The Peculiar Truth about NASA’s Deaf Pioneers
Published in
3 min readJun 25, 2024
- Contrary to what some people believe, the space race did not begin during the presidency of John F. Kennedy. The first two men to leave earth’s orbit — Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union and Alan Shepard of the United States — did so just months after JFK’s inauguration in 1961. But President Eisenhower signed the law that created America’s space agency, which was born in October 1958.
- Before Shepard’s Mercury rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral, years of preparation and testing preceded his space mission.
- Scientists needed to better understand the consequences of weightlessness on the human body. Experiments were conducted. NASA enlisted a special group of men to help them in their research.
- Gallaudet University in Washington, DC was founded in 1864 in the midst of the American Civil War. Though a private entity, its federal charter for over 150 years states that it is committed to the education of deaf students.
- The college had several titles during its existence but has long been named for its first president Edward Miner Gallaudet.
- NASA recruited eleven volunteers from Gallaudet University for their experiments.
- Why deaf men? Scientists wanted to know how the loss of gravity in space might affect a person’s sense of equilibrium and…
