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SpaceX Tourist Says Whole Crew Got Horribly Sick When They Reached Orbit

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SpaceX's Fram2 private astronaut mission was off to a rough start, with crew members throwing up due to space motion sickness.

SpaceX launched its Fram2 private astronaut mission from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Monday.

Soon after, a crew of four astronauts on board the Crew Dragon vehicle entered a highly unusual polar orbit, giving them a unique perspective on some of the most remote places on Earth.

But as crypto billionaire and mission commander Chun Wang reported in a tweet, the once-in-a-lifetime journey had a pretty rough start — highlighting a brutal adjustment period many astronauts have to endure when traveling to space.

"The first few hours in microgravity weren’t exactly comfortable," he wrote. "Space motion sickness hit all of us — we felt nauseous and ended up vomiting a couple of times."

"It felt different from motion sickness in a car or at sea," Wang added. "You could still read on your iPad without making it worse. But even a small sip of water could upset your stomach and trigger vomiting."

It's a particularly pertinent topic as more people — often with less training and experience — are traveling into space for prolonged periods.

The motion sickness proved severe enough that nobody on board asked to open the Dragon capsule's cupola, a large glass dome that allows passengers to gaze at the Earth below, which replaces the hatch used to dock to the International Space Station on the tourism version of the craft.

"We were all focused on managing the motion sickness" instead, Wang wrote.

The phenomenon, often referred to as "space adaptation syndrome," is a common problem for space travelers adjusting to weightlessness once in orbit. According to a 2006 study, anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of astronauts experience space motion sickness.

Researchers have found that symptoms are usually the result of adaptation to a different gravitational force — not necessarily weightlessness alone — after finding that the same symptoms appear after spending more than an hour in a centrifuge on Earth.

Scientists are still looking for an effective treatment. While drug-based interventions have been proposed to mitigate symptoms, none of them have been systematically evaluated.

Other researchers are evaluating whether other interventions, like wearing a pair of VR goggles, could address the issue. In an experiment last year, a team of scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder found that duplicating the motion of the spacecraft inside VR — essentially a "virtual window" to the outside — could reduce moderate symptoms of motion sickness.

Fortunately, even without extensive countermeasures, many of these symptoms can go away on their own.

After sleeping "really well," Wang recounted that he "felt completely refreshed. The trace of motion sickness is all gone."

"We had breakfast, took a few X-ray images, and opened the cupola three minutes after midnight UTC — right above the South Pole," he added.

The Fram2 crew is expected to spend up to five days in orbit, ending in a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, which is a first for a SpaceX astronaut mission, according to Space.com.

More on the mission: SpaceX Launching First-Ever Astronauts Over Earth's Poles Tonight

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SpaceX Tourist Says Whole Crew Got Horribly Sick When They Reached Orbit

SpaceX Spotted Scooping Pieces of Starship Out of Ocean After Impact

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Footage shows SpaceX crews retrieving debris belonging to the upper stage of SpaceX's enormous Starship rocket.

Breaking Things

There's always something you can learn from failure. Sometimes failure looks like your rocket blowing up after crashing into the ocean — but it's a learning opportunity nonetheless.

In the case of SpaceX, that means retrieving the watery remains of said rocket, Starship, to determine what went wrong during the less-than-perfect performance of its latest suborbital test flight. And so SpaceX employees traveled to the waters off the western coast of Australia, where the rocket's upper stage splashed down, to collect the debris.

These were the findings of SpaceX-focused content creator Interstellar Gateway, which gathered footage of the crews dredging up some of the spacecraft's hardware, including heat shield tiles and various tanks.

But there could be more than meets the eye. Based on Interstellar Gateway's sleuthing, the next retrieval mission could bring back the entire spacecraft in one piece.

"This was the first flight we've seen a vessel rigged specifically for towing... leading us to the realization that they may be attempting to return Starship back to port," Interstellar Gateway told Gizmodo. "Upon our investigation during their port operations, we noticed all of the needed lines and rigging materials needed to pull Starship back, as well as a staging area prepped with a crane, ready to remove Starship from the water."

Explosive Progress

SpaceX stunned the world with its fifth orbital flight test of Starship in October. After reaching space, the rocket's lower stage, the Super Heavy booster, made a controlled descent down to the Earth's surface, guiding itself back to its launch tower where it was caught midair by a pair of mechanical arms — an astonishingly precise feat of engineering.

The rocket couldn't repeat the feat, however, during its latest test in November. Just four minutes into the flight, SpaceX had to call off the booster catch, forcing the rocket to make a rough splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, where it immediately exploded into flames.

By contrast, the upper stage, the Starship spacecraft itself, demonstrated it could relight one of its engines in space and made a much softer, controlled splashdown in the ocean. Still, it did catch fire and fall apart after the landing, though nowhere near as dramatically as with the booster.

Safe and Sound

Besides the reusability factor, there's a huge incentive for SpaceX to recover the Starship spacecraft in one piece.

"There is only so much data SpaceX can get from Starship via StarLink transmissions as it has always sank shortly after splashdown," Interstellar Gateway told Giz. "Similar to the valuable data being used from the first caught and intact booster, there are tons of structural and out of view faults that can be found from an intact Starship returning to land."

With any luck, that'll soon be the case. The next Starship launch is reportedly slated for no earlier than January 11 next year — so keep an eye out.

More on Starship: Video Shows Robot Welding SpaceX Starship

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SpaceX Spotted Scooping Pieces of Starship Out of Ocean After Impact

NASA Will Attempt to Launch Boeing’s Troubled Starliner Away From Space Station as Fast as Possible, Just in Case

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NASA is looking to get Boeing's plagued Starliner away from the space station as fast as possible to ensure that it doesn't lose control.

Last month, NASA officially announced that Boeing's plagued Starliner is returning without a crew on board.

The decision, which came as a black eye to the embattled aerospace giant, means that stranded NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will return to the surface on board SpaceX's Crew-9 mission in February instead.

Later this week, likely on Friday evening, the space agency will attempt to have the faulty spacecraft undock from the International Space Station autonomously and eventually reenter the atmosphere.

And it sounds like NASA will be playing it as safe as possible. With the helium leaks affecting Starliner's propulsion system, the agency is looking to get the capsule away from the space station as fast as possible to ensure that it doesn't careen out of control — or, in a worst case scenario hypothesized by experts, even crash into the station.

During a teleconference today, NASA officials laid out the plan. The agency has chosen to have Starliner perform a "breakout burn" which, according to NASA's Johnson Space Center lead flight director Anthony Vareha, is a "series of 12 burns, each not very large, about one Newton meter per second each."

"It's a quicker way away from Station, way less stress on the thrusters," added NASA commercial crew program manager Steve Stich.

The original plan involved having the spacecraft perform a "dress rehearsal" for a "fly-around inspection" of the space station. That's something NASA is requiring both Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon to be able to perform before being certified, as part of its Commercial Crew program.

"The reason we chose doing this breakout burn is simply it gets the vehicle away from Station faster and, without the crew on board, able to take manual control if needed," Vareha explained. "There's just a lot less variables we need to account for when we do the breakout burn and allows us to get the vehicle on its trajectory home that much sooner."

During testing at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico earlier this summer, engineers discovered that a Teflon seal in a valve known as a "poppet" had expanded as it was being heated by the nearby thrusters. The seal was found to significantly constrain the flow of the oxidizer, greatly cutting into the thrusters' performance.

As a result, NASA is trying to be extremely light on the trigger button during its upcoming attempt to return Starliner.

When asked how confident he was in Starliner's ability to one day return to space, Stich appeared optimistic.

"We know that the thrusters work well when we don't command them in a manner that overheats them and gets the poppet to swell on the oxide," he explained. "We know that the thruster is a viable thruster, it's a good component," but the goal is to "not overheat it."

In other words, the space agency is far from giving up on Starliner, despite an extremely messy and potentially disastrous first crewed test flight.

NASA has openly discussed what it has learned from previous spaceflight disasters. During NASA's announcement that Starliner would come back empty last month, NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance Russ DeLoach went as far as to invoke the agency's fatal Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters in 1986 and 2003 respectively.

In short, Starliner's return to the ISS still appears to be on the table, no matter how far off such a mission may be at this point. That of course also depends on how successful NASA is in getting Starliner back on the ground.

The agency will be looking to "fill in some of the gaps we had in qualification," Stich said, adding that teams are already looking for ways to get Starliner "fully qualified in the future."

More on Starliner: NASA Engineers Were Disturbed by What Happened When They Tested Starliner's Thrusters

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NASA Will Attempt to Launch Boeing's Troubled Starliner Away From Space Station as Fast as Possible, Just in Case

SpaceX Violated Environmental Rules by Dumping Toxic Wastewater, Regulators Find

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A Texas agency has spanked Elon Musk's SpaceX for dumping toxic pollution into the water around its sprawling Starbase launch site in Texas.

Dumping Sludge

A Texas agency has given Elon Musk's SpaceX a slap on the wrist for spewing toxic wastewater into the fragile ecosystem around its sprawling Starbase launch site, according to CNBC.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) accused SpaceX of "discharging deluge water" without their approval in early August, adding to a total of 14 complaints against the aerospace company for polluting the surrounding environment.

The notice could potentially delay SpaceX's ambitions of launching more than two dozen rockets annually at its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, in addition to any plans for space missions at Cape Canaveral, Florida (where SpaceX has also received environmental complaints).

SpaceX responded to the Texas notice and CNBC report in a lengthy post on the social media platform X-formerly-Twitter, saying that the company has been careful about any "excess water" not coming into contact with "local groundwater." This all comes amid the fact that SpaceX has actually been working alongside the TCEQ and the US Environmental Protection Agency on the subject of the violation notice, its water deluge system, which uses water to cool "the heat and vibration from the rocket engines firing."

"Throughout our ongoing coordination with both TCEQ and the EPA, we have explicitly asked if operation of the deluge system needed to stop and we were informed that operations could continue," SpaceX tweeted.

CNBC’s story on Starship’s launch operations in South Texas is factually inaccurate.

Starship’s water-cooled flame deflector system is critical equipment for SpaceX’s launch operations. It ensures flight safety and protects the launch site and surrounding area.

Also known as…

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 12, 2024

Captain Planet

Besides this latest violation, residents and environmentalists have already complained about the impact of rockets launched at the Boca Chica site, which is situated next to a beach where endangered sea turtles breed and a critical migratory bird habitat.

Rocket launches at the site have scorched the lands, blasted apart the nests of migratory birds, and rained rocket debris on fragile flora, but Musk, SpaceX CEO, has been able to successfully yield his influence within the Federal Aviation Administration while running roughshod over upset officials at the US Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service, according to a July report in The New York Times.

In Florida, Musk and SpaceX are already facing complaints about how the company may potentially launch more than 70 rockets at Cape Canaveral, with a whole array of disparate stakeholders — residents to commercial fishermen — upset at the impact of that unprecedented, high number of rocket launches in a single year.

Any complaint taken far enough could, theoretically, forestall these rocket launches. Though — given the sheer tonnage of financially and politically incentivized parties lined up behind Musk and SpaceX — it would likely take an advocacy effort as ahistorical as Musk's ambitions to slow them, if there's even one to be had.

More on SpaceX: Elon Musk Slammed for Filling Orbit With Space Junk

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