Astronaut Scott Kelly Not Feeling Like Himself After Returning To Earth

Astronaut Scott Kelly returned to the planet earth three months ago after spending close to one year in space. The astronaut was recently speaking at a NASA event that was taking place to give him a forum to respond to questions related to his mission. 

Kelly is still feeling the effects of spending one year in space. He explained how his condition after landing depended on the length of his flights in space. His shortest missions were 7 days and 13 days long, and his longest was a 340 day mission, well that’s close to one year. The flight was twice as long and the effect after landing was terrible. In the event Kelly told the crowd, that after he got his body was really sore and stiff. His skin had not been in contact with anything except clothes and anything he came in contact with. Made his skin feel like he was on fire. That seems like a really bad experience for a visit to space. His body experienced some kind of rush and all the places on his body that had contact with anything or anyone experienced discoloration. Then on his first few days back on the planet earth, Kelly experienced flu like symptoms. Kelly joked about his condition, saying that if he had not been in space for a year, he would have gone to the hospital fearing he might have contracted a new form of virus that was slowly killing him. When in the space stations, there is microgravity hence astronauts are always floating and their skins come into contact less frequently with other sources. Constant contact enables your skin to be more resilient and tough well, that’s how calluses in the skin forms. Since the astronauts don’t walk in the space stations they don’t wear shoes and their feet are even able to shed a layer of skin since there is no contact. Kelly doesn’t consider all these as factors that can prevent future longer space flights. He says that going to space gives them a better chance to learn more about other planets in the universe.

He looks forwards to future missions that will involve astronauts spending years in space. For instance, just traveling to the planet Mars takes six months and that means in order to have a successful mission of going to the planet Mars and back, the astronauts will need a minimum of 12 months just for traveling. Well, that indeed confirms Kelly’s idea of spending years in space making studies. This will give them a chance to study the planet and hopefully they won’t be able to experience the side effects that Kelly experienced when he got back to our planet earth. We believe by then many innovations would have been made that would enable the astronauts to have artificial gravity, hence be able to improve the rate of contact experienced on their skins while they are in the space stations.