Multimedia:Sheri Wells-Jensen’s SETI Institute presentationLearn more about Mission AstroAccessOther work by Andrew LelandĪrticles:Sheri Wells-Jensen’s, “The Case for Disabled Astronauts,” Scientific American Take a look, explore and subscribe!ĭOWNLOAD BRAILLE READY FILE HERE ()Citations in this episode Plus, find other cool things we did in the past - like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Radiolab is on YouTube! Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive.

Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today. Production sound recording by Dan McCoy.Special thanks to William Pomerantz, Sheyna Gifford, Jim Vanderploeg, Tim Bailey, and Bill Barry Jeremy Bloom contributed music and sound design. And our reporter Andrew, who is legally blind himself, confronts some unexpected conclusions of his own.This episode was reported by Andrew Leland and produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, Matt Kielty and Pat Walters. We follow the Mission AstroAccess crew members to Long Beach, California, where they hop on an airplane to take an electrifying flight that simulates zero-gravity – a method used by NASA to train astronauts – and afterwards learn that the biggest challenges to a future where space is accessible to all people may not be where they expected to find them. And not only that, but that they may have an edge over non-disabled people. In this episode, reporter Andrew Leland joins a blind linguistics professor named Sheri Wells-Jensen and a crew of eleven other disabled people on a mission to prove that disabled people have what it takes to go to space. Since the beginning of the space program, we’ve always expected astronauts to be fully abled athletic overachievers who are one-part science-geek, two-parts triathlete – a mix the writer Tom Wolfe famously called “the right stuff.”īut what if, this whole time, we’ve had it all wrong?

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