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Astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore is “doing good” but is having a “rough” time adjusting to gravity after his prolonged 9-month stint in outer space, his daughter revealed.
Daryn Wilmore provided an update on her father’s condition on Thursday — two days after a SpaceX capsule carrying Wilmore, 62, and Sunita Williams, 59, landed off the coast of Florida.
“He’s doing good,” Daryn responded on TikTok to a user who asked how her father had been adjusting to gravity since his return to Earth.
“It’s rough, but he’s a trooper.”
One of the most significant changes for the astronauts will be adjusting to not being in microgravity, which allows them to float inside the spacecraft or during spacewalks.
Muscle mass decreases due to decreased use and a lack of stimulus through exercise equipment, and bone loss occurs while astronauts are in microgravity.
“Without Earth’s gravity affecting the human body, weight-bearing bones lose on average 1% to 1.5% of mineral density per month during spaceflight,” according to NASA. “Astronauts also lose muscle mass in microgravity faster than they would on Earth.”
SpaceX successfully launched Crew Dragon 10 to the International Space Station from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.
The stranded pair traveled home with fellow American Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov as they finished their tour on the Crew 9 mission.
After the astronauts splashed back to Earth, they were flown to Houston, Texas for quarantine and medical evaluation.
Daryn said she saw her father the day he landed.
The 19-year-old posted a series of videos on TikTok describing her experience on Earth as she waited for her father to return home.
In August, the college sophomore posted her first video, explaining that they weren’t expected to return to Earth until “late February, early March” after their Boeing Starliner spacecraft thruster problems and helium leaks on what was meant to be a 10-day mission.
She said that she and her family are close with their father and that Butch’s unexpected extended stay in space was challenging for them to grasp.
However, Daryn also revealed she and her family were in “constant contact” with him while he was stuck in space.
In one of her February videos, Daryn also said that “there’s been negligence” that has led to her father being stranded above the Earth.
“It’s less the fact that he’s up there sometimes; it’s more the fact of why,” she said. “There’s a lot of politics, there’s a lot of things that I’m not at liberty to say in that I don’t know fully about.”
The 19-year-old posted the “final installment of ‘My Dad is Stuck in Space,’” saga on Wednesday since her dad was “not anymore.”
“I’m so happy. I’m so proud,” Wilmore said in the video recorded hours before her dad returned on Tuesday.
Daryn said she planned to make him his favorite dessert, pecan pie, and made a list of things to do with her dad when he reunited with his family.
She said that her dad is “going to spend the next few days going in, tests, lots of medical stuff, because they’re still technically part of the experiment of human spaceflight, and just get re-acclimated to gravity and the routine back here on Earth.”
After thanking her 36K followers on TikTok for their support and for following along with the saga, she said Hollywood should make her dad’s story a film.
“Hollywood, I think a movie should happen. I think a movie should happen. If you want to call me, I have ideas,” she said.
“‘Apollo 13,’ that’s a great movie. But do you know what could even be better? This movie right here.”
