Spaceflight and the human body: Astronauts on the health effects of long missions

As NASA plans years-long missions to the moon — and beyond — astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Andreas Mogensen, currently aboard the International Space Station, join Yahoo Life’s Rebecca Corey to discuss how extended time outside the safety of Earth’s atmosphere and gravity affect the human body and mind.

Video Transcript

REBECCA COREY: What have you personally found to be the biggest health challenge while in space so far?

ANDREAS MOGENSEN: For the month and a half that I've been up here, it's just a general stuffiness that comes from the increased blood volume to the head. You just feel a little bit congested constantly.

JASMIN MOGHBELI: I've been pretty lucky. I, thankfully, haven't experienced the stuffiness that Andy and several others experience up here. One thing I will say is I definitely feel the need-- we're scheduled to work out two and a half hours a day, and I do feel the need and the want to do that because we're not using our muscles regularly, as we would back on Earth.

REBECCA COREY: And how do you all keep physically fit in space?

ANDREAS MOGENSEN: We have a stationary bicycle, we have a treadmill, and then we have a strength and conditioning device. And so we do a mix between cardio and muscle strength building, exercises in order to maintain our muscle mass and our bone density.

REBECCA COREY: Being on the International Space Station, it's such a confined, isolated space. And to be there for months at a time seems like it would present a lot of mental health challenges as well. So what do you both do up there to keep mentally and emotionally fit while in space?

ANDREAS MOGENSEN: Maybe it's the professionalism, the selection of astronauts. Maybe it's the fact that being up here really is an incredible experience. I mean, I think we all feel incredibly fortunate to be up here. We enjoy each other's company. The work that we do is interesting.

We have an opportunity to look down at our beautiful planet in the evenings and in our free time. And so all in all, it's just an incredible experience. So it's not as challenging as a lot of people believe it to be.

JASMIN MOGHBELI: And as Andy mentioned, this is an absolute once-in-a-lifetime experience. And for me personally, one of the most challenging things has been the thought of leaving this experience not knowing if I'll ever get to come back. And it feels like time is just kind of flying by. And while I do certainly miss my husband and my daughters back home and all my friends and family, overall, it's just such a unique opportunity that I'm just trying to soak it all in.

REBECCA COREY: What's the biggest lesson that researchers are hoping to learn from you and your mission in space that could eventually be applied to keeping astronauts safe and healthy on even longer missions, like eventually, hopefully, a three-year mission to Mars?

JASMIN MOGHBELI: We're constantly learning more and more about the impacts of spaceflight on the human body. It's one of those things where you have such a small number in the grand scheme of things of people that have flown in space that it's often hard to pinpoint something as is this a causal factor or not? But one thing a lot of kids ask me is, oh, are you going to be younger than all of us when you come back flying in space? But I think actually, we find it might actually age us a bit more up here. So I think we're really still gaining an understanding of all those things.