Astronaut Butch Wilmore doing good but having rough time adjusting to gravity, daughter says

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 Ma...