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In Space, No One Can Smell Your Many, Many Farts
Zero G makes America's bravest heroes fart up a storm and pee without
warning.
By
Erin Marquis
PublishedYesterday
Comments (10)
Image for article titled In Space, No One Can Smell Your Many, Many Farts
Screenshot: CBS Sunday Morning

Becoming an astronaut is a fairly romanticized career path, but there
are a lot of less-than-romantic aspects to working 50 miles or more
above the Earth’s surface. Case in point: just being in zero G makes the
human body do all sorts of embarrassing things.

A new story from the New York Times exhaustedly points out that living
in space comes with all sorts of “bodily indignities” which should give
even the most eager potential space explorer pause. It turns out, it’s
not just deadly radiation or muscle loss due to weightlessness
astronauts traveling to spots in our own solar system will have to put with:

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In microgravity, however, the blood volume above your neck will most
likely still be too high, at least for a while. This can affect the eyes
and optic nerves, sometimes causing permanent vision problems for
astronauts who stay in space for months, a condition called
spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It also causes fluid to
accumulate in nearby tissues, giving you a puffy face and congested
sinuses. As with a bad cold, the process inhibits nerve endings in the
nasal passages, meaning you can’t smell or taste very well. (The nose
plays an important role in taste.) The I.S.S. galley is often stocked
with wasabi and hot sauce.

These sensory deficits can be helpful in some respects, though, because
the I.S.S. tends to smell like body odor or farts. You can’t shower, and
microgravity prevents digestive gases from rising out of the stew of
other juices in your stomach and intestines, making it hard to belch
without barfing. Because the gas must exit somehow, the frequency and
volume (metric and decibel) of flatulence increases.

Other metabolic processes are similarly disturbed. Urine adheres to the
bladder wall rather than collecting at the base, where the growing
pressure of liquid above the urethra usually alerts us when the organ is
two-thirds full. “Thus, the bladder may reach maximum capacity before an
urge is felt, at which point urination may happen suddenly and
spontaneously,” according to “A Review of Challenges & Opportunities:
Variable and Partial Gravity for Human Habitats in L.E.O.,” or low Earth
orbit. This is a report that came out last year from the authors Ronke
Olabisi, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the
University of California, Irvine, and Mae Jemison, a retired NASA
astronaut. Sometimes the bladder fills but doesn’t empty, and astronauts
need to catheterize themselves.

While writing for Jalopnik has its ups and downs, I’ve never had to
catheterize myself while on the clock (though we are issued
Jalopnik-brand adult diapers during longer races and auto shows).
There’s much much more to suffering in space than just pee not peeing
and farts not smelling. Read all about the indignities of space travel
from the New York Times here.

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