Living in Space Facts

Living in Space Facts

Fun facts about the challenges of living in space.

  1. Peggy Whitson set the U.S. record for spending the most cumulative time living and working in space at 665 days on September 2, 2017. However, Russian cosmonaut Valeri Vladimirovich Polyakov holds the record for the longest single stay in space of more than 14 months (437 days 18 hours) during one trip aboard the MIR space station.

  2. To mitigate the loss of muscle and bone mass in the human body in microgravity, the astronauts work out at least two hours a day.

  3. Astronauts wash their hair with a "rinseless" shampoo that was originally developed for hospital patients who were unable to take a shower.

  4. When it’s time to sleep, astronauts are weightless so they attach themselves or use special sleeping bags located in small, one-person crew cabins so they don’t float around and bump into something.

  5. There are five basic human spaceflight hazards placed on the body during space flight and living in space. These can be summarized with the acronym “RIDGE,” short for Space Radiation, Isolation and Confinement, Distance from Earth, Gravity fields, and Hostile/Closed Environments.

  6. Astronauts and cosmonauts must regularly conduct spacewalks for space station construction, maintenance and upgrades while living in space.

  7. Although there have been refrigerators in space for test materials and experiments, astronauts living in space just received their first food-dedicated refrigerators towards the end of 2020. The “Freezer Refrigerator Incubator Device for Galley and Experimentation” (FRIDGE) was designed by the University of Colorado, Boulder and was carried to the International Space Station on the NG-14 Cygnus supply spacecraft.

  8. Astronauts living in space see the sun rise and set every 90 minutes because the International Space Station orbits the Earth at 17,000 mph (27,000 kph).

  9. Currently, a crew of six living in space goes through about 900 pounds of clothing each year. Since they are unable to wash all that laundry in space, most of the used, sweaty clothing is transferred to a cargo ship and burnt in the atmosphere upon reentry.

  10. After about two months of living in space, an astronaut’s feet will “molt,” shedding the outer, callused skin on the bottom of the feet. Due to the weightless environment, calluses have no use on the bottoms of the feet.