“Coming home, it turns out, is its own kind of mission, and the part of you that watched yourself float for six months does not stop watching the moment your boots touch the tarmac.”
The reporting rests on flight surgeon notes, crew debriefs and memoirs. No published study, no sample size, no control for the fact that returning astronauts are debriefed into a shared vocabulary. Bone density loss and vision changes after long missions are measured. This one is a pattern in anecdotes, and the writing is doing more work than the evidence.