When work leads to new discoveries, it’s a cool thing. Been reading Mary Roach’s “Packing for Mars,” laughing and marveling quite a lot at the promised curiosities of the cosmonaut accounts, the monkeys, and the US efforts during Gemini and Apollo missions to maintain the astronauts’ sanity, waste products, and physical forms in space. Yesterday evening, I also attended the talk at NASA with Pascal Lee and Mary Roach. The talk focused more on the logistics and general feasibility of going to Mars, the next unexplored frontier, with Dr. Lee providing images from the humvee research conducted in the Artic by the Mars Institute that may help us plan for Martian terrain. Ms. Roach also had opportunity to insert a few anecdotes, like one about the sanitized pee water available at the NASA Ames cafeteria, from her book.

So, yay on Mars? Guess that depends on a lot: resources, the commitment and mental stability of selected travelers, and whether either the government or private companies will assume the risk for sending people out on an ultimately one-way trip, to name a few.