Space adaptation syndrome
Space sickness is the nausea, the experience spaceman until her body has adapted to weightlessness. How seasickness is caused by a disorder of the vestibular system, the space sickness.
The space sickness occurred during the first space flights virtually unnoticed because these flights took place under very restricted conditions. You will be enhanced if you are able to move around freely, and therefore in larger spacecraft occurs frequently. About 60 % of all Space Shuttle astronauts they experienced during their first flight. The first case is in space, and is assumed nowadays, in 1961 occurred in German Titov, who reported dizziness and nausea. The first significant cases have occurred in the early Apollo flights. Frank Borman on Apollo 8 and Russell Schweickart Apollo 9 had both significant and moderately severe cases of motion sickness; at this Schweickart had a change in the deployment plan for succession.
As with seasickness symptoms of mild nausea and disorientation can range up to vomiting and intense discomfort; Headaches and nausea in varying degrees of intensity are often reported. About half of patients have mild symptoms, only about ten percent suffer greatly.
Modern medicines for motion sickness act, inter alia, against space sickness, but are rarely used. It is believed that it is better if the astronauts get used for a few days to weightlessness as if they are exposed to the side effects of medication during the period of deployment. General will now be made to ensure that during the first days of the mission take place no critical activities, in particular no external work where a vomiting might be fatal. Allow the teams time to get used to.
Even otherwise, a longer stay in a state of weightlessness, for example, in Earth orbit, a heavy burden on the body. It has been found among the astronauts, that it has a detrimental effect on the heart and the circulatory system, the muscles, the fluid balance in the body and on the body functions. It causes calcium loss in the bones.
In 1965, after two American astronauts had four days orbiting the Earth, we noticed a more unpleasant result. The doctors who examined her after her return to Earth, found that the circulating blood volume had decreased. Experiments on the next flight confirmed the loss of blood. On the eight day flight of the spaceship Gemini 5, the number of red blood cells of astronauts by 8%, which corresponds to about half a pint of blood decreased. In a later, fourteen- day flight lost two other astronauts almost a pint of blood. The same is found in the astronauts who flew to the orbiting space laboratory ( Skylab ). The first team suffered a 15 percent loss of red blood cells, the second a 12 -percent. The first team lost about 10 percent of their blood plasma, the second about 13 percent. The third team suffered a loss of blood. Furthermore, one could read in the appearing in the Journal and Atlanta Constitution: "The loss of red blood cells and blood plasma and of cellular body fluid is a serious medical problem space, no matter what reason has this appearance. . It may be an exaggeration to say that the future of manned space flight depended on its solution from, but the truth is not too far from "One of the astronauts who are to perform such flights, so he said: " Because of what we know today I 'm not ready to go to Mars tomorrow. "
- Human Spaceflight
- Disease in neurology