Peloton Ride Goes to Orbit as Astronaut Jessica Meir Joins Robin Arzón From the ISS

The class opens with a view of Earth. Peloton instructor Robin Arzón introduces astronaut Jessica Meir, who is aboard the International Space Station, and Meir shows riders the planet from the station's cupola, the dome-shaped observatory astronauts use to photograph Earth. The view, she says, is magical and never gets old. From there, the 20-minute ride begins.

The class is free. Peloton has posted it on its YouTube channel and in the Peloton app, and CNET describes it as a ride that teaches viewers about exercise in space. Meir was broadcasting from the ISS when it was recorded, and the conversation reached a Peloton studio in New York.

Meir doesn't ride a standard bike. She uses the FERGO, short for Flight Ergometer, which CNET compares to a minimalist, high-tech unicycle mechanism with no seat and no handlebars, anchored to the wall. The reason is physics: in microgravity, pushing down on a pedal would send an astronaut backward toward the ceiling. To stay put, Meir wears a wide waist belt secured to rigid side struts, and her cycling shoes clip into specialized pedals with straps.

Meir has been through this before. During an earlier stint on the ISS in 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown, she and fellow astronaut Drew Morgan appeared in a short video about cardiovascular activity and what Meir called living happily in isolation. They showed off an earlier bike, the CERVIS (Cycle Ergometer with Vibration Isolation and Stabilization System), and a T2 treadmill that uses a harness and bungees to counter near-weightlessness.

The heart of the new class is why astronauts exercise at all. "We need the loading on our muscles and our bones to keep our muscles and our bones healthy," Meir says. Without it, she explains, astronauts would lose significant muscle mass and bone density, because in microgravity bones begin leaching calcium when they are not being loaded. Astronauts devote 2.5 hours a day to exercise, much of it on the ARED, the advanced resistance exercise device, which handles squats, deadlifts, bench presses and sit-ups. Meir calls it an "engineering marvel," and it can go up to 600 pounds.

There are lighter moments too. Meir drinks by forming a blob of water in midair from her pouch, flinging it gently and catching it in her mouth, which visibly delighted Arzón. She also describes the space toilet, built around a big pump that sucks everything down, and notes that the station recycles up to 98% of its water, urine included. Her line: "today's coffee is also tomorrow's coffee," or, as astronauts put it, "from toilet to tap."

CNET senior editor Laura Michelle Davis, a Peloton member who often picks Arzón as her instructor, took the class. She found it full of information about microgravity and the importance of lifting weights while floating, and full of engineering: a livestreamed conversation from hundreds of miles above Earth to a New York studio, ending up on her bike monitor at home. It kept her brain active, she said, and felt like her own intergalactic journey.

Exercise in orbit has a record of its own. Sunita Williams was the first astronaut to run a full marathon in space, matching the 2007 Boston Marathon and finishing in 4 hours and 24 minutes. Tim Peake was the second, running the 2016 London Marathon in 3 hours and 35 minutes. The Peloton class, free and on demand, is a way for anyone to get a taste of that routine from their own bike.