🚀 The Shocking Impact Being In Space Has Had On The Two Stranded Astronauts

Astrophysicist Brad Tucker joins Jonesy & Amanda with some information around the two stranded astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
New Jersey and Amanda jam Nation.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Well, we've been staying updated on the two astronauts stuck
in space for the last nine months. Barry Wilmore known
as Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams are only supposed to
be up there for eight days. It ended up being
nine months. Usually the maximum stay for astronauts at the
International Space Station is six months. So the mission has
started to bring them home. They're still at the space station,

(00:23):
but be expected to be home on Earth in a
matter of days. What does this do to your body?
And what will it be like for them to be home?
Here to tell us more is camera based astrophysicist Brad
Tucker Brad High.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
How's it going.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
It's going very well. How's it going to go for them?
What's happened to their bodies in space now? Nine months?

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah, as you said, there's a lot of changes that
you go into these longer duration missions. Ah, things like
your phones. We don't realize it, but you actually lose
a lot of bone density in space, and we know
that for every six months you spend around the space station,
you lose twenty years worth of bone city loss. Yeah,
so they'll come back like they have the bones of

(01:04):
a sixty or seventy year old, and that's huge, and
that doesn't get repaired. It takes a while for your
heart to get back to normal because your heart actually
adapts to being in space and gets a bit lazy.
You know, you have to think about on Earth where
you used to our heart pumping against gravity. Well, if
you remove it, our heart adapts to that. But then
you get back down, your heart can no longer pump

(01:26):
enough oxigenated blood to the brain, so you get things
like you get faint, and you feel light headed, and
you actually can't even stand up without fainting. Your eyeball
physically changes its shape in space because of the pressure
in your head, so that takes a while to get
to normal. Even the physical shape of your brain takes
about three years to return to normal. So there's a

(01:47):
slew of these things that they'll have to happen when
they get back.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Wow. Yeah, and how have I helped to do that?
Did I have to live in a certain enclave to
have this stuff repaired?

Speaker 1 (01:59):
So some of it, some of it kind of just
goes back with time. Others they do need treatment. Others
like the eyeball and the eye pressure. No one really
understands the indicators that will tell you whether it will
go back to normal. So some it takes a couple
of weeks, some it takes a couple of years for
your vision to actually get back to full functional and normal.

(02:19):
So there's a lot of these things where they just
don't understand. And that's actually where Butcher and Sunny will
be interesting as almost guinea pigs to say, to say,
because most of the data comes from younger astronauts in
their thirties into the early forties, late twenties and or
only up there for six months. They have both been
into space their late forties early fifties and have been

(02:41):
up multiple times, so we'll actually learn a lot from
their long exposure and how to potentially treat these things
going into the future.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
Is there any benefits from being in space for a
long time, Like there's a lot of negatives, it seems
to me. Are they benefits?

Speaker 1 (02:56):
So you get taller, so it's a quick way of
growing because your spine stretches, you do eventually lose that.
There are some changes that actually your physical age does
change in space. They've actually measured this between two identical
twins and we're actually to measure at a genetic level
a change in aging in space. There's a lot of

(03:19):
belief that cancer to tumors in space actually change and
multiply differently and as in slower, because they don't have
the mechanisms they think due to gravity to do it.
So there's actually a lot of work on cancer treatments
on the space station because they think it's a quicker
way of accelerating it. Now, the reverse also happens, because

(03:39):
you're exposed to higher levels of radiation, you do end
up with a potential higher level of cancer down the road.
So there's just a lot of stuff that goes to
the human body in space that it's a huge amount
of effort nasal pores into.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Well, if anything, soon he's hair hasn't stopped crying. That's
certainly now Donald Trump, Well, Donald said this.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
I see the woman with the wild hair and good
solid head of hair she's.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Got, and he's wondering whether they've all fallen in love.
He's really big on the signs.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
Brad, thank you for joining us, No worries, take care.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
I'm talking of the astrophysist, physicist