CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Recent from house, NASA’s oldest full-time astronaut stated Monday that weightlessness made him really feel many years youthful, with on a regular basis aches and pains vanishing.
Don Pettit marked his seventieth birthday on April 20 by plunging by the environment in a Russian Soyuz capsule to wrap up a seven-month mission on the Worldwide Area Station.
In his first public remarks since landing, Pettit stated he threw up everywhere in the Kazak steppes upon landing, the results of feeling gravity for the primary time in 220 days.
Returning to Earth has at all times been “a major problem” for his physique, Pettit stated from NASA’s Johnson Area Heart in Houston.
“I didn’t look too good as a result of I didn’t really feel too good,” he stated, including that his physique’s regular “creaks and groans” returned.
In weightlessness, then again, Pettit felt the many years soften away.
“It makes me really feel like I’m 30 years outdated once more,” stated Pettit, an astronaut since 1996 who ventured to house 4 instances. “All that sort of stuff heals up since you’re sleeping, you’re simply floating and your physique, all these little aches and pains and the whole lot heal up.”
Mercury astronaut John Glenn was 77 when he returned to orbit on a brief shuttle flight in 1998. However he’d been gone from NASA for many years and was near wrapping up his Senate profession.
Even a pair of 90-year-olds have flown to house, however solely on 10-minute up-and-down hops by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket firm.
Pettit, an engineer who nonetheless feels “like just a little child inside,” targeted on his astrophotography whereas on the house station, capturing auroras, comets and satellites streaking off within the distance.
He additionally performed a slew of physics experiments in his spare time, like blowing and stacking bubbles, and forming an ideal ball of honey on a spoon with peanut butter, with the intention to share the expertise with others.
“I’ve received a couple of extra good years left,” Pettit stated. “I may see getting one other flight or two in earlier than I’m prepared to hold up my rocket nozzles.”
