Space Can Take a Nasty Toll On An Astronaut’s Heart, Study Finds
April 02, 2021 at 11:13PM It’s perfectly fine that human beings want to travel in space. But we have to reckon with the fact that space doesn’t want anything to do with us. The exterior environment of space, of course, represents instantaneous death, what with the killing cold and the absence of any atmosphere. But even inside a spacecraft or a space station—cozy, pressurized, temperature-controlled, with food supplies, comfortable sleep pods, and a zero-g privy to take care of unavoidable essentials—the body doesn’t care for space. Space radiation, which makes it through the walls of even the sturdiest ship, raises an astronaut’s lifetime risk of cancer. Just as problematic are the effects of what would seem to be the happiest part of living off-planet: weightlessness. Retired astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent close to a year aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015 and 2016, once told TIME that he’s often asked whether the view or the absence of gravity is the be...