The best books about being an astronaut

For starters, I recommend everything Mary Roach has ever written. Ever since I read Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers in college, I’ve made sure to grab Roach’s new books the week they’re released. Her self-deprecating sense of humor always cracks me up, and she does such an amazing job of capturing both the science and the culture of the fields she studies. 

This book is filled with incredible and fun stories you’ve likely never heard before. Why does the Japanese astronaut selection process include making 1,000 origami cranes? Why were the “walls spattered with blood” in a 1999 space station simulation? Why did the astronauts aboard Apollo 12 spend part of their homeward journey naked? Check out her book to find out! 

This book is hilarious and raunchy and is an incredible story about how social progress is made.

Mike Mullane was at NASA when the first astronaut class that included women was recruited. He was a pretty massive sexist when the women initially joined, and he details how his thoughts on working with women astronauts changed as he found the women astronauts to be eminently capable.

By the end of the book, it’s clear that Mullane could still stand to make a little more progress on the sexism front, but he has come a long way. Social progress is often achingly slow, but this is a fun story about how it sometimes slowly inches forward. 

While researching our book, Zach and I read dozens of astronaut memoirs. I hate to say it, but most of them were incredibly dull. Astronauts are brilliant and hard-working, but that doesn’t necessarily make them good writers. Many of their books are filled with technical details that must only be interesting to fellow engineers.

This book stood out to me because Collins is a genuinely incredible writer and storyteller. Collins was one of three astronauts aboard Apollo 11 and was the only one who didn’t get to touch down on the Moon. 

Lynn Sherr is a reporter, and was a friend of Sally Ride. Between knowing Ride personally and her many interviews with Ride’s partners, family, and friends, Sherr was able to write a remarkably in-depth biography of a person who largely avoided sharing personal information publicly.

I learned a lot about Ride I didn’t previously know, like the fact that the US’s first woman astronaut was also LGBTQIA+! She was a trailblazer on so many fronts.

I wanted to end the list with a book that gives a sense of what life in space is like now. Scott Kelly spent a year aboard the International Space Station, returning to Earth in 2016.

Being an astronaut is undoubtedly an incredible experience, and I envy those who have had the chance to look down on the Earth from space. But Kelly’s biography makes clear that the bulk of an astronaut’s day is not comprised of these moments of euphoria.

Lots of time is spent on tasks like maintaining the space station and running experiments, and life in a cramped station orbiting Earth in the void isn’t all fun and games. Carbon dioxide levels get high and give you headaches; from time to time, someone needs to tamp down the poop in the space toilet, and it’s hard to be physically separated from loved ones, especially when something catastrophic happens, and you can’t be there to help.

It’s a great, realistic look at what it’s like to live in space.