There seems to be some confusion in the comments. The cosmonaut didn't spend 878 days in space continuously but rather over 5 separate missions starting from 2008.
And he will reach 1110 days once he returns from the current mission in September.
I am pretty sure this guy came to my french island in 1998 or 1999 when I was last year of high school (if it was not him, it was another cosmonaut who had done a very long stay, but I am pretty sure it was him). He came to visit my high school to give a talk. A close classmate, who was half Russian and could speak well the language, translated for us. Kind of cool :D
I had previously read that there was a point of no return for walking atrophy, somewhere before the two-year mark. Hope the medicine has improved, for this astrionaut's sake.
They have not. The astronauts have to exercise for hours per day (2.5 last I checked) in specially designed systems, but that doesn't even begin to compare to what we experience just existing under 1g. So they do experience substantial atrophy and are initially unable to even walk without assistance after getting back to Earth.
And if this can’t be overcome, it means any alien visitors of significant physical size after years of space travel would be rendered quivering bodies after landing on earth —that’s probably a good thing :)
More seriously it actually has really interesting implications for Mars and any other sort of low-g colonization. People who are born and live in only such an environment may simply be physically incapable of coming back to Earth in anything like a normal fashion.
Imagine trying to go to a place right now where suddenly you weighed 3x as much. In all probability, you would die without some sort of special assistance - probably of some sort of cardiovascular failure. If you're a 180lb male, it's the equivalent of strapping a 360lb weight suit on yourself, with the relevant difference that lying down wouldn't offer even the slightest of respite from the forces being imposed on your body. It also has interesting implications for sports, which are just going to be awesome in low g. An Earther would have a massive and tremendously unfair advantage against a Martian.
There's going to be some dramatic (and rapid) social, physical, and even evolutionary drift.
True mitigation would be spin-wheel sleeping and standing. Basically a centrifuge with spacesuits at the end, so they sleep/train in simulated gravity. They do not have that on the iss- although the snake-robot crane could do the job.
Here is an interesting and relevant context: there is a huge amount of evidence that Roscosmos is taking an active part in the war effort. There is a great source about it from Eric Berger of Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/06/it-appears-that-roscos...
Take that into account when reading news made from state press-releases like the one in the post.
P.S.: For the full context, the Roscosmos ex-boss also has had his own private military company for a while.
I wish they would go into more detail regarding the health effects. Eyesight, bone density, cancher risks, etc. I think it helps to be older though, slow cell divide and regeneration, slow down even "aggressive cancers"
> I think it helps to be older though, slow cell divide and regeneration, slow down even "aggressive cancers"
Are you suggesting that older people are less likely to get cancer?
My understanding was that cancer was mostly driven by the immune system's mechanisms for killing rogue cells failing. The assumption is that there's always cells doing things they shouldn't, it's when you fail to stop them it becomes a problem.
Currently reading 'A City On Mars', which takes a deeper dive into the effects of space on our bodies, as well as other caveats of settling beyond Earth(birth, disease, political systems, etc...). It is not comprehensive and that is because data is still very, very sparse for space operations.
According to Wikipedia astronauts that spent about 800 days in space have aged about 20 milliseconds less. But I'm not sure if that's the correct phrasing and usage of word "age".
Same in Polish. Actually, in my childhood, some of which was still under communism, "cosmonaut" was in use, "astronaut" came in the 90s, with Hollywood movies.
And he will reach 1110 days once he returns from the current mission in September.