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  • 11 hours ago
Britain's first cosmonaut Helen Sharman describes how her body felt when she landed back on earth after completing her mission in space in 1991 and comments on how she viewed the crew of Artemis II after they returned. Report by Blairm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Transcript
00:00I was walking around quite happily after a few hours. To start with, I wanted to make sure I held
00:04on to something.
00:05People were holding me to say we've seen the Artemis 2 astronauts to stop them from possibly overbalancing.
00:11But we saw them coming out of the spacecraft looking cheerful, happy, waving, smiling and communicating pretty much as normal.
00:20And for a few days, again, it's amazing how we can adapt to these different situations.
00:25I think it's helpful if you can wear something to stop the blood flow going away from your head.
00:29Otherwise, you can feel lightheaded as well as feeling a bit wobbly because of balance.
00:35Some astronauts have what we call space adaptation syndrome.
00:39It's a posh phrase, really, for just meaning they feel sick.
00:42And it's a bit like any kind of motion sickness on Earth.
00:46If you're in a boat, sometimes in a car where our balance system affects the vagus nerve.
00:51And actually, you know, without taking any drugs, about half of all astronauts would actually vomit in space.
00:58The drugs are quite good now, the antiemetics.
01:01But the people who tend to feel space sick also tend to feel Earth sick when they get back.
01:06Again, the drugs are quite good.
01:07But looking at the astronauts coming back from space just recently from the moon, it looks like they were all
01:13feeling pretty good.
01:15So, yeah, and of course, the three that have gone before would have been chosen partly because they weren't space
01:21sick the first time.
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