I’m Gonna Be Sick

John French wants to make people throw up. But don't worry, it's for science!

John French wants to make people throw up. But don’t worry, it’s for science!

He’s a professor of Human Factors at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach Florida. He’s studying motion sickness, and the effects it has on astronauts. To do that, he makes his subjects sick by placing them in an optokinetic drum: a cylinder with a chair in the middle. The inside is painted with black and white stripes. The cylinder, or drum, then rotates around the subject and in a few minutes they start to feel the symptoms of motion sickness.

So how does this apply to space travel? And what other physiological challenges do humans still have to overcome to spend a long time in space? We take a trip to John’s lab to find out.