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Traveling in space looks like all kinds of fun, and in a lot of respects, it is—provided you can overlook a few downsides. There’s the loss of muscle mass, for one thing. Then there’s the decalcification of bones and the stress on the heart and the damage to the eyes and the changes in the immune system and the disruption of the genome and an actual shortening of your overall life expectancy.It was, in part, to study all of those biological problems that astronaut Scott Kelly spent 340 days in space from 2015 to 2016 (chronicled in TIME’s Emmy-nominated series A Year in Space). Now, just over three years after his return, the first tranche of studies into Kelly’s off-world marathon has been published in Science. The results are mixed — Kelly fared better than expected on some measures and worse on others. The overall conclusion is less ambiguous: space travel is exceedingly hard on the human body, and we have a lot to learn before we’re ready to start living on the moon or Mars.
For all of the hardships of living in space, Kelly’s telomeres actually—and unexpectedly—lengthened by an average of 14.5% when he got there. That’s an effect researchers on Earth have tried to achieve with telomerase, an enzyme that sustains and builds telomeres. But the results have been uneven, not least because trying to immortalize cells may cause them to proliferate uncontrollably—and malignantly. In space, however, the lengthening seems to come free of charge.But what’s free of charge in space comes at a price back on Earth. Almost immediately—within 48 hours of landing—Kelly’s telomeres reverted to baseline length and, worse, some were actually shorter than they had been before the mission.