'It was magical' - the first disabled crew to fly in zero-gravity

 This is a full transcript of 'It was magical' - the first disabled crew to fly in zero-gravity as broadcast on 9 November 2021 and presented by Beth Rose.
[Music]
SINA- You're sitting on the ground, you push off so much as with one finger and you're floating. This is what you see in Mary Poppins.
MARY- I was able to kind of let my leg go and just let it fly, had this moment of like flipping around my leg.
SINA- Magical. And I don't really use that word to describe things, but magical. [Music]
BETH- Wow! Doesn't that sound amazing? This episode we're talking about space travel with the disabled crew who got to experience zero gravity for the first time. Hello. I'm Beth Rose and you're listening to BBC Ouch. Emma Tracey is alongside me virtually too.
EMMA- Hello. Yes I am, but with my feet firmly planted on the ground, thank you very much.
BETH- This episode, Emma, is full of adventure and excitement. I got to chat to Mary Cooper and Sina Bahram from America, who are two members of Mission AstroAccess, the first disabled crew to go on a parabolic flight.
EMMA- Parabolic what?
BETH- Parabolic flight. It's basically where an aeroplane, in this case a Boeing 727, flies in a very steep arc shape otherwise known as a parabola, and that creates zero gravity.
EMMA- Am I going to get lost in lots of technical speak on this podcast?
BETH- No, I promise you, you're absolutely not. Mary and Sina are two very impressive people. Mary's at Stanford University studying Aerospace Engineering, and Sina runs an access company and specialises in computer science. But they are so full of fun and wonder about their trip, and they are very good at explaining all the technical bits.  By the way, they weren't just there to have fun, oh no, they did some pretty cool experiments too. Mary carried out tests to see what space would be like with her prosthetic leg, and did a few cartwheels for good measure.
EMMA- Cartwheels?
BETH- Yes, in space. I believe, or I hope, it's a lot easier. And Sina who's blind, found out how it would be to navigate while floating, and - you'll like this Emma - he took his braille display with him. Would it work in zero gravity?EMMA- Ooh, I've got one of those. So the dots pop up and fall down on planet Earth on a braille display. So would they actually do that in space, I wonder? And I'm kind of thinking that maybe being disabled in space might actually be easier than being disabled on planet Earth, because it sounds like it should be.BETH- Well, you might just find out in this episode. I spoke with Mary and Sina a few days ago, and Emma and I will drop back in later with our own thoughts. Ready?
EMMA- Yeap.
MISSION CONTROL- Five, four, three, two, one. Lift off.
[Music]
MARY- My name's Mary Cooper. I'm a current senior at Stanford University majoring in Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science.  A little bit about me personally. I'm a below the knee amputee. I lost my leg when I was super-little, I was born with fibula hemimelia, and I had my leg amputated when I was around nine months old, and I've just grown up walking on a prosthetic foot. It's one of my favourite things about me now. I grew up playing parasports. The first time I ever really like walked on my prosthetic leg was on the soccer field, and now I currently row at Stanford, which is a big part of my identity.
SINA- My name is Sina Bahram. I'm the President/Founder of a company called Prime Access Consulting. We're an inclusive design firm that spends a lot of time thinking about how to make digital and physical spaces more inclusive and welcoming to the widest possible audience. My background is that I happen to be blind, so that definitely influences the work that I do. And I am ABD in a PhD in Computer Science, so I spend a lot of time thinking about how not only to make digital worlds and digital things accessible through digital means, but also what the interplay is between that and the physical world that we live in.
BETH- You've both had a busy few weeks. Tell me what you've been doing.
MARY- Super-exciting for both me and Sina. We were both selected to be researchers aboard an inaugural zero gravity flight. We had a crew of 12 disabled individuals, and it was just the best crew you could possibly imagine. I think you see this a lot when you get members of the disabled community together, we all have this kind of resilient, strategic thinking like out of the box curiosity about us, and just getting all that enthusiasm in one room was so exciting. And then of course adding on top of that a zero gravity flight which is an incredible, thrilling experience. So we all went aboard a Boeing 727 that does parabolic manoeuvres.
BETH- What is a parabolic manoeuvre?MARY- Kind of an upside-down C or a hump. The plane does those manoeuvres, and at different points during the hump you experience everything from zero gravity to just light amount of gravity, less than we feel here normally on Earth. And then at other points coming out of the parabola you will feel high points of gravity. And so we got to experience both of those, which is very exciting. We mostly focused on the weightless or zero gravity parts of the parabola which simulates being in space. We were really focused on accessible space flight solutions of course to help us as the disabled community, but also because we think that it can benefit the entire aerospace community as a whole.
SINA- This is something that we take really seriously, because it's not just inclusive design, but also that this is a critical safety issue. If we're designing for all audiences, it means that even when a particular audience that may have the use of vision or hearing or a limb, if that is different for whatever reason, a safety issue, an accident that occurs, the attention being diverted. If these systems were designed with inclusive design principles, then that need not be such an important safety issue.  There was an astronaut a couple of years ago where a cleaning solution was released inside of the visor and so he was unable to see, and that could have been a complete non-issue if speech based access and other forms of vibrotactile feedback had already been built in from the beginning. So when we include these considerations upfront it improves the situation for everyone.
BETH- Is space travel or space exploration something that you've maybe always dreamed off since you were young?
MARY- Yeah. I am obviously studying aerospace engineering. I think anyone in my class would love to go be an astronaut, and so it's always been my thought. But I will be honest with you, I'm kind of the type of person that I don't really like to admit or say something aloud unless I know I can do it, unless I know that it's even an option. So I've kind of always like held it inside, I never really told people that, "Oh, I want to pursue being an astronaut", because I don't really like to see failure, or I don't want anyone to be like, 'Oh, she didn't make it', and I just didn't even really think of it as a possibility.  You think of the original astronaut, which was hard for even some military men to make it because the standards were so complex, and now they're starting to get a lot looser, starting to build more diverse, stronger teams, and I have started to lean into that idea. Mission AstroAccess has been a huge part in just giving me the power and empowering me to be able to say, "Hey, this is what I want to do, this is the journey I would like to pursue".
SINA- Mary, I'm grinning over here as you were talking, because the sentiments are exactly the same. I've wanted to do this since I've been four years old. But, like you said, the underlying assumption was, 'Oh, that's totally impossible'.
MARY- I think as disabled individuals we know we are really strong, like we go through so much and we're so resilient. But the process of getting there and the process of making up our mind and being allowed to say those words, is a really big deal to us, and Mission AstroAccess really gave us that power.
BETH- What did you have to do to secure your place on the crew?
SINA- There was a competitive process around the country. You could submit in sign language or in written form. If you submitted in sign language they asked that you captioned the video for somebody who's blind that might be reviewing. If you submitted a video, they asked that you provide captions. It was just really well thought out.
BETH- Were there nine of you that were selected to form the first AstroAccess crew?
SINA- Twelve total ambassadors. Some were pre-existing members of the team. It's really important to acknowledge folks like Dr Sheri Welson. Oh my goodness, I'm going to mess up Sheri's last name, I apologise. Sheri really has been in the project since the beginning helping guide, helping solve some of the interplays between all right we want to keep everything safe. But we're not subscribing to a medical model of a disability here, and we want to keep everything inclusive, but we are not at all interested in inspiration porn. Guiding that has been really critical.
BETH- But am I right in in saying there's never been a disabled astronaut or cosmonaut before?
MARY- NASA and from a government standpoint, they have never picked anyone with a disability before. They always have had these very strict standards that in some ways have kind of become obsolete now, I think. It has just been proven time over again that a more diverse team is a stronger team.SINA- And these standards aren't safe. I mean I really want to iterate this point. NASA's doing a disservice to humanity and also to astronauts themselves by not considering inclusion upfront. I think that what they have hopefully learned and taken away from this, what we've already known for decades, which is that when you get a group of people with diversabilities together the sum's greater than the parts, right?
BETH- Yeah. My question was going to be, is there any reason why a disabled person cannot be an astronaut, a cosmonaut, a commercial astronaut? Is there any reason at all?
SINA- Built enablism and the processes as they stand now. But other than that, no. Think about Mary and my answer to you, we both wrote it off when we were 4 years old, not because we thought we weren't able to do it, but because we thought that the obstacles in place by the gatekeepers would simply be a flat no. We had a deaf member on the team who wrote a letter into NASA asking to be an astronaut, and got a very formal response back saying we're not accepting deaf applicants. So that is something that we need to immediately put a stop to so that in 2030 and 2040 when there is a 9 year old girl wanting to do science experiments on Mars, her consideration is I happen to be blind, but it doesn't matter whatsoever, and actually I have a lot to offer to the table so they should be so lucky to have me on the mission. 
[Music]
EMMA- I am loving their enthusiasm. Now I know they mentioned that there hadn't been any government funded disabled astronauts, but has anyone else with an impairment been to space?BETH- Well actually, someone quite recently made the trip. Hayley Arceneaux who survived bone cancer as a child, and has an internal prosthetic, a titanium thighbone, she flew on Inspiration4. It was a commercial flight that went into orbit in September courtesy of Elon Musk's SpaceX programme. But also - and this is really cool - in the 1950s NASA recruited 11 men called the Gallaudet Eleven. Any idea what Gallaudet comes from?
EMMA- I have no idea.BETH- They went to Gallaudet University for deaf and hard of hearing students in America. They were recruited because their vestibular systems in their inner ears, which is connected to how we balance, they were damaged and they no longer experienced motion sickness. Perfect for space travel.  There's a great story about an experiment that took place off the coast of Nova Scotia. The sea was so rough the scientists begged for it to be called off, while the Gallaudet Eleven had a perfectly fun time playing cards.
EMMA- Love it. 
BETH- Honestly, if you like that story, you are going to love the way Sina and Mary talk about weightlessness, and how different they feel now that they're back on Earth.
[Music]
BETH - So take me back to Sunday 17 October. Mary, what was it like when you woke up that morning and knew that something rather incredible was going to happen to you that day?
MARY- We had such a busy couple of days getting ready for the flight, we were all pretty tired. We toured numerous amazing space companies, SpaceX, Virgin Orbit, Relativity, meetings with our team, a walk through on the plane. So you start adding all this up and these are events that require all your attention. But I remember waking up on Sunday and it kind of just started to sink it, it was like, 'Whoa, this is real!'. And the moment it actually finally sunk in was when they closed the cargo door on the plane, for me Sina, and we're sitting there.
SINA- Yeah, yeah.
MARY- And it was like, 'Wow, okay this is it!'. It's kind of one of those moments when you get strapped into a rollercoaster and you're like, 'Okay, there's no turning back now, this is the moment', and we all were looking around and, I don't know, I think you could just feel the adrenaline. It wasn't that adrenaline that you get before a drop on a rollercoaster like a scary adrenaline, it was more just like an excited adrenaline.
BETH- Aren't parabolic flights often referred to as the "vomit comet"?
SINA Yeah. That was definitely not an effect I felt. But also, this is not like a rollercoaster, there's no pit of your stomach falling out or anything like that. It's honestly the climb up the rollercoaster where you're experiencing some 1.8 gravities, and then you're kind of released. To quote the poem The Surly Bonds of Earth, you're just released from those and you're able to float. So that nausea thing was luckily something that I don't think too many folks experienced. I also have a hypothesis, which is that a lot of that comes from a disconnect between various sensory systems. For example, for me and some of the other members of the blind crew and folks who were low vision, because that disconnect didn't exist between what we were feeling and what we were seeing, I have a suspicion that that may mitigate this nausea effect.  It was truly a privilege and an honour. But also it was just like fun. Imagine everything we've said about persons with disabilities being problem solvers, and now imagine an emergent effect of getting 12 such individuals combined with all of the support staff dedicated towards a singular goal. That level of focus and heart and love and kindness and brilliance all in one place is truly something that I'll never forget. And honestly, it's addictive, like I can't wait to realise that in future endeavours because it's a really beautiful thing.
BETH- What was it like, that very first moment when you experience zero gravity?
SINA- Magical. And I don't really use that word to describe things, but magical, absolutely joyous.
BETH- Is there any way to describe it? Is it like being in a swimming pool, or is it just completely different?
SINA- No. Mary, I'd like your thoughts on this. That's what everybody says, it's like swimming. No. It's not that you're floating up, it's that you're no longer getting pulled down.
MARY- But a lot of people have that sensation because it is one of the closest things you can describe it as. I think someone on our team described it really well. As a child you used to pick dandelions and you would blow them and the white flakes would go off and you make you a wish. It felt like that, like being one of those flakes just in the wind, and you have really no sense of where you're actually going. It was like being a kid and experiencing something new. You don't get to experience new things very often.
SINA- Absolutely. Every assumption that you have. For example, being blind I'm very aware of my environment. I have to be, I can't just rely on looking over, 'Oh, the coffee table's over there', you're paying a lot of attention to your body, to am I brushing up against something? And for all of the things that have remained invariant in your life, which is to say gravity, down is down, up is up, for that to be released, for that constraint to be redefined, you know you could look at it as kind of scary.  That's not the emotion though. It was just sheer joy. You're sitting on the ground, you push up so much as with on finger and you're floating. This is what you see in Mary Poppins, it's just a beautiful, beautiful thing. And I think for all of us, at least for many of us, we've been dreaming about this our entire life. In some of the pictures I like 100% have my eyes closed, and it's not because they shouldn't be open because I can't see much from them or anything. It's because I just wanted to concentrate on that sensation of just bliss that came over during the experience.
BETH- What was it like for you, Sina? As you say, normally we've got gravity so that gives you one point of reference. But suddenly to have no points of reference, how did you feel internally and how did you sort of navigate your way around the aeroplane?
SINA- I was expecting disorientation, because intellectually I've been thinking about this. But what was fascinating was the causes of that disorientation. Since I don't see, my understanding of things is that they remain stationary and left is left, and unless if I enact a stimulus in the environment left remains left. Here it doesn't. So imagine the plane's moving round you, so all of a sudden I'm not doing "anything" but left is now down, and so that takes a little bit of getting used to. But left is down because you enacted a little bit of spin, and so you start learning what you can do to start controlling your attitude in space.  Honestly, the more disorienting part for me was when we would sometimes pull negative Gs. So what happens is you float upwards - not that negativity gravity is a concept it's just a colloquial way of referring to it - and so you are now floating upwards through no act on your own. You didn't push off from the floor, but you float up. That honestly was more disorienting that the zero G piece, at least for me, because once I started getting used to zero G, I immediately found it comfortable and easy for me to push off with less force and to use more finesse around it. But then when you're sort of floating up through no act of your own, that's something to get used to.  That is exactly the kinds of questions that we now know need some answers around orientation, around wayfinding, around multi-modal cues in the environment like sound and vibrotactile feedback, again so that somebody not relying on vision knows where they are in space, but also knows what their relative velocity and spin is in space as well as those just being cues in the environment for everybody.
BETH- Mary, what was your experience like? Did things feel different with your prosthetic leg?
MARY- Yeah. For me really getting on this flight it felt like something I knew in my mind that I could do. It was more getting on the flight to prove to everyone so I have this concrete example in this experiment to be like, 'Hey, I've proven that I can do it', it's not just in my mind. Each of us, me, Sina, everyone, came up with lots of different experiments or ideas to run with MIT. Each parabola we focused on some different activities. One of the main things for me was station keeping, which is basically just keeping your whereabouts and being able to move around the cabin, which is very important if you eventually want to fly sub-orbital all the way up to getting to the International Space Station. One of the main things I personally wanted to show was the station keeping getting around, but also that I'm capable of doing it with and without my prosthetic leg, which involves being able to take off my leg in zero gravity, and also get it back on. So that was personally a big win for me, I was able to do that on the flight.  And also have a little bit of fun. I think like Sina said, that's a really important part of the mission I think was just going up and enjoying ourselves. I was able to let my leg go and just let it fly, I had this moment of like flipping around my leg and doing cartwheels and everything. That was such an amazing experience.  Really for me I'd say my biggest win or the biggest scientific demonstration for me, was just being able to demonstrate that I could take care of my prosthetic in a similar way that I take care of it on Earth.BETH- You were going to work basically, it wasn't just all about fun. You had lots of experiments to carry out. I think what's really interesting to note is that you had to do them within kind of 30 second-
SINA- Less. 
[Laughs]BETH- Less, was it?
SINA- 20 to 25.BETH- Which is no time at all really. Or does time warp as well when you've just got that limited amount to achieve what you have to do?
SINA- I don't know about you, Mary, but it flew. I was like, 'How in the world are we done with this?', it just happened, I mean it flew. And then also at the same time certain moments in retrospect feel like they lasted forever. Overall, I wanted minutes. 
[Laughs]BETH- What sort of experiments did your crew carry out?
SINA- We did some vibrotactile feedback, so something that can vibrate and that you can feel to give you a sense of, for example, when the parabola may end. So imagine and non-verbal timer. By the way, this is important to understand, it is a loud environment. This zero G flight, it's not like a commercial flight, it is multiple times louder. The noise floor is so loud. We had audio beacons set up to do some experiments for station keeping, like Mary was talking about, but for those with low or no vision, and guess what, we didn't hear them. We couldn't hear them at all whatsoever. That's a learning.  So what does that mean? Do you then need to not rely on the audio being where you need it to be and instead project it, for example, through bone conducting headphones? Do you need to invert that model? Do you need to take the vibrotactile feedback and combine it with audio and put it on someone's chest or back where you have a lot of sensation and can convey information? There's all these questions that are now opened up and we need to explore.  One thing was, I used a braille display in zero G and also in 1.8 G, because we wanted to know how does a refreshable braille display operate at microgravity? Because it's important for communication, for writing, for reading. Also, how does it operate when you're pulling Gs? At 1.8G do the pins still raise up? Do they operate correctly? And it worked like a champ. That was just so cool. So these were the types of things we were doing. Then lastly, station keeping. When they go, "Feet down", then how easy is it to find the mat? What I was surprised at, and really happy with, is that many of us in the blind and low vision crew, we were able to find out mats even though none of the audio beacons we had set up we could hear whatsoever, but yet we were still able to find our mats and everything. I think that was just really a testament both to our internal working memory and all the way finding solutions we've had to come up with on Earth, and also a fact that it's not as hard as we think, the challenges may be different. So therefore we need to really use that data to inform what questions we're going to ask next and what solutions we're going to explore.MARY- Really stepping away from the flight the thing that resonated with me the most was that we really don't need many accommodations. I think in some sense we even over-plan, which is great. But it's so thrilling and such honestly a freeing idea to think that there's not that many changes that need to be made to have that joy, to experience zero gravity, to get to accessible design. I think it's not as big a task as people believe, and in some ways it can even be more economical, safer, and just a better design and overall experience for astronauts.
BETH- I think one of the experiments I read about was whether American sign language was actually legible in microgravity. Which I hadn't thought about before, but I guess as your body is moving around maybe signing becomes more difficult.
SINA- Yeah. We had some interesting report-outs from our deaf crew members, and I think they were saying that one of the experiences was signing where the interpreter and/or the other person was upside-down, so one person was right side up so to speak and the other one was upside down so to speak, what does that mean? Sign language is directional, so all of a sudden you're needing to interpret in a different way. I think that combined with as you are signing obviously you're imparting motion, so I know those considerations came up and they tried it a little bit to see what needs to happen. One of the ideas that was floating was it doesn't make sense to have a drone that does very easy station keeping that is displaying the sign language, and then can immediately detect you and then be directionally invariant, because well if it knows you're "upside down" then it can invert what it's displaying. That's not hard at all, right?
MARY- To touch on the deaf group, I personally have a lot of excitement around American sign language and its usage in the aerospace community. We were very lucky to have on our mission Cady Coleman who is an astronaut herself, and one of the things that she talked about is that it is a lot louder than you think. She recounted going to bed and it being super-loud every single night. Cady shared too that they have hand signals that they would use. But you might as well adapt American sign language which is a great way to communicate with your hands. All astronauts right now are required to be fluent in different languages, and I think American sign language, even if it's not completely fluent, would be a great addition just for safety redundancy.
BETH- Have you now come back from this flight with many more ideas for experiments that you want to try out next time?
SINA- 100%.
MARY- Yes. 1000%.
SINA- 1000%.
MARY- That's kind of the cool thing, this is really just the beginning. Coming out of that flight we all had thousands of ideas just bouncing off the walls of when we get to go again, what we want to change, how we want to do it, who we want to include, and that's so exiting.
BETH- Sina, is there anything that you really want to try out next time?
SINA- I absolutely want to solve the sonification of a gyroscope. I want something on my body that either through sound or vibrotactile feedback always gives me a sense of directionality. There's already been research on this here on Earth, there was an experiment where some subjects were given a belt that always vibrated towards north, always, always, always. Then they went around their daily life for days, weeks, months. Then they took the belt off, and when they did they had a residual effect of always knowing where north was. Really fascinating stuff.  We're learning more about how birds do this, and about how other animals in the animal kingdom do these kinds of things, and this is just fascinating to me to understand that, because there is nothing that is specific about blind people there. All of a sudden that is built as part of your flight suit, and that helps absolutely everyone. So then Mary, for example, Mary can see. She'll be looking at something and doesn't need to glance up to know that for whatever reason she's actually experiencing a little bit of spin because her left hip is vibrating a bit.  This is the kind of stuff that we keep coming back to, the word accommodations was used earlier, but it's not, these are considerations that are proper inclusive design. We need to get away from thinking of this as that which is done in excess of or some extra consideration. These are necessary considerations that we simply haven't been making yet because we already know the benefits that are going to come out of it. One of those most amazing benefits is also increasing the diversity of the candidates that can then help us propel into space as an interplanetary species.

BETH- It feels a bit like there's a really positive space race happening once more.
SINA- Yes.
BETH- Because as you mentioned earlier, there's the commercial space flights. The European Space Agency are trying to recruit between four and six para astronauts. Are there any plans for the two of you with AstroAccess, are you going to get to do a flight again?
MARY- I think AstroAccess is a lifelong mission, so 1000% there's a future for us there. I think all of us are coming off the high of completing the first mission, and like I said, those ideas are everywhere right now and we'll sort through them and then come up with the best team focused idea and the best next team focused mission. AstroAccess is a family and so no matter what they're stuck with us!SINA- That's right. Here-here.
BETH- Sina, do you think one day there's hopes there might be, I was going to say a full mission, or whether there might be integrated missions with other companies?
SINA- I absolutely want that to be reality, and I think so many other folks do as well. We were touring companies and interacting with folks that are working, like you said, at competing agencies, and they didn't view inclusion as one point of competition. They came together to actually figure these things out, to learn more, and to weave it in as an industry. We spend so much time here on Earth with inefficiencies when it comes to accessibility, and to see this level of there's some made up words like cooperatition or things like that. I mean these folks are living those values, and just to go to see that in such a competitive space where the stakes are so high, and then to say, "Yeah but you know what, this helps everybody. Rising tide raises all ships. They're living that", and I think that's honestly what spoke to me.  So yeah, I absolutely think that Mary and I are going to be hanging out together in the future one way or another, and in orbit is going to be one of those places. I just can't wait to do what it takes to manifest that in the world. I will say the feeling, it really has been transcendent. I don't know about you, Mary, but I gave a conference talk the next day, and the way that I was discussing certain things it was different. I hope that feeling never goes away as long as I live, and I really doubt that it will.MARY- I 1000% feel different. Every single night I lie in bed and I try and remember that feeling of complete weightlessness, I close my eyes and you can feel it a bit. It's almost kind of like when you go on a boat or you're on a ship for a bit and you kind of get used to the rocking, and then you get on land and you still feel the rocking. You can still kind of remember it just like a daze in your memory, and it's a feeling I know I'll be chasing for a long time.BETH- I really loved chatting to Sina and Mary, it was so fascinating.[Music]If you liked that or want to find out more, you can always contact the BBC Ouch team. You can find us on Twitter @bbcouch, you can search BBC Ouch on Facebook, and also you can email us ouch@bbc.co.uk Speak to you soon.[Music]