NASA's oldest active astronaut felt as sick as he looked shortly after returning to Earth this month.
Don Pettit and two cosmonaut colleagues came home aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on April 19, touching down in Kazakhstan to bring their seven-month International Space Station (ISS) mission to a successful close. (In Kazakhstan, it was actually April 20 — Pettit's 70th birthday.)
Footage captured just after landing shows Pettit looking pretty peaked — and that's because he was quite sick, temporarily at least, according to the astronaut.
"I didn't look too good because I didn't feel too good," Pettit told reporters during a press conference from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston on Monday afternoon (April 28). "I was right in the middle of emptying the contents of my stomach onto the steppes of Kazakhstan."
The camera didn't show any of this, a fact that sparked some worry among folks watching NASA's landing webcast: Was Pettit all right? Had he been whisked away to a hospital or something?
But there was no cover-up, Pettit said; rather, the folks with the cameras were just giving him some privacy while he was fertilizing the steppe with the remains of his most recent meal.
"They're polite, and they don't have a camera shoved in your face when you're in the middle of doing that," Pettit said today. "They cut away to give you a little bit of privacy when you're not feeling too good. Because, after all, nobody wants to be on camera when you're doing that."
And Pettit was familiar with this reaction; the four-time spaceflyer said that his body tends to respond poorly when reintroduced to the full force of Earth's gravity.
"Some people can roll off a [space] shuttle flight, and they're ready to go out and have pizza and dance," Pettit said. "Someone like me, coming back to Earth has always been a significant challenge. And even with a 16-day shuttle mission, that felt about like being gone for six months on space station. And that's just my physiology."
Pettit said he's feeling fine now and is continuing with his post-landing rehab, which will last another month or so. And the astronaut — who is known for his amazing off-Earth photography — is keen to leave our planet again, if NASA gives him the opportunity.
"Being an explorer of space is what seems to be my lot in life, and I'm ready to do it," Pettit said. "I know John Glenn flew at age 76, something like that, and I'm only 70, so I've got a few more good years left. I could see getting another flight or two in before I'm ready to hang up my rocket nozzles."
