What is it like to be in space? 500 words or less. Well, I would just say everything initially feels different. Going into microgravity is — there’s no roller coaster here on Earth to, no chamber we can put you in, to feel what it’s like. There’s a fluid shift in your body, basically, without gravity. The fluid in your body kind of gravitates up towards your head. So at first everybody has this chipmunk thing where your cheeks all puff out, but that does other things to you, too, as well, where it can impact cognitive abilities, vision, something called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It’s a long way of saying everybody feels different and to give you the bookends, your best-case scenario for your first call at three to five days in space is you feel like you’re hanging upside down in your bed endlessly, like that’s just the best-case scenario for your first three to five days. The other end of the spectrum, which unfortunately impacts about 50 percent of people, is it’s like horrific motion sickness. And it has nothing to do with your susceptibility to motion sickness on Earth. I mean, you could be a hard-core test pilot, air show pilot, used to being upside down, doing flips and rolls —— And you were a pilot, right, before on Earth. – Yeah, still a pilot. – Yeah. I was in the lucky 50 percent that it feels like you’re hanging upside down from your bed. -That’s good. But in both my missions, 50 percent of the crew did not feel well. And this has been the case since the beginning of our space program. But you know, what I’ll say is it’s worth it. It’s worth it for one of the greatest views ever to see our planet from that perspective and to get a sense of the solar system around us, let alone the galaxy and the universe. I mean, we are a speck of sand in the grandest, vastest desert imaginable. And it’s just such an exciting, extraordinary journey to think about because we’ve really only just begun.
