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Nasa astronaut Anna Fisher, who made history by becoming the first mother in space, has warned many are unprepared for the rigours of spaceflight and the toll it will take on their bodies. Fisher said she was sick for the first two days of her mission on the Discovery space shuttle in 1984 and said she was concerned that people paying hundreds of thousands of pounds did not fully appreciate what might happen.

Speaking to The Telegraph, she said: “The one thing I am concerned about with tourists in space is people thinking you can just get on a rocket and just go into space.

“Your first moments in space are not always your best. I remember when we were in the shuttle and you are at 3Gs for the last two minutes or so, and it’s a little hard to breathe and then the engine shuts off, and boom, you’re weightless, it’s that fast.

“I could feel the blood rushing and in 30 seconds I was going ‘uh oh’, I am going to be one of the ones who is not going to feel good and I was extremely grateful that I had eaten absolutely nothing for breakfast.

The Apollo 8 crew were the first astronauts to report space sickness in 1968, and by Apollo 9 the crews were feeling so bad that their spacewalk had to be rescheduled. It is widely known that microgravity seriously impacts metabolism, heat regulation, heart rhythm, muscle tone, bone density, eyesight, and the respiration system.

In 2016, research from the US also found that astronauts who travelled into deep space on lunar missions were five times more likely to have died from cardiovascular disease than those who went into low orbit, or never left Earth.