Get it out there...

From: Retronaut

"I have not entered a literary contest since I was 11, when I was utterly convinced my poem was going to win (it didn't). But I think I'm going to have to brush up by poetry skills after learning that Nasa is looking for haikus in the form of a 'message to Mars,' and will take the three best, on a DVD, on board its Maven spaceship, due to begin a mission in November to study the upper Martian atmosphere.  

     I have said before that I'm a little obsessed with Mars exploration and Martian literature – Kim Stanley Robinson, Ray Bradbury, Philip K Dick, Robert A Heinlein."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"NASA is inviting members of the public to submit their names and a personal message online for a DVD to be carried aboard a spacecraft that will study the Martian upper atmosphere.
     The DVD will be in NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which is scheduled for launch in November. The DVD is part of the mission's Going to Mars Campaign coordinated at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP).
     The DVD will carry every name submitted. The public also is encouraged to submit a message in the form of a three-line poem, or haiku. However, only three haikus will be selected. The deadline for all submissions is July 1. An online public vote to determine the top three messages to be placed on the DVD will begin July 15."
— NASA
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“The pie hole and the feed chute are mine.”

"We should have seen this coming. When Mary Roach wrote Packing for Mars, her 2010 book about the bodily experiences of astronauts in space, she seemed especially excited by the feeding, digestive and excremental issues with which NASA had to deal. She has now advanced from the exoticism of space-shuttle toilet training to the universality of the digestive tract. And at last Ms. Roach has a subject that doesn’t make her (insert constipation joke, possibly about Elvis Presley) strain.

     Gulp is far and away her funniest and most sparkling book, bringing Ms. Roach’s love of weird science to material that could not have more everyday relevance. Having graduated from corpses (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook) and sex (Bonk, full of stunts featuring Ms. Roach as guinea pig), she takes on a subject wholly mainstream. She explores it with unalloyed merriment. And she is fearless about the embarrassment that usually accompanies it."
— Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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Buy all of Mary Roach's books here...

Haute (altitude) Couture

"[Nicholas] De Monchaux has constructed Spacesuit [: Fashioning Apollo] (maybe slightly too cleverly) as a series of layers, each corresponding to the 21 layers that comprised the A7L space suit of the Apollo missions. The author revels in finding curious details from the material history of the world, and Spacesuit bursts with dinner-party fodder: Did you know that the U.S. government’s documentation of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests created a worldwide film shortage? Or that the Apollo mission’s computer-backup system was crafted into a binary pattern that was then physically woven into ropes? And that only seamstresses could be called upon to do this work properly? [...]

     The narrative heart of Spacesuit is the story of Playtex, the women’s undergarment manufacturer. The company, known at the time as the International Latex Corporation, triumphed over the more politically connected, engineering-driven Hamilton-Standard to win the Apollo lunar space-suit contract. It plays out like an after-school special: ILC’s team, a motley group of seamstresses and engineers, led by a car mechanic and a former television repairman, manages to convince NASA to let them enter their 'test suit' in a closed, invitation-only competitive bid at their own expense. They spend six weeks working around the clock — at times breaking into their own offices to work 24-hour shifts — to arrive at a suit solution that starkly outperforms the two invited competitors. In open, direct competition with larger, more moneyed companies, ILC manages to produce a superior space suit by drawing on the craft-culture handiwork and expertise of seamstresses, rather than on the hard-line culture of engineering.

     [...] the suits, de Monchaux says, were never actually constructed according to engineering drawings. The drawings were always descriptive, not prescriptive: produced after the fact. To fit into NASA’s engineering system, ILC had to essentially reverse-engineer construction documents of each space suit after they had already been produced. This seemingly small detail points to the vast blind spots across different cultures of making and knowing, and de Monchaux happily points out the appealing irony: The very image of NASA’s technical triumph, the most iconic image of the space race, is in fact a 'throwback' — more craftwork than Kraftwerk."
— Rosten Woo, Los Angeles Review of Books
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