Lovely Peeps! Your cool #history for the day! 🚀
(You might want to watch with sound off. The music has words & I found it difficult to hear the music, read the text, AND focus on the signing.)
If you want to just enjoy the signing, the full text is within this post. 😊
"Everyone’s talking about Artemis II. The first humans to travel to the moon in 50 years. Historic mission.
But nobody’s talking about the #Deaf men who made it possible.
In the late 1950s, #NASA had a problem. They needed to understand what weightlessness does to the human body. But every test subject kept getting violently motion sick.
So they came to #Gallaudet.
Eleven Deaf men. Most of them had lost their hearing to spinal meningitis as children, which also damaged their vestibular system. Their inner ears couldn’t be overwhelmed. They were immune to motion sickness.
NASA put them in centrifuges. Zero-gravity flights. A rotating room for twelve straight days. One experiment on a ferry in choppy Nova Scotia waters. The researchers got so seasick they had to cancel it. The Gallaudet Eleven? They were playing cards.
Their bodies gave NASA the data it needed to send humans into space.
No #Gallaudet_Eleven — no Mercury. No Mercury — no Apollo. No Apollo — no Artemis II.
Sixty years later, four astronauts just flew 252,000 miles from Earth & came home safely.
They stood on the shoulders of eleven Deaf men most people have never heard of.
Now you know!"