Mary Roach

So many of those moments.

I remember when I was reporting for Packing for Mars, I was up in the Arctic on Devon Island, which NASA uses as an analog for the moon and Mars and

I had a week there when I didn't really need the whole week.

So I just talked to a lot of people thinking, I don't see what they do, these researchers.

And there was a guy who studied, he was a suit guy, and he was working on creating an escape suit.

So this would be a suit where if something goes wrong, either as the spaceship is going up or the capsule is coming down,

at any different altitude.

And it's really tricky because depending on how much atmosphere you have, you know, your parachute has no air to unfold or you're going to burn up.

So it's a very tricky suit to create and system to create.

Anyway, he's explaining it all to me.

And I'm like, maybe I'll write something about this.

I don't know.

And he had given me a mission patch.

Okay.

That's a patch that has the name of the mission, the number and all the crew members names around it.

And I didn't really, I'm like, oh, thank you.

And it was for Columbia.

And one of the names on the patch is Clark, Laurel Clark.

And I realized in the middle of his explaining things that his name is Clark.

Like that was his wife.