the.com/weightlessness
the body's vacation from gravity, where your spine grows and your heart shrinks in protest
means The state of experiencing no apparent gravitational force, so that the body and everything around it floats freely, as astronauts do in orbit.
from A plain English assembly: 'weight' (Old English 'gewiht,' the heaviness of a thing) plus the negating '-less' (Old English '-leas,' meaning 'without' or 'free from') and the noun-making '-ness.' So at root it simply names the condition of being without weight. The word only became truly useful in the 20th century, when rockets and orbit gave humans an actual place to be weightless rather than merely a thing to imagine.
- taller
- Astronauts gain up to two inches in orbit
- not zero g
- It's actually constant freefall, not absent gravity
- weak heart
- Hearts shrink without gravity to pump against
- puffy faces
- Fluids float upward, swelling astronauts' heads
- vomit comet
- Planes simulate it via stomach-churning parabolic dives
vomit comet — nasa's parabolic flight aircraft that creates 25-30 seconds of weightlessness per parabola
international space station — orbits earth at 17,500 mph where astronauts experience continuous microgravity