One of the NASA astronauts currently stranded in space has spoken about the impact being away from our planet for so long has had on their body, while doctors have got some concerns over the pair.
Barry 'Butch' Wilmore and Sunita 'Suni' Williams were only supposed to be on board the International Space Station for eight days but they have been away from Planet Earth since June 2024.
Technical issues with the spacecraft they were supposed to make their return trip on were discovered and it was decided they should not come back on it.
Advert
Now, thankfully, it won't be long before they're set to get back onto solid ground and feel gravity once more as a new crew is headed up to the International Space Station and they'll be going home with the crew that gets rotated out.
However, they're feeling the effects of being in space for so long and it sounds quite concerning.
Suni Williams explained that she's been in space for so long that that she's found remembering how to walk difficult since she's been in a zero-gravity environment for so long.
"I’ve been up here long enough right now I’ve been trying to remember what it’s like to walk," she said when answering questions from students at her old school.
Advert
"I haven’t walked. I haven’t sat down. I haven’t laid down. You don’t have to. You can just close your eyes and float where you are right here."
Being in space for so long will require a period of rehabilitation for the astronauts as they get used to returning to life with 10 Newtons of gravity.
Pulmonologist and Air Force veteran Dr Vinay Gupta told the Daily Mail that for Butch and Suni this rehabilitation will have to last at least six weeks so they can regain their strength and return to a diet fit for an Earthling.
He explained that the human body 'needs the Earth's gravitational pull', and without it 'a lot of things are not functioning correctly'.
Advert
However, the doc also raised concerns over what else being in space for so long can do to the human body as he warned that being in space for so long might have exposed them to enough radiation to increase their risk of cancer.
Dr Gupta said that if he was the astronauts' doctor he would 'think about a more proactive strategy for cancer screening'.
NASA has previously done an experiment where they had identical twin astronauts and sent one into space for a year to measure the change it had on the human body.
The twin who went into space suffered some damage to his DNA, which researchers put down to radiation exposure in space, though fortunately most (but not all) of the damage was repaired six months after he was back.
Joe Harker