9 minute read
TO GO BOLDLY
www.alltogethernow.org.uk DECEMBER/JANUARY 2022
All Together NOW! 15 TOBOLDLYGO!TOBOLDLYGO!
Advertisement
All aboard!
CALLING all would-be sailors. The Jubilee Sailing Trust (JST) has 80 fully-paid for places onboard its tall ship SV Tenacious – the only tall ship in the world designed to be sailed by a mixedability crew.
And one of the nine voyages taking place in 2022 is a Liverpool to Dublin adventure.
The places have been given as part of the JST’s partnership with the Stelios Philanthropic Foundation – a charity that offers various opportunities to young people, including scholarships to schools and universities and opportunities to support entrepreneurship.
Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, Chairman of The Stelios Philanthropic Foundation and Commodore of The Gustavia Yacht Club, said: “Disability should not act as a barrier to those seeking the adventure of life at sea with all its potential for exciting self-improvement.
“I am very pleased to be working with the JST so that as many as possible can share in the rewards that these experiences can bring to beneficiaries from our supported causes in the UK. ”
n JST: Tel. 023 8044 9108
. . . but is space travel a step too far for older people?
STARMAN: Shatner’s brief flight posed few health risks
AFTER Star Trek legend William Shatner became the oldest astronaut at 90, Professor Nick Caplan, ofAerospace Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Professor Chris Newman, of Space Law and Policy at Northumbria University, consider how well space tourism’s older travellers can expect to fare.
MORE than half a century after William Shatner hit our screens as Captain James T Kirk, he has boldly gone where no nonagenarian has gone before.
Aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard for a 10-minute sub-orbital flight, he broke the record set only recently by 82-yearold Wally Funk. She travelled on the New Shepard’s first crewed spaceflight in July.
Wally was one of the Mercury 13 women who qualified for spaceflight in the 1960s but never flew. With commercial spaceflight companies now taking older people to space, what is the potential physical and mental impact on them?
In just a few days in space, the human body starts to adapt.Astronauts’ bones start to lose density and their muscles become smaller and weaker.
While these changes aren’t much of a problem in microgravity, they can lead to increased risk of injury, such as back pain or bone fracture, when returning to Earth.Astronauts spend considerable time exercising in space to minimise these adaptations, which are similar to age-related changes affecting people on Earth, but happen much more quickly.
A90-year-old might arrive in space with their muscles and bones already deconditioned. This could present additional risks as their body adapts further when deprived of gravity. While we can speculate, not nearly enough older people have gone to space for us to know for sure how their bodies will cope.
Anyone like Shatner, who only spends a few minutes in microgravity, won’t need to worry about this too much. The greatest risks to their health are the mental and physical stresses experienced during launch, re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, and landing.
During launch, Shatner and his three co-passengers would have experienced vibrations resulting from the thrust generated by New Shepard’s BE-3 engine, equivalent to more than one million horsepower.
This would lead them to experience an acceleration or g-force of 3g. Essentially, this feels like three people the same size as you sitting on your chest, pushing you into your seat. During re-entry into the atmosphere, the g-force reaches 6g.
High g-forces can have profound effects on the human body.At high gforces, blood can be pulled away from the head, which can starve the brain of oxygen. This can lead to visual changes including tunnel vision, loss of colour (greyout) or complete loss of vision (blackout), and in some cases, a g-force-induced loss of consciousness. This can occur at as little as 3g.
However, during simulations of suborbital flights in people aged 20-78, older people were actually found to better tolerate the high g-forces during re-entry through the atmosphere.
When New Shepard’s engines switch off towards the end of its ascent, allowing it to slow down and start falling back to Earth, the high G-forces abruptly disappear and passengers feel weightless. Even in trained astronauts, this often leads to space sickness.
The lack of gravity means the position sensors in the ears (called our vestibular system) get confused and can’t tell if you’re moving, or which way is up or down. Older, untrained space tourists, who could already have vestibular impairments, may be more susceptible to space sickness.
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic – the spaceflight companies founded by Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson – are providing only brief glimpses of space. Nonetheless, they will make valuable contributions to our understanding of the health effects of human spaceflight among increasingly diverse groups of people.
Twelve disabled ‘astronauts’
COUNTDOWN: The 12Ambassadors ofAstroAccess’Flight 1 in front of Zero G Corporation’s G-Force One aircraft on the tarmac of Long BeachAirport. Below, playtime for the crew
FREEDOM FLIGHT: US army veteran and former Paralympian Centra Mazyck and, inset, Mona Minkara, assistant professor of bioengineering at Northeastern University, enjoying
life without gravity
MISSIONMISSION POSPOS
THE RACE is on to launch the first disabled astronaut into space.
Last year the European SpaceAgency started its mission to find a future disabled astronaut.
Now theAmericans have gone one step better by sending a crew of 12 people with mobility, vision, and hearing disabilities 32,000 feet above the earth to experience the weightlessness of space in a zero gravity aircraft.
“This represents an historic step in the mission to open space for all, ” said George Whitesides, co-project lead ofAstroAccess, an organisation dedicated to disability inclusion in space exploration for the benefit of all mankind.
Their ultimate goal is to fly one or more team members to space in the coming years.
“Each of our ambassadors brings incredible experience and a wealth of expertise to our team, added Mr Whiteside, who is also chair of the SpaceAdvisory Board for Virgin Galactic.
“We are only at the beginning of this journey, but I am already excited to see what can be achieved by removing barriers to space, inspiring the future generations to pursue careers in aerospace and other STEM (Science, technology, engineering and math) industries, and the benefit this will have on humankind. ”
The crew comprised disabled scientists, veterans, engineers, and artists who all experienced weightlessness and carried out a variety of experiments that looked at how space vessels could be modified so that all astronauts and explorers, regardless of disability on earth, can live, work, and thrive in space.
Computer scientist Sina Bahram said: “Floating in microgravity was the truest physical manifestation of pure joy and delight that I have ever felt in my life. ”
Anna Voelker, co-project lead ofAstroAccess, said: “Space removes the barriers between people; now is the time to remove the barriers to space itself.
George Whitesides, co-project lead of AstroAccess, added: “This successful flight was an important milestone in our mission to open space for all.
THE CREW
Sina Bahram is an accessibility consulta scientist, researcher, public speaker, entr founder of PrimeAccess Consulting. He in 2012 as a White House Champion of C doctoral research work enabling users w succeed in STEM fields.
Dana Bolles is a science communication previous payload safety engineer at NAS an advocate for the importance of inclusi equity, and accessibility.
Mary Cooper is an academic, champion below-the-knee amputee. She is currentl Stanford University pursuing a degree in Engineering & Computer Science.
Eric Ingram is the founder and CEO of S company de-risking space operations wit
return from epic voyage . . .
SSIBLE!SSIBLE!
suitesthat enable spacecraft to see and understand the area around them. Eric previously served as the President of the United States Wheelchair Rugby Association and has competed in the sport for over 15 years.
Centra (Ce-Ce) Mazyck is anArmy Veteran Jumpmaster.After a spinal cord injury during a routine jump, Ce-Ce became a public speaker for Disabled American Veterans (DAV) and a Paralympic athlete competing for the US Track & Field Team in javelin during the London 2012 games.
Mona Minkara is anAssistant Professor of Bioengineering at Northeastern University and leads the Minkara Computational Modeling for BioINterface Engineering Lab. Mona also documents her travels around the world through her YouTube channel “Planes, Trains, and Canes” . Viktoria Modesta is a bionic pop artist and creative director and performed at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Paralympics.
Zuby Onwuta is a Harvard-MIT trained innovator. He is the patented inventor of Brain control for BlindAssistive Tech, a solution that reads and responds to human brain waves and provides hands-free vision augmentation and reading assistance
Sawyer Rosenstein is a news producer at WPBF 25 in West Palm Beach and host of the Talking Space Podcast. He was the youngest ever member of the NASApress corps and covered the final space shuttle launch in 2011. He continues to cover Commercial Crew Program launches including the most recent Inspiration 4 launch. engineering at the University of Florida. In 2011, following in the footsteps of the Gallaudet Eleven, he was one of the first modern day Deaf NASAresearchers to participate in a Zero-G research flight as part of the Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program.
Apurva Varia is a Mission Operation Director for three spacecrafts – Parker Solar Probe, Interstellar Boundary Explorer, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter – and was the first Deaf mission director for an uncrewed mission at NASA.
Sheri Wells-Jensen is anAssociate Professor of Linguistics at Bowling Green State University, where her research focuses on social aspects of human colonisation, astrobiology, disability, and the relationship between language and thought. She is currently writing a book about disability and space.
