Why Life on the International Space Station Sucks

It's been said that there's nothing nobler that humanity does than spaceflight and it's us. We're the ones that said that, just right now.

Sure, humans do a lot of great things, but we do a ton of completely awful things too.

The challenge of space travel forces us to pool together with the best of humanity, because space wants nothing more than to kill you in the most horrible ways possible.

After visiting the moon through the rest of the world decided that sitting parked in low earth orbit was good enough for humanity, but that  doesn't mean that our most recent, and greatest accomplishment in space.

The International Space Station- isn't any less of a wonder.  

Weighing in at 925,335 pounds- or 419,725 kilograms for nations who didn't land on the moon.

The ISS is 73 meters long and 109 meters wide. Aside from the earth, the ISS is the single largest human inhabited structure in the entire universe.

In fact,  

It’s the largest thing built by humans to ever exist outside of the planet.

But as awesome an accomplishment as the ISS is, the simple fact is that life in space is tough. Turns out humans are pretty badly adapted by evolution for living outside the earth’s protective atmosphere.

Who knew?

So if your dream is to become an astronaut, get ready to learn why life on the ISS absolutely sucks.

-Working Out, All the Time-

Humans evolved on earth, but in the last sixty or so years we decided that earth wasn't good enough anymore and just like the Jeffersons, we moved on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky. Sort of. Turns out though that trying to live somewhere you didn't evolve to hebetate comes with some pretty serious health effects.

On earth, we have the gentle but constant pull of gravity keeping us firmly in place and occasionally reminding us that flying  through the sky in giant metal tubes is blasphemy (animator, include a scene of a  plane going down here).

Why Life on the International Space Station Sucks

All that gravity had a pretty profound effect on the evolution of our physiology, and very quickly after starting their respective space programs; both the USSR and the United States discovered that fact.

Gravity's incessant pull keeps our bones strong as our body constantly reinforces them with calcium so that we don't collapse into a heap whenever we try to stand up. It also has a myriad of unknown effects on the way that blood circulates and even how organs operate, and we're still learning about these effects as NASA prepares for long-term human habitation of the moon, and eventually Mars.

If you don't like exercising, then space is not for you, because if you want to live in space you're going to have to do a whole lot of exercise.

Each day astronaut’s exercise for at least two and a half hours using specialized equipment meant to help them combat the effect of zero gravity on their bodies. Without exercise, astronauts start losing both muscle and bone mass because the body has nothing to fight against.

But it's not just becoming a smaller, shrimper version of yourself that you have to worry about because low gravity makes it harder for blood to get around your body, making you at risk of extreme fatigue and passing out.

Fatigue, loss of bone mass and muscles, and the threat of constantly fainting- the ISS definitely sounds like a place it sucks to live in.

But if you have a sensitive nose, you won't like our next reason why living in the ISS sucks.

-Recycled Farts-

Take in a deep breath. Odds are you probably smell whatever's immediately around you. But even if that scent is bad, you know it’s just not going to linger for long.  

If your brother starts getting a bad case of the bottom-end grumps, you know all you have to do is open a window and the stink is nothing more than a memory.  

Now imagine that you can't open a window.  Or, that you can never get fresh air.

That's the ISS.

One of the chief concerns of spaceflight is ensuring that astronauts have enough breathable oxygen, because after extensive scientific research man's greatest minds deduced that breathing is pretty important for keeping people alive.

But getting things into space is extremely expensive, so expensive that getting a few months worth of oxygen up to the ISS is simply a non-starter without bankrupting a small nation.

That's why the ISS uses state of the art oxygen recycling systems, which can reuse oxygen over and over again.  It does this by first splitting water brought up in resupply missions into oxygen and hydrogen.  That hydrogen is recombined back into the water using black magic or, science, we guess- which in turn means you can create more oxygen.

But that also means that you're going to be re-breathing the same fart for a very long time.  

Like Astronaut Scott Kelly- who spent a year in space- said in an interview once, smells linger on the ISS, especially because without gravity, scents can more freely spread.

But bad smells isn't all, because aboard the ISS everything- not just air- has to be recycled, and that means water... as in the water that you pee out. As another astronaut put it, yesterday's coffee is tomorrow's coffee.  

You'll be drinking so much of your own pee in space that you'll make Bear Grylls proud.

-Showers Can and Will Kill You-

Who doesn't love a nice hot shower? Well, on the ISS taking a shower is not just practically impossible, but also potentially deadly- as American astronauts found out back in the Skylab days.

During the early days of space flight when crews would be in space for a few days, they had no chance to clean themselves, and it was said that the smell of returning astronauts and cosmonauts was so strong that it was like running into a wall for the crews that recovered them.  

When the US put its first space station into orbit, Skylab, one of the things that NASA determined would be important was crew comfort, and so it included a sort of shower.

The Skylab shower consisted of a special curtain you could pull up around you which cocooned you in a small tube-like structure. Then you turned on water which shot down on you from above- above of course being an extremely relative term in space. You would then lather up and wipe yourself clean with floating water, before vacuuming it all up.

The problem though is that in zero gravity water behaves more like Jell-O than...

Well, water, and tends to clump together. Also, it has nowhere to 'fall' to, so it just sort of floats around heading wherever it last had momentum towards.  This proved to be particularly dangerous as large clumps of water could easily be inhaled or float directly over an astronaut's mouth or nose. Also, there was the ever-present threat of water getting loose and floating everywhere and on a space station jam-packed with delicate electronic equipment the last thing you want is an electrical short.

Skylab's shower risks were so bad that when it came time for the ISS,  

NASA said astronauts would just have to resort to wiping down manually. While many astronauts will attest that you can get decently clean in space by wiping yourself down with wet towels, the truth is that you can only get so clean when you can't run soap and water over you.

-Radiation Everywhere-

On earth, radiation is only a concern when ordering sushi fished up off the coast of Fukushima, or when one is trying to get the superpowers of a spider. Space however is pretty much lousy with radiation, and at such extreme altitudes, astronauts on the ISS don't enjoy as many of the benefits of the earth's  magnetic field to protect them as we do.

You'll pretty much notice immediately that you’re suddenly smack-dab in the middle of a cosmic radioactive shooting gallery the first time you close your eyes. With your eyes closed, you'll start seeing flashes of light like some sort of disco resurgence, but it's not terrible 70s music making a comeback- it’s the universe trying to murder you to death.

Stars, black holes, and all kinds of other celestial phenomena do science stuff all the time. A lot of that nerd science stuff creates radiation. That radiation then travels across the universe until it finds your soft, squishy body full of DNA to destroy. The awesome light show you're enjoying with your eyes closed is highly charged particles smacking into your eyeballs and tricking your brain into believing it's receiving a signal telling it that your eyes see light.

And the flashes are just from the radiation hitting your eyes- imagine how much more blasts the rest of your body and you can't even see.

But of course, the ISS is well shielded against radiation, but nobody knows just how well protected you would be in the ISS from a particularly energetic release of radiation by the sun or a nearby star. Even with low levels of radiation though, the fact is your DNA's still being cooked over weeks, months, or even years in space.

Why Life on the International Space Station Sucks

What does all that radiation do to your body?

Well, we haven't observed enough individuals for long enough who've endured long-term spaceflight to really know yet

Most scientists agree that astronauts have a higher chance for cancer, and maybe like a 0.01% chance of superpowers, but just how big a chance for the big C is unknown.

What is for sure though is that if the ISS's shielding ever failed or was damaged somehow, and a strong blast of radiation washed over it, you’d be cooked faster than popcorn on high.  

Speaking of cooking though, if going to space makes you hungry, enjoy your food while you still can here on earth because in space...

-The Food Is Terrible-

You can't really cook in space, at least not in the conventional sense- we're pretty sure most of our fans already knew that. Lugging up the supplies for making a home-cooked meal in space would be a pretty wasteful use of very limited space on cargo flights. Plus,  

How would you even keep pancakes from just floating off a pan?

Instead, all space food comes in plastic packaging, and while you may have an oven to heat it up, it's all pre-cooked. NASA does try to provide variety in order to keep morale up, but the simple fact is that pre-cooked meals  taste universally terrible, and even more so when the actual food you can serve on the ISS  has to be something that won't make a giant mess.  

Macaroni and spaghetti with meatballs is a staple item, but forget about a nice stew or lentil soup.

Condiments are available, though salt and pepper come in liquid form and we have no idea what that even means nor do we want to find out.  

The reasoning is solid though- salt and pepper in their normal forms would simply float away and get just everywhere. It's a good thing that condiments are available because you simply won't taste much of your food unless it’s slathered in pounds of condiments.

If you've ever seen footage of astronauts in the ISS, no doubt you've noticed they all look a bit puffy in the face. That's because without gravity. All the fluids in your head go on a free-for-all, floating around wherever they like. In turn, this makes astronauts congested, and if you've ever had a really bad cold then you know that unless you're eating wasabi by the spoonful, you really can't taste much.

Terrible food, radiation that will kill you, recycled farts, and showers that'll drown you- life on the ISS definitely sucks, which only makes us admire more the men and women who are even right now pushing the limits of the final frontier.

This article is based on publicly available information unless otherwise noted.