Stranded astronauts to face 'flexibility, strength' challenges upon return home, expert warns

It’s more than nine months headed back to earth Right now let’s bring in our former NASA astronaut, Jose Hernandez and biomedical engineer Dr. John Jaquis. Thank you so much. Doctor, I wanna start you with you first. Our team has big curiosities over what the medical challenges will look like once they splash down and they were able to get them out to medical treatment. What is all of this going to look like? We’re told that they’ll be carried out on stretchers

Usually that’s a for sure thing. You lose a lot of muscle mass, you lose a lot of bone density. Also compromises, tendons and ligaments, especially over the extended period of time that they’ve been up there. So they will not be in tip top shape when they get off the space vehicle. They will need to focus on rehabilitative exercise and proper nutrition. So there’s, there’s two things that are really compromising them while they’re up there is, number one, your digestion doesn’t work very well when you don’t have the assistance of gravity. So the gravity field of the earth pulls food through your system and when you’re a little kid or you’re around little kids and they’re on a jungle gym after they eat and they don’t feel so well Yeah, it’s ‘cause they need things pushing down.

Yeah.

On their, on their digestive system. And then the other thing is, without gravity, without the mechanical tension on musculature and on bone, bone density starts to go down and they lose a lot of muscle mass. Yeah. And the glycogen stores that are needed to be held within the muscular tissue.

Incredibly important information. And to Jose, our astronaut now please do tell us what they must be thinking and feeling as they make their way back to earth.

Well the first thing they have to do is they have to do a, a fluid load because well being up in space, they don’t need as much fluid in their body as they do in one G. And so you have to ingest lots of fluid, whether it’s chicken consummate Gatorade or whatever. But you have to have lots of fluid. And as John pointed out, you know, when I came back from space and my first two words outta my mouth was, gravity sucks. Ah. Because, because you’re adjusting to gravity and it’s not fun. And you and these guys have been up there for nine months. They got about two months of of physical therapy so they can come back and be normal here in a one G environment.

Doctor, we’re gonna have to leave it there. We’re tight on time ‘cause of breaking news, but if you could just sort of tell us what life will be like after them. Our team was talking this morning about we can learn from this, there are certain, you know, life extending things that we learn from zero gravity environments, final thought. Absolutely.

So they go through a period of degradation by not having the benefit of the earth’s gravitational field. It is going to take them months to rehabilitate even to be back to a state of normalcy.

Yeah. - And then they’re probably gonna work hard to get to a state of high performance as astronauts always do.

Yeah. It is really important to cover this aspect of it. ‘cause we think there’s gonna be this big celebration but they are gonna be rushed off to get medical treatment right away. We do know that. Thank you so much to both of you. Appreciate those perspectives. Thank you. We’ll see you again soon. Thank John.