Since then, the applications of the AlterG treadmill have only multiplied. In 2005, Sean Whalen started a company with the use of his father’s patent, aiming to help rehabilitate people. Instead, Whalen’s son Sean stumbled across the prototype sci-fi device in his father’s garage. “Whalen then began to consider the use of air pressure as a way of applying a strong force-equal to body weight-to astronauts during treadmill exercise that would work better than the waist harness system.”īy 1992 Whalen had patented “gravity differential technology,” but the unloading treadmill never made it to space. Although aerobic activity helped, astronauts still suffered bone and muscle loss, and even a loading harness didn’t quite do the trick. He conceived the anti-gravity treadmill as a way for astronauts to maintain bone and muscle strength in zero-g. Since the International Space Station was launched in 1998 (and with its Skylab and Mir predecessors), space agencies have had to invent ways to keep astronauts healthy and ready for reentry after an extended stay in space.ĭuring his work as an engineering graduate student at Stanford, and later as an employee of NASA, Robert Whalen studied the biomechanics of keeping humans healthy in space. Astronauts need to exercise all the more in microgravity to avoid bone loss and muscle atrophy. The predecessor to the treadmill was the tread wheel, which was in fact used in 19th century Britain as a punishment for prisoners, and eventually outlawed in the early 1900s “after outcries of it being seen as cruel and unusual.”īut ISS is equipped with a treadmill because exercising in a weightless environment is important. It might be surprising to learn that ISS has a treadmill at all, as it is not necessarily the most popular piece of exercise equipment. In 2009, ISS was upgraded to a cheekily-named COLBERT (Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill) treadmill. Although novel, why produce a machine that lessens gravity, when more space program resources have been directed toward generating gravity in space?Ī decade ago, the first astronaut ran the Boston Marathon in space, giving a new meaning the phrase “space race.” Sunita Williams anchored herself to the International Space Station’s TVIS (Treadmill with Vibration Isolation System) treadmill, wearing a harness the entire time. ![]() The AlterG, or anti-gravity treadmill, as it is somewhat dramatically known, is said to simulate walking on the moon. When NASA researchers sought to replicate gravity in space, they developed a device that could alleviate gravity here on Earth. But the appearance of gravity can be manipulated through air pressure, to the benefit of both astronauts exercising in space and patients rehabilitating on the ground.
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