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!"

#Artemis2 #ASL #History #TIL #Nyle_di_Marco

@Her_Doing That is beyond awesome, and he is correct, I did not know that!!
@Her_Doing Have you got a reference on that, please? #interesting #motionsickness
Thanks in advance.

@franciswashere

Hi! I'm not sure what you need me to provide beyond the above - I put 'Gallaudet Eleven' into a search engine and the top three entries were a Wikipedia entry, a NASA blog post from 2017, and a book promotion post from Hatchette Publishers for 'The Gallaudet Eleven' by Kerry O'Malley Cerra & Christina Gerhmann.

I'm sure any of these can give you better leads than I can!

Good luck and have fun down those rabbit trails! 😊

@Sempf

I have learned there is a book 'The Gallaudet Eleven' by Kerry O'Malley Cerra & Christina Gerhmann that I want to add to my teetering TBR pile!

(There may be others! It was the first one I found!)

I am truly fascinated by the biomechanics of how this works - and exactly how NASA learned to compensate for it in hearing crew - and I hope the book might be more of a deep dive into that. 🤩 🙏

@Her_Doing diversity is a source of endless strength. you never knew what those who don't fit the mold of "normal" can offer us. there are revelations in our differences that enrich us all

@Yza

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!! 💯

@Her_Doing I’m sorry, I just fell into his eyes.

@Stephenleader

He IS gorgeous, isn't he? 😄

@Her_Doing I absolutely did not know that and I am glad I know it now. Awesome. Thanks for sharing this.

@CiaraNi

I am *thrilled* it has been so popular!!

I just post stuff *I* like and it means the world to see other people like it too. 🥰