A History of Space Sickness: How to Avoid Throwing Up When There is No ‘Up’

Such was the worry caused by Titov’s sudden déjà food, as the contents of his stomach left his body, that the Soviet Union stopped all human spaceflight for a year whilst it was investigated. These were the early days of spaceflight, so being sick in space was a big cause for concern. What if it was some sort of space bug? Or perhaps humans simply could not cope with spending longer periods in space? After all, Yuri Gagarin had only spent a short time completing his single orbit a few months earlier.

In time, Titov’s experience would be put down to Space Adaption Syndrome – no mystery space bugs involved. Over in America, astronauts flying aboard the Mercury and Gemini missions were not experiencing similar problems. Or if they were, they were keeping quiet about it. Perhaps individual astronauts worried that admitting to feeling queasy might prevent them from being selected for future missions. Others have suggested that the small size of Mercury and Gemini capsules limited how much ‘floating about’ the astronauts could do, preventing their movements from causing a motion sickness style illness. On top of this, not everybody suffers from space sickness. Just like how not everyone gets car sick, as I discovered on a trip to Cornwall as my eldest child pointed out, rather redundantly, that my youngest child had just pebble-dashed the back of my seat.

So that’s the basics when it comes to space sickness, but things get a little weird when you look at who gets sick. Remember, astronauts in the early days of American spaceflight were often all-American hero types with thousands of hours of ‘pulling Gs’ in jets. And yet, despite never so much as getting a single butterfly in the stomach, some of these hardy types went on to barf in space.

Frank Borman on the way to the Moon on Apollo 8 was sick but did not want Mission Control to know. Some experts believe the cold-like symptoms suffered by Wally Schirra on Apollo 7 were Space Adaption Syndrome symptoms too.

It might be, that on the Apollo missions, having more room to float about caused greater disorientation leading to space sickness. Certainly, by the time of Skylab and the Space Shuttle – both of which offered even more room – astronauts were getting sick more regularly. Fortunately, it normally only lasted a few days, but some estimates suggest around half of all space travellers feel ill in their first few days in space, as their bodies struggle to adapt. The advice these days is to keep your head still and on no account immediately start doing somersaults! Which is a shame.

Lack of reporting, as well as the relatively small number of people to have travelled into space, makes it hard to predict exactly how many of us would suffer from Space Adaption Syndrome. On top of that, there are astronauts who have flown in space and felt fine, who have then gone on to feel ill on their next spaceflight. Similarly, newly qualified astronauts that were fine during training aboard zero-g simulating aircraft flights, have then been poorly in space. Just because you feel ill on a rollercoaster, it does not follow that you will feel ill loop-the-looping around the Earth in a spacecraft.

All of this raises some important issues for anyone with aspirations of seeing the Earth from space. What about the future of space tourism? What measures might people need to take? There is medication that can help fight off space sickness, but some of the side effects can include drowsiness and can hamper performance. This means many astronauts chose to tough it out, knowing that for most people the symptoms of space sickness pass after a few days of getting used to being in orbit. For this reason, the first few days of an astronaut’s time in space are scheduled not to be too busy, with mission planners giving time for people to adapt. Spacewalks are never scheduled for the first few days of an astronaut’s time aboard the International Space Station. Even after those first few days, astronauts use patches affixed to their body to give them doses of medication before spacewalks – as an added safety mechanism. It is one thing to throw up in your spacecraft, but throwing up inside your spacesuit helmet could be fatal. With nowhere for it to go, the potential for blocking up the oxygen supply or stopping an astronaut from being able to see means that extra safety steps need to be taken.