Astronauts Facts

Astronauts get taller when they are in space.

Astronauts cannot burp in space.

The heart of an astronaut actually gets smaller when in outer space.

In space, astronauts can cry, but their tears don't flow down their faces. Without gravity, tears form a liquid ball that sticks to the eye, gradually growing larger until it spreads across the nose to the other eye or needs to be wiped away with a towel.

Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name was Moon.

If you were to cry in space, the tears would form a bubble in your eye until it's so big it moves to another spot on your face.

On Hubble's last repair mission, astronaut Mike Massimino stripped one screw. It held a handrail blocking a dead instrument behind 111 more screws. The ground team tested a fix and sent up the plan: brute force. So Massimino, who later played himself on The Big Bang Theory, tore the handrail off by hand. The instrument he helped fix still measures starlight.

Hubble launched in 1990 with a $1.5 billion price tag - and a mirror ground to the wrong shape. The error was just 2 microns off, about 1/50th the width of a human hair, but enough to leave the telescope nearly blind. NASA became a late-night punchline. In December 1993, astronauts spent 35 hours across five spacewalks installing corrective optics in orbit. The images that came back were perfect.