I was at the U.S. Space and Rocket Museum in Huntsville, AL. One of the exhibits was a mock up of the Mir space station. It was a long hollow cylinder with a separate entrance and exit for visitors. Now, the cylinder was tilted - lower in the front than the rear. Okay. So I walked up the 2 or 3 steps to enter it.
The thing was stripped of most every thing. There was a row of cabinets mounted on the upper starboard bulkhead running the length of that compartment. The front of the cabinets would have been perpendicular to level, but they had rolled the cylinder maybe 5 or 10 degrees to the port side. And they had added a floor for visitors to walk on but it wasn’t level either. It was higher on the port side than on the starboard side. Again, maybe 5 or 10 degrees off. At some point looking around the interior (there was a forward compartment where, even though it was stripped of stuff, you could see where the seat for the Zero G toilet was and holes in the control panel where meters and switches had been) I found myself getting nauseous. I had to reach out, rest a hand on a bulkhead, close my eyes, and take some deep breaths. Once I gathered myself together, I exited it and after a minute felt fine.
Well, it didn’t take me too long to figure out what had happened; my balance organs in my inner ear (or is it middle ear?) were telling me A, my eyes were telling me NOT A, and my stomach was telling me of this disagreement. My reading tell me this wasn’t an uncommon situation for Apollo crewmen who started doing somersaults and stuff like that right after they unbuckled and changed out of their pressure suits. They had to wait until they acclimated more to Zero-Gee before they could do that sort of thing.
So, can I call this an episode of “Space Sickness”?
What you experienced is somewhat different than space sickness. Space sickness is caused by changes in gravitational forces, not simply by a disconnect between what you see and feel. Astronauts also experience it following extended training time in a 3G centrifuge when they return to regular 1G.
I’m sure that doing somersaults while weightless can make things worse by adding disorientation to whatever’s already happening with the balance organs, so I guess you could say what you experienced is a component of space sickness, if you want to fudge things a little.
Just another example of Motion sickness - Wikipedia . To be sure most of what you were experiencing was more a static disconnect between what your eyes saw and what local gravity was telling your ears. Compare that to the traditional full-on motion sickness which is a *dynamic *disconnect between what your eyes see and what your 3D motions and 3D acceleration(s) tell your ears.
I’m going to bet that had somebody taken vid of you walking through the exhibit your gait would have been unusually wobbly & we’d probably see you jerk yourself a time or two between your competing perceptions of which way was up. Even before you felt overwhelmed and needed to hang on until you reoriented.
Sounds overall like they made a pretty darn good exhibit. Shame they couldn’t have dummied up more interior equipment so it didn’t look so much like a derelict hulk inside.
The more I think about the bareness of it compared to all the full and seemingly cluttered walls of the ISS, I’m thinking someone at the museum gave some old rocket fuel tanks and some budget to some on staff welders (remember, the US Rocket and Space museum is at the Marshall Space Center/Redstone Arsenal) who weren’t busy and told them to make a Mir mock up.