A related item to the post earlier this week about Congressman Frank Lucas talking up the Oklahoma Spaceport in his district: in an article in the Alva Review-Courier Lucas trotted out some statistics regarding spaceflight at a town meeting. “From my research I’ve determined that 40 percent of citizens who encounter weightlessness for the first time have the most sensational motion sickness,” he said. While that may apply to orbital spaceflight, I suspect the number isn’t nearly so high for people who fly on zero-g aircraft, either government or commercial, and may also not be applicable to suborbital spaceflight, where the zero-g experience will last on the order of five minutes. Any thoughts?
Obviously my opinion may not be as credible as that of a doctor or someone trained on the finer points of motion sickness, I think that the number of roller coasters and other rides, combined with the popularity of video games that involve lots of complex simulated motion, has probably innoculated many people to the problem, at least a bit. Think about it, car sickness used to be a big deal, now it is a rare person indeed who has the problem. When I joined the military, neither I nor most of my fellow soldiers had ever been on a ship, but no one got sea sick. I could be very wrong, but that’s my suspicion.
I have got to learn to edit before pressing submit. That post looks like an 8th grader wrote it.