1: this run up to the Apollo missions, the engineers had

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Speaker 1: to come up with a clever way to allow these

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Speaker 1: men to urinate in space. When you're wearing your basic suits,

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Speaker 1: you can't go to a urin all let's face it.

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Speaker 1: So they built a device a bit like a sock

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Speaker 1: that you'd wear, had a little I guess it's like

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Speaker 1: a little condom, a sock that had a tube coming

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Speaker 1: out of the end of it that would collect the

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Speaker 1: urine into a bag for you to deal with later.

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Speaker 1: And to make sure there was a leakproof fit for everybody,

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Speaker 1: NASA decided to produce three different sizes, small, medium, and large.

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Speaker 1: They gave the astronauts the choice of which one they wanted.

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Speaker 1: Nearly every single astronaut, as you can imagine, selected the

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Speaker 1: large small. Almost no one went for the small or

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Speaker 1: the medium. And because of this, once they got into space,

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Speaker 1: there was urine flying all over the place. We have

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Speaker 1: a big problem. So back down on Earth, NASA were thinking,

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Speaker 1: how are we going to fix this? What's what's a

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Speaker 1: way to look at it? And instead of changing the apparatus,

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Speaker 1: they used psychology, so they didn't fiddle with the design

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Speaker 1: or the device in any way. They re labeled them

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Speaker 1: from small, medium, and large to large, gigantic, and humongous,

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Speaker 1: and as it says here, just like that, the problem

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Speaker 1: went away, no problem at all. But a great book. Yeah, well,

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Speaker 1: the book it's brilliant. It's called Packing for Mars by

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Speaker 1: Mary Roach, and it's just even you know, the flag

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Speaker 1: that was flown on the Apollo was the first one,

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Speaker 1: the Apollo eleven. Yep, even that flag, the research it

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Speaker 1: took to attach a flag to the outside there's no

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Speaker 1: air up there, and they had to attach it to

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Speaker 1: the pole so it would look like it was floating

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Speaker 1: in a breeze, which is what's made people think, oh, conspiracy.

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Speaker 1: They weren't there, there's no breeze, and blah blah blah.

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Speaker 1: That was all designed. Every single moment of that was designed.

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Speaker 1: The maths behind it is inspirational. It really is packing

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Speaker 1: for Mars. One wonders, what about packing for Uranus. You've

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Speaker 1: overpacked large, humongous for Brendan