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It's the Sound of Young America. I'm Jesse Thorne. My guest is Mary Roach. Her numerous best-selling books are scientific inquiries of a humorous nature.

Her first big seller was called Stiff. It was all about what happens after we die. Not up in the sky in heaven, but to our bodies right here on earth.

She recently wrote BONG about the science of doing it and her new book is called Packing for Mars, the curious science of life in the void.

It's about all the little questions that crop up when we think about what it would be like to travel to Mars or just be in space in general.

It's also super funny. Mary Roach, welcome to the Sound of Young America. Thank you.

So Mary, were you the kind of person who was into the idea of the romance of spaceflight before you started this or did you start for another reason?

I seem to be the only person. Well, I was 10 when we landed on the moon and I somehow never saw it. I didn't have any idea that it was going on.

I was kind of next door playing at the Bulge House or something. So I was never a romance of space type person.

I ended up over at NASA for a story years ago, the neutral buoyancy tank, that huge, huge swimming pool where they submerged pieces of the space station as though it were a shipwreck.

And they rehearse spacewalks. There's just a lot of things to geek out over. So that's where I first got kind of interested in this.

I imagine everyone there wearing horn room glasses and short sleeve dress shirts.

It's not far off. If you go on NASA TV, which I love, NASA TV is just the raw feed, and you look, they'll sometimes just have the camera trained on mission control, even though nothing's going on.

It's just a guy eating a sandwich or looking at his computer. And they are wearing the short sleeve dress shirt blue or white usually.

One of the things that I found interesting in your book was that it to some extent challenges this idea that we have of what an astronaut is.

And I think there's this character on the NBC show 30 Rock called astronaut Mike Dexter, who's the dream husband of the protagonist played by Tina Fey.

And his basic qualities are that he's handsome and American and an astronaut. And I think that we think of astronauts as just having those qualities.

Oh, yeah, yeah. What kind of person is an astronaut in actuality that buzz light ear thing that kind of that held all the way through Apollo.

That's really what they that's kind of what they were because they were looking for people who are, you know, these were guys are going doing really risky things.

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