You Came, You Saw, Now How Do Get Home

When I first read the title of the book “Packing for Mars”, I admit to being a little skeptical about how much I would enjoy reading the book. However, right from the first chapter I was hooked. I found it fascinating that the Japanese program used origami as a technique for testing the patience or their subjects. I received an origami craft kit for my birthday when I was a kid from an aunt who was working as a government contractor on an American Air Force base in Japan. I worked for weeks trying to read the instructions and construct the simplest origami design in the book. I eventually gave up. I cannot even imagine the patience it must take to know that you will have to complete 1,000 of them in the time span of a week. Once I read that first chapter, I found myself hooked and while it is hard to choose just one chapter that is my favorite I can narrow down the one that I found most interesting to chapter 13 “Withering Heights”. In this chapter, the author addresses the scary reality that once a mission is over you are faced with the daunting task of finding your way back to the Earth’s surface. When one aspires to be an astronaut I imagine they focus on the adrenaline of take-off, the joy in the idea of seeing the Earth from a great distance and the feeling of freedom you get from weightlessness, not on the scary idea of being hurdled back into the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed. While this scary reality of space travel is the focus of the chapter, the part that I found most amusing was the confessions of NASA that when civilians would stumble onto the test site outside of Roswell, the civilians would call them in as UFO sightings. So much for those conspiracy theorists. The government may be keeping secrets but maybe they are not of the extraterrestrial type just those of government testing gone awry.