NASA Astronaut Reveals The Weird Way They Sleep in Space — and It Doesn’t Look Comfortable

Peak relaxation is when you get home after a long day’s work and lie down on freshly washed sheets spread neatly on your bed. Well, one must thank the universe for the magical force that is gravity. Unfortunately, astronauts do not have the same privileges as people on the ground. NASA astronaut Sunita ‘Suni’ Williams once unveiled the glamorous way astronauts sleep in their spacecraft. She explained that there is no real sensation of lying down in space as on Earth while demonstrating what she and her colleagues do to get a good night’s sleep during a tour of the International Space Station docked on Earth’s orbit, per a YouTube video shared by NASA (@NASA). 

Williams, a former commander of the ISS, addressed the long-sought question about sleeping in space. “People always ask about sleeping in space. Do you lie down? Are you in a bed? Not really,” she gave the final verdict. She explained that it does not really matter what position they are in while sleeping. “There is no sensation of lying down, you just sit in your sleeping bag,” the 59-year-old American spacewalker said. While there is no bed, Williams ensured that the environment in the bedroom-slash-office is homely enough for the astronauts. 

Continuing with the tour, Williams demonstrated how she slept in the spacecraft in the phone booth-sized room. The sleeping bag was latched to the wall with strings to prevent it from flying all over the place. “You can sleep in any orientation. I have it sleeping feeling like I’m standing up right now but like you saw I’m on the floor,” she revealed. She also referred to the Sleep Station as a “little office” complete with a computer, some toys, books, and clothes. She did not, however, add context to the quality of sleep at the station. Interestingly, there were four sleep stations tucked in all four walls of the spacecraft. “So all of us sleep in a little bit of a circle,” Williams quipped in the video shared in 2012. 

According to the description, she recorded a detailed tour of the orbital laboratory in her final days as Commander of the ISS. Following her stint as the commander ended, the NASA astronaut was shuttled off to space on Boeing’s Starliner in June 2024 for a week-long mission. She is one of the two astronauts, Butch Wilmore being the other, stranded in space and are due to return by mid-2025. The spacecraft had returned to Earth without them following technical issues detected, including helium leaks and thruster malfunctions, deeming it unsafe for their return. While they await SpaceX to send over a rescue spacecraft, Williams and Wilmore have kept busy doing maintenance and repairs on the ISS. 

In late January, Williams stepped down from the space station for the first time for a spacewalk after seven months of remaining indoors. She performed some maintenance on the station, repairing equipment that control orientation, replacing a reflector device on an international docking adapter, and patching light filters on the NICER X-ray telescope, per BBC. They followed it up with a second spacewalk on 23rd January, this time with fellow astronaut Wilmore. Earlier in the video, Williams candidly revealed the one thing she misses doing most on Earth– walking. Similar to sleeping, she said that one does not need to walk in space but only float.