L-11: The rotating chair. if you don’t feel sick just by looking at it, then you have your chances to become an astronaut. We go through this ordeal to get used to the disorientation of living in space. The liquid in our inner ear helps our brains know which way is up by acting as an internal spirit level. In space the liquid floats and everything goes haywire. Space disorientation and space sickness is a real thing: a third of all astronauts feel sick in the first week of flight. The rotating chair aims to put us through the worst in advance so we don’t feel too bad when we are weightless. Certainly not my favourite exercise, especially since we don’t have the views from space to compensate!
