NASA pays man $18,000 to lie in bed for 3 Months

Andrew Iwanicki going through a series of tests

NASA pays man $18,000 to lie in bed for 3 Months

Dec - 01 - 2014 , 08:31

Little did he know that he’d actually be paid to do it. The very next day, he received an offer to join a NASA study that required him to lie in bed for three months straight, in exchange for a whopping $18,000!

“My bed is in the NASA Flight Analog Research Unit in Houston, Texas, where I’m being paid $18,000 to lie down for 70 days while NASA researchers study me,” he wrote. “I have been in this bed for three weeks now, and I will be here for seven weeks more.”

Andrew explained that the study – CFT 70 (Countermeasure and Functional Testing in Head-Down Tilt Bed Rest Study) – is part of a three-year effort to learn about bone and muscle atrophy in space. The team of NASA researchers have studied 54 people so far, and Andrew is the last participant.

“I had applied to the study a year earlier on a whim, assuming I’d never be chosen from the pool of 25,000 applicants and I’d never be able to halt my hectic life for 15 weeks,” he explained. But as fate would have it, he suddenly found himself with an empty schedule and an offer in hand.

“I decided that I needed a break,” he wrote. “So I put my life on hold and flew to Houston two weeks later. As I lie here, I can’t quite decide if I’ve struck gold with this scheme or if I am just a fool willing to do anything for a stack of cash.”

As it turns out, staying in bed is a lot more difficult than you’d expect. Andrew isn’t used to such long periods of inactivity. Prior to the study, he trained rigorously and even completed his first Ironman race. And now that he’s completely bedridden, he’s worried that his body might fall apart completely. His experience at the research centre has actually been far from pleasant.

Andrew was placed in a bed that tilts at a six-degree angle, which he says is extremely uncomfortable. “Every time I turned or twitched, I slid towards the headboard and, within a few minutes, was slammed against it with my neck turned sideways. To resist the gravitational pull, I laid as still as possible, but then the back pain began to set in.”