It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel

February 4, 2019 2:19 PM

The assumption has long been that this [Astronaut] training is a necessity—traveling to space is a mentally and physically grueling endeavor. We need the strongest, smartest, most adaptable among us to go. But strength comes in many forms, as do smarts. And if you want to find people who are the very best at adapting to worlds not suited for them, you’ll have the best luck looking at people with disabilities, who navigate such a world every single day. Which has led disability advocates to raise the question: What actually is the right stuff?

...Take, for example, people who use ostomy bags. Right now, pooping in space is actually an important technical challenge. During takeoff, landing, and spacewalks, astronauts wear diapers. While in the space station, they use a toilet that requires a fair amount of precision and training to use. Astronauts have told all kinds of stories about rogue poop, or situations in which the toilet has backed up or generally gone awry. In 2008, NASA spent $19 million on a Russian toilet for the International Space Station. None of this would be an issue for an astronaut with an ostomy bag. “I could plug into the wall and just empty the container that’s been collecting,” says Mallory K. Nelson, a disability design specialist who uses an ileostomy bag—a pouch that connects to her intestine and collects waste. “I’ve moved the output location of poop, which creates a lot more flexibility in the kind of systems I can have. I could attach it to a space suit.”

posted by the duck by the oboe (21 comments total)

I love all of this. The first thing I thought about was legs. While having and being able to use legs to get around in a micogravity environment can be useful they're not strictly necessary. Lots of other good thing I didn't think of too, like the advantages of being deaf in an emergency situation. Pretty cool.
posted by runcibleshaw at 2:29 PM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]

Current launch systems involve rather high G loads, but the ability to perform your role in a high-G environment is basically the only hard physical requirement.

Restrictions beyond that does strike me as being mostly cultural rather than technical. A blind astronaut can't read current instruments, true, but that's only because the current instruments are all designed to be operated by sight. It's easy enough to imagine a cockpit where all the readouts are tactile instead of visual.

The arguments in this article about ostomy bags and zero-G movement are particularly thought-provoking.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:49 PM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]

runcibleshaw: Yeah, that was my first thought too - people with spinal paralysis are already adept at finding new ways of locomotion, zero g is just going to supercharge that ability. The lack of motion sickness in some people from the d/Deaf community was news to me, and it seems fucking bonkers not to exploit it. And amputees with specialist prosthesis, smaller space requirements and lower lift requirements! Blind crews operating on lower power requirements due to no need for lighting.
posted by Jilder at 2:57 PM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

The lack of motion sickness in some people from the d/Deaf community was news to me

It's specific to people whose vestibular system has been affected by things like spinal meningitis:

The Gallaudet Eleven, previously.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 3:02 PM on February 4, 2019 [10 favorites]

By the time humans visit another star system... by that time we'll probably already all become brains in jars, if not already uploaded to the cloud, and our exploration will be done by unmanned probes instead.

This is pretty much the same conceit that most war story science fiction seems to have (like star wars) where they imagine space combat as navy carriers with smaller fighter craft. Why would you ever put a human pilot in a fighter craft? A human can only sustain 9Gs briefly and needs complicated and redundant life support systems, and has a reaction time that is glacially slow in comparison to automated AI systems. Any human piloted fighter craft would be outmatched by a swarm of lighter, faster drones that can pull 50G maneuvers with 1ms reaction times.

The "hard" SF stories all have the messy work of combat done by expendable drones. Probably not very compelling for the cinema screen though...
posted by xdvesper at 3:28 PM on February 4, 2019 [6 favorites]

Restrictions beyond that does strike me as being mostly cultural rather than technical. A blind astronaut can't read current instruments, true, but that's only because the current instruments are all designed to be operated by sight. It's easy enough to imagine a cockpit where all the readouts are tactile instead of visual.

I don't want to rain on this fantasy too much, but you really want astronauts to have all senses available to them, even just as a diagnostic aid. So much can go wrong.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 3:31 PM on February 4, 2019 [9 favorites]

Plus, many people with disabilities who might want to go to space can’t get access to the pipeline that delivers so many astronauts: “Astronauts come via the military and that’s a closed door for disabled individuals,” Myers says.

At the same time, the military also causes a fair few people to become disabled, so maybe there's a small opening from that direction? Plausibly someone with a distinguished military career and a combat injury could be the first person to push that boundary because they would seem so fitting in other ways.
posted by jacquilynne at 3:33 PM on February 4, 2019 [13 favorites]

I always figured, in the modern age, that astronaut training was more of a "dedication filter" than anything else.
Space travel is still really expensive and you can't afford to waste the investment on a dilettante.
If you can persevere through the training, chances are you won't be totally useless in space.

(By training, I mean the generalized training, not anything you may need to learn for a specific function)
posted by madajb at 3:34 PM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

Taking advantage of a lowered incidence of motion sickness among deaf folks is interesting, though... in that case you don't want that extra information going to the astronaut's brain, because it's misleading/not actionable.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 3:34 PM on February 4, 2019

At the same time, the military also causes a fair few people to become disabled, so maybe there's a small opening from that direction? Plausibly someone with a distinguished military career and a combat injury could be the first person to push that boundary because they would seem so fitting in other ways.

Like Avatar?
posted by ZeusHumms at 3:35 PM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

The "hard" SF stories all have the messy work of combat done by expendable drones.

Niven had hard SF space combat but with ion engines, so accelerations are low and it takes days to figure out if you hit something. Space, it turns out, is really big.
posted by GuyZero at 3:46 PM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

Any human piloted fighter craft would be outmatched by a swarm of lighter, faster drones that can pull 50G maneuvers with 1ms reaction times.

We have those today and they're usually called "missiles"
posted by GuyZero at 3:47 PM on February 4, 2019 [7 favorites]

We just need new bodies purpose built for space. It's very human of us to try and twist our spaces to fit our needs, but it's more "life" of us to adapt and evolve to fit the spaces we want to occupy.
posted by GoblinHoney at 3:52 PM on February 4, 2019

The Claustrophile by Theodore Sturgeon.

An early take on the question of who's best suited to be an astronaut. I'm not going to say it's about toxic masculinity, exactly, but it's definitely about silly masculinity.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:53 PM on February 4, 2019 [5 favorites]

Hell, my body's pretty much disposable. I'll be the first to test the air on Mars.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:11 PM on February 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

We have those today and they're usually called "missiles"

Quite arguably, human pilots are already obsolete in atmospheric fighter aircraft. They're kept around as a sort of anachronism, and a testament to how institutions don't like to change until they're absolutely forced to. A near-peer war of any significance would probably begin with the end of supercarriers and manned combat aircraft, and end with the line between "airplanes" and "missiles" dissolving. (And, probably, nuclear winter.)

Though, if we assume that human nature is basically constant and unchanging, one could postulate space combat with human pilots specifically because the institution that fields them is run by pilots who don't want to accept their own obsolescence. Or maybe a (probably suicidal) religious/philosophical objection to turning combat over to AIs.

In the near term, I would expect to see a mix of autonomous, remote-controlled, and manned aircraft, perhaps with the manned aircraft directing the other ones over difficult-to-jam communications channels (i.e. you can't do it all over satellite from a bunker in North Dakota if your adversary can knock out the satellite backhaul). Detecting the aircraft that's manned and targeting it might be a critical tactic, which means you'd want the manned aircraft to have a performance envelope as close to the unmanned one, which might mean using a human pilot with unusual tolerances for G-forces and stuff. Someone without legs (which tend to inconveniently trap blood that you really want oxygenating your brain when pulling several Gs) might have an advantage. Honestly, the closer you get to "brain in a jar", probably the better.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:13 PM on February 4, 2019 [3 favorites]

Another relevant early hard SF story is Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain."
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:42 AM on February 5, 2019 [4 favorites]

The article includes a brief discussion of the Deaf Poets Society zine Crips in Space, which is well worth checking out in its own right.

I've been turning up to departmental meetings and trying to explain to my peers (and superiors) why disability perspectives inform my own views of being a scientist and make them better lately. Ideas from the Deaf community and autistic communities were the first places I reached from, trying to explain why I am fundamentally drawn to the concepts of plasticity, of individuals reacting to and learning to adapt to environments as best they can--and how much better might the insights of someone with a different experience of disability than me be?

I don't know if any of it sank in. These "diversity sessions" are only an hour, and most of the discussion was "well, it is hard accommodating for underserved groups; why should we bother/ why should we deal with the costs of doing so, especially when it is so awkward when outside intervention forces us to do so?" And I'm only a graduate student.

But I said it, anyway. And I'll try to go on saying it. Disabled perspectives on science, research, and all great frontiers are intensely important to working out how to do things as best as we possibly can.
posted by sciatrix at 8:10 AM on February 5, 2019 [6 favorites]

This is a pretty timely post, since I just finished reading Scott Kelly's memoir this morning. In it he briefly talked about working with Barbara Morgan, who originally was the backup candidate for Christa McAuliffe. Morgan assumed the duties of the Teacher in Space after the Challenger disaster and eventually became an astronaut, flying one mission with Scott Kelly in 2007. He talked about how Morgan's career path was different than the typical astronaut, and in some ways how that made her even more hard working. He didn't talk about it much, but he said she was an excellent crew member and was very prepared for the mission. Point is--we're all different and can bring unique perspectives and skills to any situation. I am certain there are disabled individuals who are well qualified to be astronauts and I hope they get the chance. I also know there are disabled individuals who are already working hard to advance science and technology and I hope that their stories get told too.
posted by lucy.jakobs at 9:14 AM on February 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm of the opinion that, due to the exorbitant costs of sending each pound into space, astronauts should be little people. Same functionality, smaller package, able to reach high shelves in a single bound in zero G.
posted by Soliloquy at 7:03 PM on February 5, 2019 [2 favorites]

I've always found it odd we tend to recruit astronauts out of the aviation pool, and not the naval submariner corp.

That said, I've read (and don't really feel like Googling up) a number of scifi stories that involve variations on this sort of thing, usually around the idea of legs removed as useless or feet replaced with hands and other reductionist eliminations of body functions not useful in zero-G. And Star Trek had Worf discovering sign language as an excellent communications medium in space. It's not a new thing.

Personally, if we are really going to commit to manned space travel, I think until we lick the fact that we're soft, squishy and full of water and not very resistant to hard radiation, hard vacuum. extremely high/extremely low Gs or near absolute zero/astronomically high temps, we shouldn't limit the pool of people interesting in dying horribly. As a knowledgeable buddy said, dying by exposure on Mars or the Moon is a matter of time not mechanism.
posted by kjs3 at 7:53 PM on February 6, 2019 [2 favorites]