re astronauts what does weightlessness feel like in article apr is morgan com jlieb is morgan com jerry liebelson writes i want to know what weightlessness actually feels like for example is there a constant sensation of falling ron baalke baalke kelvin jpl nasa gov replied yes weightlessness does feel like falling it may feel strange at first but the body does adjust the feeling is not too different from that of sky diving i m no astronaut but i ve flown in the kc several times i ll tell you about my first flight at the on set of weightlessness my shoulders lifted and my spine straightened i felt a momentary panic and my hands tried to grab onto something like the strap keeping me firmly against the floor to prevent me from falling i remember conciously over ruling my involuntary motions my ears felt not heard a rush and i could feel fluid moving in my head like when you get up from bed while you have a cold at that point i ceased to concentrate on my physiological response since i had some science to do i was busy keeping my experiment going and keeping track of all the parts during the return of gravity and subsequent g pull out so i didn t really pay attention to physiology at that time after about parabolas i discovered that i was performing one of the tricks i ve discovered to keep myself from getting motion sickness i was keeping my head very still and moving very slowly all except my hands and arms which needed to be in rapid concious motion for my experiment during the pull out to parabola my queasiness finally started to get to me and i had to use one of those air sickness bags i was basically useless for the rest of that flight so i went to the seats in the back of the plane while my partner whom i drafted for just this purpose kept working on the experiment while i was ill he was a vetran vomit comet rider one of those anomalous people who don t get sick on the thing i didn t think of it as a constant sensation of falling so much as like swimming in air it s very close to the sensations i feel when i m scuba diving and i turn my head down and fins up jerry and what is the motion sickness that some astronauts occasionally experience ron it is the body s reaction to a strange environment it appears to be induced partly to physical discomfort and part to mental distress some people are more prone to it than others like some people are more prone to get sick on a roller coaster ride than others the mental part is usually induced by a lack of clear indication of which way is up or down ie the shuttle is normally oriented with its cargo bay pointed towards earth so the earth or ground is above the head of the astronauts about of the astronauts experience some form of motion sickness and nasa has done numerous tests in space to try to see how to keep the number of occurances down i m a volunteer in jsc s space biomedical laboratory where they do among other things some of the tests ron mentions i was in one called the pre flight adaptation trainer which consisted of a chair on a several degree of freedom motion base with moving geometric visual aids the goal was to measure the victim s h h h h h h h h subject s responses and subjective physiological descriptions and see if repeated exposure to this environment could reduce future motion sickness symptoms jerry i don t know of any former or active duty astronauts who personally read this group i know that bruce mccandless s office had been waiting anxiously for the space station redesign option i posted last week but i don t think bruce reads the group himself ken jenks nasa jsc gm space shuttle program office kjenks gothamcity jsc nasa gov the man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything edward john phelps american diplomat lawyer
