This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

NASA's SpaceX Crew-8 astronauts, who returned to Earth late last month after spending more than two hundred days in space, opened up about their experiences in space and after landing during a press conference earlier today. The Crew-8 mission was one of the more unique SpaceX missions since not only did it face multiple delays for its return, but once the crew landed,

NASA flew them to a hospital in Florida to keep one NASA astronaut under observation for unforeseen medical issues. While the crew did not share any details about this member or their medical problems, other information they mentioned reveals the complex post-spaceflight recovery process on Earth.

Right off the bat, NASA astronaut Michael Barratt, the flight physician, reminded members of the press and others tuned in that the crew would not discuss the medical issue that one of them had encountered. "We're still piecing things together on this. And so to maintain medical privacy and to let our processes go forward in an orderly manner, this is all we're gonna say about that event at this time," he commented.

The conversation then shifted to how well the crew adjusted to life back on Earth. Their time in space had been particularly grueling since the Crew-8 mission was the longest duration crewed spaceflight mission flown on SpaceX's Crew Dragon. The delays were primarily due to Boeing and NASA evaluating the Starliner spacecraft while it was docked to the International Space Station (ISS). While Crew-8 was originally slated to return to Earth in August, it splashed down on Earth in October.

"I've been fascinated by, I'm a first time flyer, and fascinated by the readaptation. Big words. Um, like in, it's the little things. Like the big things you expect right, being disoriented, being dizzy. But the little things, like sitting in a hard chair, right," shared NASA astronaut Mathew Dominick. Adding that since he had not sat in a "hard thing for 235 days" and was part of research activities that required him to sit on a bicycle, his "backside" was "rather uncomfortable."

Dominick revealed that the discomfort of sitting in a hard chair also made him lay "a towel down on the ground outside on our patio and I laid down so I could be part of the conversation" during a family dinner less than a week after his return to Earth.

NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps added that "everyone's different and that's the part you can't predict." Since she and Dominick performed different experiments in space, Epps stated that "we don't know we're gonna respond when we return and how fast." According to her, "even just the weight of your head, in trying to hold it up. And you know some of the muscle pains that you'll have because you haven't held your head up in, what, eight months almost for us."

Another difference that Dominick experienced on Earth was when he tried to handle objects. The astronaut shared that while he knew that things would feel heavier on Earth than in space, the "weirdest thing" he experienced was "picking up something that I had on the space station all the time." After trying to pick the same object he had used extensively in space on Earth, "feeling it here on Earth was crazy to me." To him "not just the mass, but the rotation moments of inertia" that he was used to managing in space were also off-putting.