In Space, No One Can See You Cry

January 21, 2013 • Commentary • by

Astronaut Andrew Feustel always looks stoic without the ability to cry in space.

During a seven-hour spacewalk, International Space Station crew member Andrew Feustel couldn’t help but tear up. As he later found out, anti-fogging solution inside his helmet had gotten into his eye, and it stung like no other. The problem? His body wasn’t able to react how it normally would: by crying. Instead he ended up slinking in his suit long enough to get a spongy device to wipe his eye.

This story was just one of many reminders that much of what we are learning about space is coming through its effects on the humans who are living in it—that is, in the space station orbiting around Earth. Megan Barber for The Atlantic covers the rest:

Astronauts can, certainly, tear up — they’re human, after all. But in zero gravity, the tears themselves can’t flow downward in the way they do on Earth. The moisture generated has nowhere to go. Tears, Feustel put it, “don’t fall off of your eye … they kind of stay there.” NASA spacewalk officer Allison Bollinger, who oversaw Feustel’s EVA, confirmed this assessment. “They actually kind of conglomerate around your eyeball,” she said.

In other words, yep: There’s no crying in space.

Tears, in theory, shouldn’t hurt. We don’t know why, exactly, we cry, but we’re pretty sure that the action, evolutionarily, has a palliative effect. Tears should soothe, not sting. But we know as well that life in near-zero-gravity can have a deleterious effect on human vision – and one explanation for that could be fluids shifting toward the head during long-term stays in microgravity. It could be that space gives you a pretty wretched case of dry eye – and that sudden moisture to the cornea, particularly when it takes the form of (eeesh) “a liquid ball,” could sting rather than soothe.

So the next time you’re tearing up and mourning the death of the shuttle program, just remember: ISS work found that humans wouldn’t be able to do that in space.

The Atlantic
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Commentary Ticker

  • When in Rome… Make Better Concrete: How An Ancient Mix Beats Today’s Best
    June 18, 2013 | 10:40 pm

    From the Hoover Dam and the Burj Khalifa to the Panama Canal, concrete underlies the greatest of modern architectural achievements. But modern concrete, it seems, doesn’t hold a candle to Ancient Rome’s. A little history for you: the Romans were the first to engineer concrete in mass, and it was upon this concrete that they [...]

  • Google Wants Balloon Internet for Everybody
    June 15, 2013 | 11:06 am

    “Balloons. That’s right. Balloons,” says the voice of a young girl in a video for Google’s latest endeavor: bringing the world online with massive balloons. The initiative, called Project Loon, comes from Google X, the experimental lab within the company whose sole purpose is to dream up big, borderline insane, ideas. Google X created self-driving [...]

  • Watch Researchers Discover a Sunken Egyptian City
    June 13, 2013 | 9:36 pm

    Thonis, the legendary port city that served as an entryway to the Egyptian empire, was long considered to be a myth. The tales of its immense power and vast riches conflicted with the evidence of its existence—mainly that there was none. Cities of such grandeur do not typically disappear off the face of the earth. [...]

  • “I Am The Nucleus” and Other Bizarre Quotes By Kanye West
    June 12, 2013 | 10:06 am

    Kanye West says the darndest things. On his unrelenting quest to become his own species of hip-hop artist, he has established a reputation as irreverent, controversial, and unapologetic. Though he makes time for public grandstanding by claiming a US President “doesn’t care about black people” or interrupting the VMAs, he remains mostly quiet when it [...]

  • 50 Charities, 10 Years, $1 Billion Wasted
    June 11, 2013 | 12:38 pm

    In Holiday, Florida, sits a warehouse. From the outside, it looks like nothing special, but as a joint investigative report from the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting uncovered, inside is one of the most useless charity in America: Kids Wish Network. For every dollar it raises, a mere 3 cents goes [...]

  • RSSArchive for Commentary Ticker »

Trending on The Airspace