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Fram2 astronauts Rabea Rogge and Jannicke Mikkelsen train for their upcoming space mission. (Credit: Fram2)

Don’t tell Neil Armstrong, but giant leaps for mankind may leave astronauts feeling a little queasy.

In a new experiment, aerospace engineers at the �鶹ӰԺ will work with astronauts to study how people experience motion sickness when they travel to space—with an eye toward reducing these sometimes debilitating symptoms.

The research is part of the , a human spaceflight mission that will orbit Earth from above its poles to explore these regions in new ways. The mission’s four-person crew will spend 3-5 days on-orbit aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. It’s targeted to launch March 31 on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida.

Torin Clark, associate professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU �鶹ӰԺ, explained that motion sickness in space is a common problem—although not necessarily one that many early astronauts talked about. An estimated 60-80% of space explorers have experienced at least some nausea during their first few days away from Earth. Astronaut Frank Borman, for example, vomited less than 24 hours into the Apollo 8 mission to the moon, creating a mess for him and his crewmates to clean up.

As the space tourism industry ramps up, those bouts of queasiness could become a more urgent issue.

Torin Clark

“In the past, most astronauts have been carefully selected by NASA, including many military pilots,” said Clark, who’s leading the motion sickness experiment for CU �鶹ӰԺ. “We don’t know much about how the general public will respond to these gravity transitions.”

Clark and his colleagues simulate those dynamics in experiments on the CU �鶹ӰԺ campus. The researchers, for example, spin volunteers in circles on a centrifuge machine the size of a room. They also put test subjects in a device called a “sled” that slides back and forth to mimic how a space capsule might bob in the ocean upon its return to Earth.

The Fram2 mission represents an opportunity to explore motion sickness in a real space environment. The mission gets its name from the Fram ship, which was built in the late 1800s and helped to carry early Norwegian explorers like Roald Amundsen and Otto Sverdrup to the �鶹ӰԺ polar regions. The Fram2 crew consists of Mission Commander Chun Wang, Vehicle Commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, Mission Pilot Rabea Rogge, and Mission Specialist and Medical Officer Eric Philips.

Throughout the mission, the crew members will perform a series of exercises at regular intervals. They will tilt their heads side to side and forward and back four times, motions that can stimulate symptoms of motion sickness. The crew will then fill out surveys, which Clark and his colleagues will analyze back on Earth to gauge how motion sickness evolves as humans spend time in space.

“We want to quantify the dynamics of space motion sickness: When does it start? How soon does it go back down?” Clark said. “We also want to understand how astronauts experience motion sickness when they come back to Earth because some research suggests that it might be worse than in space.”

Clark led a similar experiment during the Polaris Dawn mission, which launched last year with a four-person crew, including CU �鶹ӰԺ alumna Sarah Gillis. Eventually, Clark and his colleagues hope to inform strategies for preventing motion sickness in space. That might include improved procedures for administering anti-nausea medications or training exercises that astronauts can do on the ground to prepare for the rigors of space.

“This issue may not be as big of a deal for going to Mars because symptoms will dissipate over long-duration missions,” Clark said. “But for shorter, commercial missions, it can make people feel pretty crummy.”