Enlightened Astronaut, Part 3: Gravity Strikes Back

All that velcro-strapped stints on the treadmill can’t prevent the changes to an astronaut’s body, writes Chris Hadfield in “An Astronaut’s Guide…”:

“Without gravity, we don’t need muscle or bone mass to support our own weight, which is what makes life in space so much fun but also inherently bad for the human body, long term.”

Thus, when he returns to earth after months on the International Space Station:

“My arms are so heavy I can barely lift them… It’s like being a newborn, the sudden overload of noise, color, smells and gravity, after months of quitely floating, encased in relative calm and isolation. No wonder babies cry in protest when they’re born.”

 

And the effect doesn’t go away… for months in his case (actually, its a one-to-one ratio between time in space and time to recover). Why?

“After five months in space my body hasn’t just adapted to zero gravity, it has developed a whole new set of habits.”

Walking is very painful: the legs find the weight of the body intolerable. Damn you, gravity! The spine is again compressed due to gravity, a very rude and painful experience upon return.

 

Then there’s the matter of the heart:

“By the time I returned to Earth, (my heart) had forgotten how to pump blood all the way to my head… After a few minutes on my feet, my heart rate edged up to 130… To help my circulation, I wore a g-suit for a few days to keep steady pressure on my calves, thighs and guts.”

 

The ears (and thus sense of balance) are also thrown out of gear:

“The mechanism in the inner ear that controls balance was totally bewildered post-flight. On the ISS, it got used to responding only to my body’s own rotations and accelerations… Back on earth, though, gravity was suddenly pulling me down and the floor was now holding me up, trapping my inner ear in what felt like a constant acceleration.”

With the sense of balance thrown off, no wonder he felt nauseated all the time.

 

Initially, even something as easy as lieing on the floor and lifting one’s legs was impossibly hard:

“After the empowering environment of space where I could move a refrigerator with one fingertip, it seemed… well, unfair. Despite exercising two hours a day on the ISS, I was, back on Earth, a weakling.”

 

Who’d have thought that gravity for a returned-home astronaut is like kryptonite for Superman?!

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