DMRussell@PARC-MAXC (12/15/82)
Does anyone have a feel for "how sick" space sickness makes you feel? If it's anything like seasickness, I'm not sure I'd want to be in the same shuttle with someone who has space sickness, let alone trusting them to pilot the thing around. Is it as intense as ordinary, land-based motion problems? Or is it just feeling queasy? Also, why did the problem (apparently) first surface in American astronauts when they moved into larger ships? An educated guess would say that you can't get sick when packed like a sardine into a Gemini or Mercury, but that the free space of Apollo or Soyez allows your hard-wired inertial guidance to get confused from so much visual motion uncoordinated with your own. Or was it just that the early flights weren't long enough for the adrenelin "high" to have worn off? -- DM Russell --