Stanley John Whidden | What it's like to be a space tourist: get ready to feel awful

One of the first tourists to travel in outer space found it to be a bit of a buzzkill.
Sure, he loved every minute - even if he was physically miserable part of the time. The next wave of space tourists will need a high tolerance for discomfort.
If all goes according to plan, Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies will send two paying civilians around the moon and back some time next year.

"My advice to them would be to medicate early and often," says Richard Garriott de Cayeux, the video game developer and entrepreneur who paid $30 million to Russia's Space Adventures to spend 12 days aboard the International Space Station.
 His moon-voyaging counterparts have put down a "significant deposit," according to a post last week on SpaceX's website, but the total price and the identities of the tourists have not been disclosed.
The microgravity that permits what Garriott de Cayeux describes as "joyous, free-feeling" motion we associated with astronauts also takes a serious physiological toll.
"Body fluids stop flowing normally, which is why, in space, people's faces look puffy, and they generally have somewhat bloodshot eyes," he says. "It feels sort of like lying on a children's slide, head down. In the first days, you get very stuffed up and have a bit of a headache."
These symptoms can be easily remedied with common drugs, such as aspirin and Sudafed.

Another side effect comes from the floating fluid in your inner ear, which normally helps a person detect motion and stay balanced. In space, of course, it also begins floating.

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"So if you move your head forward, it will slosh to the back and make you feel like you're falling backwards," says Garriott de Cayeux. "There's a disagreement between what you see that you're doing and what your body thinks it's doing-and that often causes sea sickness."
That perceptual disconnect tends to last for about three days before your brain begins compensating. When you get back to Earth it takes another three days to readjust. This is another downside of space tourism that can be treated with drugs.  READ MORE.....