I've been reading up on all of this stuff as to what they say about being in a micro gravity environment compared to Earth.
The loss of bone density, they tell us, is 1% per month but could be up to 40/60% in short order. They say that gravity on Earth acts on the muscles, heart, and bones, all in a downward force (it's air pressure but let's go with the flow)...yet in micro gravity there's no force acting on the body which means that the bones and muscle, atrophy, (waste away).
The Russians appear to be the stay up kings in space as they must be born with extra bone mass and muscle which allows then to stay in space for a year or more.
The Americans haven't been as risky and they mostly do 6 weeks to 6 month stints, with the odd regular astronaut loving it so much and happy to keep losing his muscles and bone mass. Chris Hadfield is happy to keep going back up to tell us all how to sleep, brush our teeth, puke in a special bag, make a peanut butter sandwich and a whole host of other stuff, oh and even singing songs and playing his guitar.
The thing is, he's no worse for wear (apart from getting a little older) for doing these stints, just like all the rest of them in years gone by that end up living to ripe old ages and still going strong, in the main.
Astronauts are said to have complained about flashes of light in their eyes even when they're asleep, so their bodies are apparently being bombarded with radiation, as they tell us...but it's safe as they aren't up there for too long.
Unlike Valeri the Russian (437 days) who must have been playing nut the radiation flashes as they come at him.
The heart; they say, has to work harder because the blood flow in natural gravity (air pressure) goes to our feet and is pumped around the body... but in space, as they tell us, there's none of that because of the micro gravity, so the heart works harder to pump it down the body as it tends to RISE to the head for some reason.
It's all very strange but at least we have commander Hadfield, or I should say, did have commander Hadfield to entertain us. Now we will have one of the Kelly IDENTICAL twins, Scott, who will be spending ONE YEAR in the space station for?...can you guess?....he's going to be a guinea pig to see how the effects of micro gravity destroys the body and they are going to use his now retired identical brother, Mark to show us all the difference between them as they are both in different environments. A before and after type scenario. Here's one we made earlier.
Apparently that's happening in 2015.
What's puzzling though, is...they have Valeri and the rest of the regular space long termers to sift through. I mean, didn't they actually think to do all this stuff before or can't they ask for the medical checks of before and after of Valeri and the rest of them? I mean, this NASA astronaut stuff is ultra strict isn't it? You train for about 8 years or so just for one mission and are strictly medically sifted through, so why haven't they got the required data?
The problem is with the likes of these people, it's all after-thoughts that are brought on by people questioning it all, so they think, " oops, we didn't think of that, we'll add that in to the next bull crap space station talk in." And this is how it works.
The actually questioners and the conspiracy theorists are doing them a great service, because they are picking on stuff that the supposed geniuses forgot to add or simply omitted due to lack of thought.
The saga continues - but for how long before they slip up where no amount of genius can get them out of it?