22 Interesting Facts About Weightlessness

Only a few people have had the opportunity to experience weightlessness. While it’s an intriguing experience with curious sensations, it’s also true that this state has detrimental effects on living organisms.

Astronauts suffer considerably from prolonged exposure to weightlessness: their bones become thinner, muscles atrophy, and food stubbornly refuses to move down the esophagus properly. Despite these challenges, these inconveniences don’t deter the brave explorers of space!

Facts About Weightlessness:

1. This state can sometimes be experienced during a flight on a modern jet plane without leaving Earth’s atmosphere.
2. Eating in weightlessness is challenging for astronauts because food doesn’t move down the esophagus naturally under the influence of gravity.
3. Muscles atrophy, and bones lose calcium in weightlessness, leading to thinning. Humanity has yet to find a way to completely combat these negative effects, but special exercises and diets help minimize them.
4. Sneezing in weightlessness is highly discouraged. Not only could you be propelled in an unintended direction due to inertia, but also the saliva particles expelled would float around.
5. Apollo Missions: During the Apollo missions, American astronauts experienced zero gravity while traveling to the Moon. These missions provided valuable data on how the human body reacts to space travel and helped pave the way for future explorations.
6. Training in the USA: NASA astronauts train for zero gravity using a variety of methods, including the famous “Vomit Comet,” a plane that performs parabolic flights to simulate short periods of microgravity. This training is crucial for preparing astronauts for the realities of space travel.
7. Space Tourism: American companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are pioneering space tourism, offering experiences that include brief periods of zero gravity. This is bringing the sensation of weightlessness to civilians and expanding the commercial possibilities of space.
8. On space stations, all objects, both small and large, are secured, as in weightlessness, they would float around uncontrollably.
9. In weightlessness, liquids take on a spherical shape. If you pour out a bottle of water, you’ll get a water sphere.
10. Astronauts sleep in special cocoons, in a “vertical” position relative to the interior of the station. However, in weightlessness, the brain doesn’t recognize “up” and “down,” so there’s technically no difference.
11. A candle won’t burn for long in weightlessness. Since hot and cold air don’t mix in these conditions, the oxygen around the flame quickly depletes, causing the candle to extinguish.
12. Fans are used in spacecraft to mix the air, as carbon dioxide accumulates around stationary (e.g., sleeping) individuals and doesn’t mix with fresh air. Without this, astronauts would have difficulty breathing, though they wouldn’t suffocate.
13. Weightlessness can be used to create chemical substances and materials that are impossible to produce on Earth. However, these technologies have not been industrialized due to the high cost of transporting materials into orbit.
14. Experiments have shown that spiders spin spherical webs in weightlessness.
15. In weightlessness, flames spread in all directions rather than upwards. The flame of a burning match, for example, would be spherical.
16. Only in weightlessness can you observe the fascinating phenomenon known as the “Dzhanibekov effect,” where a rotating object suddenly flips its axis of rotation by 180 degrees at regular intervals.
17. Astronauts grow a few centimeters taller in weightlessness because gravity no longer compresses their spines.
18. When jumping on a trampoline, at the peak of the jump, you momentarily experience weightlessness.
19. Crying in weightlessness isn’t advisable because tears don’t run down the cheeks; instead, they accumulate on the eyeballs and can sting the eyes.
20. The skin on our heels is rough because we walk on them constantly. However, in weightlessness, there is no pressure on the heels, and the skin softens. Therefore, astronauts must carefully remove their socks to avoid scattering dead skin particles.
21. The International Space Station (ISS) doesn’t have a traditional shower; astronauts clean their skin with wet towels. They even have a special no-rinse shampoo that they simply wipe off after use, and a toothpaste designed to be swallowed.
22. Since astronauts sometimes spend months in orbit, they even have to cut their hair in weightlessness. For this, they use special scissors equipped with a vacuum to immediately suck up the cut hair.