Radiolab - The Right Stuff

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

Since the beginning of the space program, we’ve always expected astronauts to be fully abled athletic overachievers who are one-part science-geek, two-parts triathlete – a mix the writer Tom Wolfe famously called “the right stuff.” But what if, this whole time, we’ve had it all wrong? In this episode, reporter Andrew Leland joins a blind linguistics professor named Sheri Wells-Jensen and a crew of eleven other disabled people on a mission to prove that disabled people have what it takes to go to space. And not only that, but that they may have an edge over non-disabled people. We follow the Mission AstroAccess crew members to Long Beach, California, where they hop on an airplane to take an electrifying flight that simulates zero-gravity – a method used by NASA to train astronauts – and afterwards learn that the biggest challenges to a future where space is accessible to all people may not be where they expected to find them. And our reporter Andrew, who is legally blind himself, confronts some unexpected conclusions of his own.This episode was reported by Andrew Leland and produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, Matt Kielty and Pat Walters. Jeremy Bloom contributed music and sound design. Production sound recording by Dan McCoy.Special thanks to William Pomerantz, Sheyna Gifford, Jim Vanderploeg, Tim Bailey, and Bill Barry Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.     Radiolab is on YouTube! Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past — like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe! DOWNLOAD BRAILLE READY FILE HERE (https://zpr.io/vWtJYGLn6UXm)   Citations in this episode Multimedia:Sheri Wells-Jensen’s SETI Institute presentationLearn more about Mission AstroAccessOther work by Andrew Leland Articles:Sheri Wells-Jensen’s, “The Case for Disabled Astronauts,” Scientific American

Hello, I'm Louis Miller. Today, we are going back into the past with a freaking awesome rerun that'll take us all into the future. Hope you enjoy. Yeah, wait, you're listening to Radio radio from W and Y Hey, I'm Lative Nasser. I'm Louis Miller. This is radio lab And today we're gonna start all right here. We go with reporter Andrew Leeland I'm just gonna hold my mic like I'm doing a karaoke. Where are you on planet earth? Where are you doing karaoke from?

I'm in Long Beach, California. Alright, so now I'm just gonna wander around talking to people gathering, gathering at all. At a place called the FBO, which is like a tiny private airport, just one building sitting on a giant tarmac. And so I walk into the building through these sliding glass doors and this is big bright room with a fish tank in it and these fancy chairs and it's full. Hi guys. Hi. Of people.

Hi, how are you? Good. There is film crew. How are you today? There's some family members. Hey Anna, can I come in and look, linger? Always linger. And the whole place is just sort of a buzz. Members, hey Anna, can I come in and look linger? Always linger.

And a whole place is just sort of a buzz. How's the team, how's the team feeling? Are we good? You seem good. Because today is, after months of preparation, flight day, it's this training flight for potential astronauts to experience near zero gravity. And so scattered about the room, are think you're, you're, you're, you're suit. Are these people wearing,

with the, with the jumpsuits? These jumpsuits, these flight suits. How you feeling? Good. Got your ticket. Yeah, my morning car. Got your flight suit. You're ready to rock.

Yeah, rock and roll. Some of them look nervous. Some of them. So we're going to play a game of cards. All right, a little table. This is a tradition before taking off for our flight. And these people are the people who everybody's here to see they're known as the ambassadors.

So you're one of the ambassadors? I should say that I was also wearing a flight suit. No, that's why I'm confused. Okay. I'm not. I'm okay. But you could see. I could be, because technically I'm disabled. Okay, take it away, I see. I am still arranging the deck. Don't worry, I'm not fixing it. And that's a braille deck. We're really excited. This is the blind crew. Because what this flight day is, is essentially an experiment. We're going ahead for the plane.

Okay, let's do it. This first step to see what would happen, if disabled people were to go to space. You ready to rock? Oh you got it, thanks man. You think you're blind today? And so these ambassadors. Yeah, are we good? Are we good?

Are all people with disabilities? Yes, I'm ready. They're blind people. What the hell are we doing? Oh my God. Deaf people. Let my first recorded words be. What the hell are we doing?

Oh my God. People who use wheelchairs, people who have prosthetics, who are here to be a part of this experiment. Go on now. Yeah. Sure, that's good. And I was there to simply report on it. Basically, I was there to go on this flight as a journalist.

Oh my goodness. I was amazing. But it's, you know, there is, I'm coming at it from an angle that I'm interested personally. So Andrew is a writer that we've long admired here at the show. And it was a few months ago that he told us about this effort to get disabled people into space that was just in its kind of early experimental phase. And he really wanted to go. He really wanted to be a part of it and observe it because what they were really up to seemed to be wrapped up in things he thinks about a lot.

Stuff I think about all the time, which is namely what does disability mean and how does the world look at disability and how does that view need to change? Well, outer space is not the obvious place that you would go to for that to answer that question, I think. I'm with you. Well, maybe just explain, like what were the steps that brought you to Long Beach to get on this flight thing you're on. So I'm legally blind and I'm getting blinder at a very slow rate.

I've been writing and thinking about disability and in particular blindness a lot more intensively in the last couple of years as I've kind of hit a new level of vision. And it's put me in touch with the world of blindness and I've been hearing about. One, two, three, here's the mic check and if I get excited I might talk like that. A woman named Sherry Wells-Genson for a while. I won't be doing much singing, I don't think so.

And it happened that Sherry is one of the key architects of this whole getting disabled people into space thing. This could really change a lot of things. And so it's humbling and exciting and overwhelming to be part of it. And also terrifying. Well, before we go deeper into all of that, there's a lot about you that I don't even know

in terms of your background and how you got to this point. So can we go back there first and then work our way back? Yeah, sure. So where are you from, Sherry? I'm from Temperance, Michigan. And where's that? So if you hold your hand up like people do when they're from Michigan, Temperance is right down by your wrist on the thumb side. It's a pretty small town, rural, and Sherry was born blind. But I was a tree climbing forest running child

I wanted to do everything, but she said most of her childhood felt like people telling me slow down be careful Stay safely on the ground let me literally control where your hands go and Please go sit down. Let me take care of you. It was suffocating. Oh, it was a lot But she said that she always had this place of refuge. Outside in the dark at night. In her backyard. In the quiet by myself. And I remember just having that sense of, wow, no eyes are on me now. This is just me and the world.

And I can move through it gracefully and quietly and intentionally and I felt powerful and I felt sleek and I felt like I had this I had the night on my own terms. It was all mine. And she said that even though she couldn't see the stars, she had that feeling. The world is so big and I am so small. That sense of awe. That sense of wonder. And she said it was in part those nights in her backyard that made her want to become an astronomer.

Yes. But when she would say this to people, they were like, oh yeah, yes. I could read the room and I knew what was going to work and what was going to be a problem. So she graduated high school, goes to college, discovered linguistics. She became a linguist. And then, so there's only one more sharp curve to go around to get where we are. Skip ahead about 14 years and I got a just email out of nowhere that says, we know we're

doing a the study institute, the study institute, that's what they call themselves. Which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence people. We know we're doing a seminar on cognition across the cosmos. Would you like to come out here? And I've gotten a hold of Sherry because she developed a class in astral linguistics,

which is basically the study of. What would a truly alien language be like? I are going to communicate with aliens. And after I picked myself up off the floor, I tried really hard to write a professional sounding, oh yeah, sorry, I believe I can fit that into my schedule and I'll be happy to return all the while I was screaming my head off. So she just starts reading anything she can find. Everything I can get my hands on about extraterrestrial life and something keeps getting repeated. And the thing that keeps getting repeated is that any intelligent life capable of developing sufficient technology to build a radio telescope will have some analog of human visual perception.

And I kept reading that and I kept thinking, really, are you really freaking trying to tell me that you could not have a civilization of blind people who could discover science and build a telescope? Is that really what you're saying? Because that is what you're saying. We are gonna have words. So I wrote a really cool paper about how a blind race

of aliens could go through all the steps of growing up and not being eaten by tigers and gathering food and discovering science and building a telescope. And so I presented this paper at a conference and we had this lively debate about some of the details. And I thought, I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm showing them, and they're getting it. And I could see how talking about blind aliens can make it better for blind people

on earth than making it better for all disabled people on earth. And I was so happy. And then we get to the end of the paper. And I felt like they were with me. And they believed that I could build a telescope. And then I turned around. They were about two steps down off of the little stage I was on to get back to the

seating area. And one of the people who had just agreed with me that blind aliens could smoke metal and build a telescope, leaps up out of his seat, comes running forward and says to me, let me help you down those two steps. And I felt like, oh, it's not gonna be that easy. I think that was a turning point for her, where she started to think maybe theory isn't enough. She did not believe I could get down those two steps. And instead, she needed to think about people, disabled people,

blind people in space, and what a blind astronaut would look like, and how that would work. Because you can't just do that without profoundly changing how disabled people are perceived on earth. And so in 2018, she sits down and writes this article for Scientific American called the Case for Disabled Astronauts. And the thing I like about it is, it's not this sort of bid for inclusion. It's not just about disabled people

going off and being inspirational. It's not, we're gonna give candy canes to disabled kids on Christmas to make them feel better. She's sort of making the case that like, actually, disabled people would make for better astronauts. And they should actually be given this like preference when you're picking your next flight. Why? Yeah, why? Well, I mean, Sherry likes to say that space is trying to kill you at all times. We're not evolved to go to space. Everything that we trust and depend on on Earth is just gone

to go to space, everything that we trust and depend on on Earth is just gone in space. There's just not there. I mean, space is, if you think about it, it's this weird, disabling environment. Right. And so her point is that people with disabilities have already, they're already kind of better prepared. Because the built environment on Earth is not built for you. It's built by and large for non-disabled people. So as you move about in your day,

you know you're going to have to work around things. Things are not going to be accessible to you. Something's going to go wrong. You're going to have to figure it out. That skill set is essential for the unpredictable things that can happen to you in space. You never know what the heck is gonna happen, right? The caution on warning panels lit up like a Christmas tree, fire warning lights, smoke warning lights, low voltage lights.

So one example is back in 1997 on the mirror space station. There was a fire. Low torch like intensity sparks line off the end of it. And even though it was a pretty small fire, smoke starts billowing. Caverns filling with it. You can't see the five fingers in front of your face, headed for a respirator, fuzzy peripheral vision, needing oxygen. Now, the astronaut support did get the fire out. They did a great job using the skill sets that they had. But it did take them 14 minutes to extinguish the fire. When it be handy if you had one of your astronauts really good at moving around in the dark and have a person who the dark doesn't bother.

Or another example, I don't think people realize that on a space station, it's extremely loud. So this is ambient sound of the International Space Station. Oh wow. It's quite loud. Yeah, that's pretty loud. So there have even been reports of astronauts having hearing damage after spending a long time in space.

But if ASL is your first or one of your fluent languages, noise doesn't matter. You can still communicate. Or imagine, you're out on a spacewalk, and the radio just dies. Well, might not be a problem. If you could sign. You know, and a lot of the time that the astronaut spend now with physical activity, you

know, you think about an astronaut's job as being very physical. A lot of the very physical activity is the two and a half hours a day they spend doing training. Without constant load on your body, your muscles will start dissolving. Your bones will start getting reabsorbed back into your body. Doing physical workouts so they can retain the muscle tone and bone density that they came up with. Luckily we have the capability to run here on the space station too. So every day they have to ride on stationary bicycles and strap into the special space treadmill. Well you don't have to run on stationary bicycles and strap into the special space treadmill.

Well, you don't have to run on the treadmill if your legs already aren't functioning. That's time they could spend doing anything else, like research. And so we are at the very beginning of space travel, of this whole enterprise of humans moving ourselves off the planet. But because we're at the very beginning of this and more and more companies and governments are gaining the possibility of putting people in orbit themselves. The question is how are we going to do that? If we're really going to be a civilization that moves more and more people into space, which we could do, right? I don't see any reason we couldn't do that. Then we have a glorious opportunity right now, right now, because we're at the inflection point right now to decide what kind of people are going to be welcome there and what kind of world are we going to build off planet.

And so does that world include only the subset, the very small subset of human beings that happen to meet the present restrictions on physical ability to get into space. Or do we want to rethink that and open up the potential recruits for our astronaut class? There's like a common sense argument that I run up against, which is that like, yes, like obviously women are just as capable of being astronauts as men, obviously women are just as capable of being astronauts as men because we know biologically, scientifically, in every way that women and men are equal in those ways. But then when you try to say the same thing about disability, it's like, well, hang on a second. Disabled means not able, right? Literally, the person

not able, right? Like literally the person can't do the same things. You know? So how do you like get past that seemingly like very common sense perspective? And that's not an argument about space. That's an argument about employment. That's an argument about parenting. The Etsy argument that people have when they allow blind parents to have their children removed. Like, oh, you can't possibly parent your blind. You can't possibly parent this child, you're disabled. And I'm just done tolerating that sort of stuff, right? Because that comes down to basic disrespect for other human beings and allowing your own fear

and your own headspace to contaminate the way you treat other human beings and allowing your own fear and your own headspace to contaminate the way you treat other human beings. But it's also an argument about space. I think when people imagine what it takes to pilot a space shuttle, they're imagining all the same things that you need to parent a child or do all the things that you just listed. Yeah, I mean, I guess like, yeah. I mean, I get it walking across campus.

How do you know where you're going? What do you think you're doing here? Is there a special program for you? Can I help you get somewhere? Right? Not, hello, nice day, but all the other things, right? And so space might be a specially dramatic case, but it's the same case. But the first step is not, hey, I know, let's send six disabled people

to the International Space Station. That's not the smart first move, right? The smart first move is to take a zero-g flight. And then we're going to be on the path toward something, toward making big change. What are we, what's going on in the plane right now? When we come back, we're going along Beach, California. We just want to be down. Radio lab will be back. Okay, let's go get a plane.

In a moment. Lulu. What the- Radio lab? Back with burgeoning space astronaut reporter Andrew Leland. So you, okay, but so how do we go from sharing like having this kind of amazing idea that seems born of for childhood and born of some real frustration and other things into this article. Great think piece, loving it, clicking to what the heck is happening

up down in Long Beach. Yeah, so Sherry put out that piece in the middle of 2018. Where's my name, my own business, one about 10 months ago, I guess, is by now? She gets a call from George T. White's side. Dun, dun, dun, who the heck is that? He's the former Chief of staff of NASA under Obama.

And also on the line was Anna Volker. The founder of Sci Access, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accessibility of the STEM fields to disabled adults and children. They told Sherry, we read your article, we've also been thinking about this stuff for a long time. And we're interested in staffing a parabolic flight full of disabled people of all sorts. Do you want to be a part of it? Yes, absolutely. So what happens then?

How does it all come together? What do you mean after the screaming? Why are you screaming like to explain to me? It's just that sense of somebody really believes, really believes and is really gonna, is really committed to this thing. So on October 14th, I went to Long Beach to see how this was all gonna play out. But also, I had to see it on the plane.

Something about my body shape, and the way this fits me, it feels much more like sanitation worker than astronauts, to me. So I get my flight suit on. I go gather with everybody. Hello Welcome to Los Angeles. Last Long Beach And after the welcome I start meeting everybody. There are NASA people. I'm a planetary scientist Scientists I meet George. Hey, George. I'm in New Zealand. To you, white sides. Just George, the white sides have long white sideburns. No, ma'am, he does not. How are you feeling this morning?

I'm feeling great. He's like clean-cut, Princeton guy. So exciting to have him ready together. And then I meet the crew. Welcome. The ambassadors. Yeah, you've a tour. I wanted to introduce myself.

I meet New Zealand. There were 12 total. Two of them were deaf. Tell me about what's going through your mind. Right now, I can just say I'm very excited. Six have mobility disabilities, which means they use a wheelchair or prosthetic and four of them were blind. One of whom's going with space. And so the plan for today is that all of us are going to get on this plane and do what's

called a parabolic flight. Right. And can you just explain what that is, actually? So really simply, you're on a plane. The plane starts to ascend. And it's somewhat violently up. like the nose is pointing 45 degrees into this guy. And then at like 32,000 feet the pilot cuts the thrust of the engines and starts to level the plane back out and it's in that moment because of physics gravity starts to get canceled out. And what you get is this little window of like 20 to 30 seconds.

Where you feel weightless. Where you feel like you're just floating in space. How does... Incredible, really. Well, I'm wondering what exactly is the question you all are trying to answer with this flight? The question, I think the question is, what is zero G-like for disabled people and what do we need to do to make it accessible? What problems are we going to find? So we're sort of out there looking for problems.

So if you guys wanna pick your sounds, then I can program them. So for blind people floating into their gravity, do we in fact need some kind of device that will help you always know where the nominal floor is? That's it. That's it. Because on these flights, the most important thing is, you always know where the nominal floor is.

Because on these flights, the most important thing is, can you float up and then find your way back down to where you started from without hurting anybody? So before the flight, the blind crew was testing out these different ringtones that might help them orient themselves because Cheri's like, we don't know what happens when you're blind in zero G. Do you just panic and roll into a little ball and cry? Like there's all these things they don't know. How much of an inconvenience are legs that you can't control in zero gravity?

How do you alert a deaf person that they need to get back to their seat? You can't stop on the floor and use the vibrations to help get attention. So what's ideal? Is it like a light? A little stop ticker thing? In some ways, the fundamental question is just what happens to you when you're disabled? In zur gravity. I mean we we don't know that until we do the investigation. And so Look at that plane. Sunday morning 10 30 a.m. We all bored this plane. Hey, oh, sorry. It's a normal plane except once you get inside, it's

like you've entered a tube of toothpaste or something. Oh, why is that? Well, in the main cabin, there's no seats and it's just lined with these like bright white gym mats. But in the back, there are a few rows of seats and so I went and sat down there with everybody. Well, this feels like a commercial airliner, right? It's trapped myself in, so I don't run for it. I know, we got middle seat. Ha-ha! And apparently, there's an area in the very far back of the plane

called the pain cave, where if you start to feel real bad, you can go there. Feel bad, like. Well, the plane is known as the vomit comet. Oh, right. Because of the duh. But anyway. Fear passed self. Because of the... duh. But anyway... Fear past self.

What the fuck were you thinking? Doors closed and pretty quick. I'm just trying to see if that's... Lane is moving. You take off. There we go. There we go. And we fly out over the Pacific Ocean,

north of San Francisco. Yeah, all right. Just, I'm just chilling. And they start bringing people out over the Pacific Ocean, north of San Francisco. Yeah, all right. Just, I'm just chilling. And they start bringing people out into the main area with the padded. Have a great time. All right, here we go. Oh, two minutes.

Everybody kind of takes their positions. So you said they did and sold them? Say again? But you said they did and sold them. They did and sold them. I'm positive. Blind crews checking on their sound system. I see one guy lying on a mat who uses a wheelchair.

He's got a strap around his legs. It's a hope being that it is tidied up to keep my legs spreading apart and doing a split. Everybody's getting ready. And then... Now we're heading off up the hill. The plane starts climbing. I can feel it. Oh my goodness. I'm gonna lay down. He get up to 20,000 feet, 25,000, 30,000.

And then, at 32,000 feet. Oh, yeah! We enter zero gravity. Wow! And suddenly, people are just floating everywhere, bouncing off the walls. And there are just all these bodies moving around in space. And it's pretty chaotic and disorienting.

But it's like, you get a peek into this other world, and then it's like... But it's like, you get a peek into this other world and then it's like... And in like 20 seconds, gravity's back. It's very annoying, I forgot which way the floor was, but I found it. If I was totally blind, I'm trying to imagine how I would be doing this. So the plan is we're gonna do 15 15 parabolas and as we keep going, I'm trying to get around and talk to people and observe things and I'm in a snow globe that a toddler is shaking every minute. I don't think a single person is doing an experiment on this plane, just the getting through

each problem is an experiment. And then I find out later that the blind crew, the sound devices that they brought, aren't working because it's too loud on the plane for them to hear. And every time I feel like I'm trying to get a handle on something somebody starts yelling Down, feet down But eventually I do make my way up to the blind group And they're like This is incredible sharing how are you?

Everything's going good? Awesome. It's okay. And do you have trouble bumping into anybody or finding the floor or anything? No. Oh, shit, I think we're, is it starting again? I'm gonna lie down.

And as we all float up again, I start to realize that people are figuring it out. Like they're all doing the thing. They're floating up off the floor and safely floating back down and it has happening over and over again. Eric is doing like break dancing disco moves. Monica is doing some, oh, my back down, my back down. And while we were up there, we also did these parabolas that simulated... Gravity on the moon.

I don't know what the moon is. I hate all the yellows on the moon. And gravity on Mars. My Mars. Oh, yeah. Mars is that blue? Mars is blue. And a certain point.

I've been kind of an emotional reaction to that. I just felt overwhelmed. No one's in the pain cave, no one's getting sick. Like they're able to do this. Here comes another one. Bonus seems extremely happy. The sherry looks honestly like a Buddha. Oh there's little diamonds of water.

There's water floating all through the cabin and little beautiful orbs. My legs are reaching the ceiling. I see CC, her mouth is open wide. And we're coming down. That's the level we're done. Good boy. Wow. So we make it back down to Earth. We de-plane, we have some snacks, there's lots of hugs.

That's pretty much it. So, okay, they land and like scientifically, what did the flight show us? Like, what did it prove? They found that between 70 and 90% of the times that an ambassador left their yoga mat or their station, they were able to return to it. And that's like, how does that check against their expectations or? I think they were very happy with that. And was there, was there, was it truly just like, can disabled people hack it in a space flight?

Well, but, or was there, was anyone looking specifically at, could they make better astronauts than non-disabled people? I honestly, I don't think that they were testing against non-disabled astronauts on this flight. Mm-hmm. I mean, it was, it was a really tiny mission compared to being an actual space, you know, like to being an astronaut.

But I will say that when I was on the plane, I did feel like there were some moments when that huge distance between what it takes to be an astronaut, to go on a mission to Mars and what was happening on this plane, that huge distance felt like it started to collapse a little bit. Like, there was one moment with Mary Cooper,

who's a Stanford undergrad who has a prosthetic leg. One of her goals was to remove her prosthetic leg and reattach it in microgravity. And so she did that test, which is fine. But then she also took it off, held it in her hand, and so she did that test, which is fine. But then she also like took it off, held it in her hand, and spun it, so that it was like spinning on its axis and kind of rotating, you know,

doing this very graceful microgravity balletic turn in space. And as her leg was just floating there between us, I just looked at her and I was like, you are totally an astronaut right now. We can do this. Disabled people can be astronauts. It's clear to me. Sherry Wells-Jensen again. And so I felt powerful and confident and joyful. Sherry Wells, Jensen again. And so I felt powerful and confident and joyful. But we didn't flick a switch and change the world. I can tell that by the next two times I went through airports, right?

You know what I mean by my airport situation, right? Yeah, wait, what's the airport situation? So after the flight, Sherry left Long Beach and flew up to Berkeley to visit some friends. And as she was getting off the plane and like walking up the jetway, these guys came up behind her and started directing her. Like, three guys behind me in the jetway going a little bit left, little bit right. That's like they were trying to, they had, I should have turned around and said, if y'all want to remote control car, go buy buy one because I would just like to walk down the freaking

jetway in peace. Could you stop? Could you stop? Could you please just, Jesus, could you please stop? Stop, stop, stop. Um, she's thinking like, I just did this thing that, you know, is this brand new, never been done before historical thing. And these guys still can't conceive of me as being able to like walk in a hamster tube. And so in some ways, what we've done is widen the gap between what's possible and what's expected.

Wait, you widened it or you narrowed it? I think we widened it because we pushed what's possible out of step. Like we went on this parabolic flight and it was like, oh, look at that. These disabled people can do that. But the expectations didn't change. Right? That gap between what I understand we can do and how we are still treated and what the expectations

honors still are is a horrible yawning gap. And it's bigger than I thought it was because the positive end has been moved up, right? So I know that I can be an astronaut. And yet when I walk through an airport, people treat me like a drunken golden retriever. It reminds me of the way you described microgravity, where like you push against the wall and you sort of go flying in the other direction. It's almost like this project in some ways like you gave this wall a big shove and instead of the wall moving like you kind of went tumbling. I think that makes really good sense. It was emotionally quite distressing, quite disorienting to me, to

return after this amazing flight and to realize the world remains unchanged. And I have to say, I had my own sort of complicated upside down experience of watching these possibilities get pushed out further. watching these possibilities get pushed out further. I am floating up from the ground. Like, around the end of the first set of parabolas, there was this moment where Eric and Sawyer who were in the mobility group sort of floated into standing positions. Right, so apparently in lunar gravity I can stand. So that's cool. And I started crying.

I've been kind of an emotional reaction to that. And I really didn't want to be crying. I can imagine doing this with people who can walk. And I felt really bad that I was crying. And... Why would you feel bad about that? It seemed to come out of the sense of liberation that like, you know, the wheelchair user, wheelchair, like, that, that, that, like, their disability had been erased and that's a thing to

celebrate, because that goes against everything that I'm trying to understand and sort of frame, and situate myself towards, right? Like? I feel like as I become more blind, it's really complicated for me because what I'm going through right now is a loss, and I'm experiencing it as a loss. It's a literal loss, but there's all this emotional loss connected to it too. But at the same time, I am recognizing elements

of blindness that are interesting. And like, it's tricky. Part of me wants to go with a sherry route of being like, and maybe even it's making me better. You know, and I'm not there yet, but at the very least, I don't want to see disability as a negative trait that should be erased. Let me ask you in terms of the flight.

So after Sherry told me about her complicated reaction to the flight. I started crying. I told her about mine. And then afterwards I was sort of ashamed like why was I crying and was I like? You know, do you think that that my reaction was problematic in that way? No No, no, no, that's different. Those people were genuinely feeling joy. They weren't being manipulated. They didn't walk away feeling like shit and you were happy. They were genuinely joyful about a new experience

with their own bodies which belonged to them. And I tried to be super fair about this. I think if there were a 0G parabola and I went through it and I could see for a minute, I could see light and color. Like I did when I was a tiny, tiny child, I would have been, I would have been somewhere else. I would have been elated. I would have been joyful.

That's a new experience is not a bad experience. I think that the harm comes when we use that joyful experience as a weapon against your ordinary experience. What does that mean? It means that that would not make my life as a blind human being less valuable, or it wouldn't mean that I was now going to struggle all my life for return to the zero G state so I could see again.

Like I don't want to use that experience of being different as explosives against my ordinary experience, which is not seen. It would be such a relief to have that experience without having to have people feel sorry for you later that it went away. Let me ask you one more question about you though about this gap that you've talked about. If the flight is actually making the gap bigger, then why are you planning future flights? Oh, it doesn't because the gap has always been there, right? It's not like I discovered it, right? It just, I just had a, I just had a particularly

vicious experience of the gap. And that doesn't mean, I mean, because these flights make it better, right? In the end, these flights are going to make it better. I'm not a patient person, but I'm willing to take the long view when I have to, um, that we are making things better by doing, by doing the work of gathering the data that we need, that will eventually destroy the gap. Reporter Andrew Leland Andrew just came out with a new book. It is called The Country of the Blind, a memoir at the end of sight.

And in a lot of ways it's really similar to this episode in it. He goes on all these different adventures with other folks who are blind artists, sculptors, activists, engineers, kayakers, philosophers. All his sight is fading more and more. It is beautiful, it's vulnerable, it's masterful. So I highly recommend you check it out. This episode was reported by Andrew Leland and produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, Matt Kilti, and Pat Walters, Jeremy Bloom, contributed music and sound design, production sound recording by Dan McCoy. Thank you to so many people, here we go, all the mission, astro, access ambassadors, including

and especially Sherry Wells-Gensen, Dana Bowles, Apoorva Varia, Eric Ingram, Mary Cooper, Mona Minkara, Sina Baram, Zubian Wuta, C.C. Mosaic, Victoria Modesta, Eric Shear, and Sawyer Rosenstein. Plus, additional thanks to George White'sides, Anna Volker, and Capusta, Jamie Moularo, J.D. Polk, K.D. Coleman, Shannon Finnegan, Sharon von C, April Jackson, Ebene Guy-Ton, and Annie Deakman. I'm Lula Miller.

I'm Lutz Fnazor, composed of the wrong stuff. This is Radio Lab. Thank you for listening. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abemrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Lachif Nasir are our co-hosts. Dylan Keef is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Pressler, Rachel Kusik, Akedi Foster Keys, W. Harry Forthuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutiades, Sinden Yana Sambandang, Matt Kielte, Annie McEwan, Alex Nisen, Sara Kori,

Anna Vasquez-Buzz, Sarah Sandback, Erin Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Sachi Kita Gimomoki. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, I'm Luis Vera, and I'm calling from Mexico City. Leadership's board for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Science sandbox, Simon's Foundation initiative and the John Tempt to Foundation. Foundation and support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred B. Sloan Foundation. your lab was provided by the Alfred B. Sloan Foundation.