Question: how long can you stay in a 0 gravity inviroment before it becomes unsafe

Charles Laing answered on 14 Jun 2016:

Hi Rowhyn,

The longest a human has ever spent in space is 437.7 days. He was a Russian cosmonaut called Valeri Polyakov.

Astronauts regularly travel to the International Space Station (ISS) and stay on-board for periods of 6 months and we have got quite good at keeping them healthy. However, if we want to travel further, such as a mission to Mars, we need to conduct experiments on more astronauts during longer duration missions.

A recently completed mission involved an astronaut who went into space for one year with his identical twin brother staying on the ground. The results from this research will be very interesting to see the effects of long-term space travel whilst comparing to life on Earth. Our colleagues at NASA are currently completing the analysis of this data and we await the results.

The truth is we don’t really know the effects of the zero gravity environment past 437.7 days and we can only guess that the muscles and bone will continue to waste away. However, the exact rate of this is not known and the time when the decreases level off still need to be found.

Charlie 😀🚀