Swollen eyeballs, baby-like skin, and the overview effect: how astronauts feel when they return to earth
As Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams prepare to come home after their unexpected nine-month ISS stay, here is what they may experience
Gravity may seem like a drag, but spending long periods of time without its grounding force can wreak havoc on your body. On Friday, Nasa and SpaceX will launch the space agency’s Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station to retrieve astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams, after what was meant to be an eight-day stay turned into nine months.
While it is not the most time a human has spent as an extraterrestrial – Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov spent 437 continuous days aboard the Mir space station – most long space missions are a maximum of six months.
This article was amended on 17 March. The previous version erroneously recorded that Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub held the record for longest time spent in space but that is the record for time spent onboard the ISS.