Swollen eyeballs, baby-like skin, and the overview effect: how astronauts feel when they return to Earth

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stand at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, on the day of Boeing's Starliner-1 Crew Flight Test mission to the International Space Station, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, US, 1 June 2024. Wilmore and Williams have been stranded in space for nine months, but may soon be rescued on the Nasa-SpaceX Crew-10 mission. Photograph: Joe Skipper/Reuters

Gravity may seem like a drag, but spending long periods of time without its grounding force can wreak havoc on your body. On Friday, Nasa and SpaceX will launch the space agency’s Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station to retrieve astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams, after what was meant to be an eight-day stay turned into nine months.

While it is not the most time a human has spent as an extraterrestrial – Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov spent 437 continuous days aboard the Mir space station – most long space missions are a maximum of six months.