Upworthy · 1 day ago

In 1958, Nasa Recruited 11 Deaf Men to Test Zero Gravity

When NASA needed to understand how weightlessness affected the human body in the late 1950s, every test subject became violently motion sick-until they recruited eleven Deaf men from Gallaudet University whose damaged vestibular systems made them immune to the nausea that grounded everyone else. These volunteers endured centrifuges, zero-gravity flights, and twelve days in a constantly rotating room, calmly playing cards on a choppy ferry while researchers around them grew too seasick to continue. "We were young and adventurous," one participant later reflected, but their contribution was far more than youthful daring-their bodies provided the essential data that made the Mercury, Apollo, and now Artemis missions possible. Decades later, most of the astronauts who've safely traveled to space and back have stood on the shoulders of eleven men whose names few have ever heard.