Deaf Volunteers Helped NASA Send Its Astronauts To Space Safely

Most people have heard of the Mercury Seven, but few know about the Gallaudet Eleven, the team of deaf men who helped NASA prepare to send people into space.

In the late 1950s NASA worked with the volunteers from Gallaudet College, and with the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine, to understand how the weightlessness of outer space would affect their future astronauts, the space agency said. “These experiments help to improve understanding of how the body’s sensory systems work when the usual gravitational cues from the inner ear aren't available (as is the case of these young men and in spaceflight).”

In 10 of the 11 men, they lost their hearing when they were young to spinal meningitis. The illness damaged their inner ears, causing the hearing loss but also taking away the mechanism that causes motion sickness because it’s the movement of fluid in the inner ear that helps your brain balance you and interpret motion. The only other way those conditions could be replicated in healthy ears is beyond the pull of gravity.

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“We were different in a way they needed,” Gallaudet volunteer Harry Larson said in the NASA statement.

According to the space agency, researchers tested the men on a physical and a psychological level to find out how humans perceive and respond to certain movements like rotation and the heaving of sea waves.

“One test saw four subjects spend 12 straight days inside a 20-foot slow rotation room, which remained in a constant motion of ten revolutions per minute,” NASA said. “In another scenario, subjects participated in a series of zero-g flights in the notorious ‘Vomit Comet’ aircraft to understand connections between body orientation and gravitational cues.”

There hasn’t been a deaf astronaut yet, but there has been some progress in accommodating the hearing impaired in the space program. A few years ago, an astronaut on the International Space Station recorded a video message in sign language to be delivered to deaf students. Caldwell Dyson is not deaf but knows sign language, and she was telling the students about what it was like to be an astronaut.

“One thing I have learned is that deaf people can do anything,” Dyson said, according to the English subtitles. “The only thing they can’t do is hear. Maybe some day you can fly into space and live on the ISS.”

Now called Gallaudet University, the college where the deaf volunteers from the pre-spaceflight era went to school is hosting an exhibit called “Deaf Difference + Space Survival” to tell their story.

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