Returning astronauts describe pain in the soles of the feet and lower back within days of landing — the spine suddenly forced to support half the body's weight again after months of weightlessness

Space Daily·6h ago

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Astronauts have reported experiencing pain in their feet and lower back after returning from space, which may be caused by their spines readjusting to support the body's weight after months of weightlessness. The physical effects of space travel on the body are not the only challenges astronauts face, as some have also spoken about the psychological difficulties of readjusting to life on earth. The experiences of astronauts after returning from space vary, with some describing lingering physical and emotional effects.

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Returning astronauts describe pain in the soles of the feet and lower back within days of landing — the spine suddenly forced to support half the body's weight again after months of weightlessness

Full coverage

Scott Kelly spent 340 days aboard the ISS, and he has said the leaving was never the hard part — it was the coming back, when the balance and the strange detachment lingered for weeks after splashdown

In 1973, Buzz Aldrin published a memoir admitting that coming home from the Moon had nearly destroyed him, breaking a code of silence inside the astronaut office where psychological difficulty was something you flew through rather than something you wer

On July 1, 2026, the company once known as Maxar began selling 3D maps of Earth it can refresh within a day or sharpen to 15 centimeters, built less for people to study than for the autonomous drones and weapons that navigate by matching their cameras a

For most of history the worry was too many people, yet by 2050 some 155 of the world's 204 countries will not have enough babies to sustain their populations, a Lancet study projects — a quiet reversal of the fear that defined the last century

Only about one in five workers worldwide feels truly engaged at work, a 2026 Gallup report finds, a slide to its lowest level since 2020 that it estimates costs the world economy close to a tenth of its total output in lost productivity every year

A passenger jet 850 feet above the runway at Vilnius in January 2025 abandoned its landing when its instruments began quietly lying — nothing on the plane was broken, and it diverted to another country

The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived four Nazi concentration camps and lost his wife, parents, and brother to them, argued in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning that human beings can endure almost any suffering as long as they can find

When a Russian chemist named Dmitri Mendeleev laid out the sixty-three known chemical elements on a single sheet of paper in 1869, he deliberately left blank spaces for three elements he predicted would exist but had never been observed — and within th