Now you see, NASA at least was smart enough to figure this out. They realized there’s no air in space. They predicted that sound wasn’t going to carry naturally through a vacuum, even if the astronauts flipped up their faceplates to cancel out any potential muffling effects.
That said, notice how they didn’t strap their astronauts to chairs and force eighteen years of lip reading lessons on them. I doubt this was because they were afraid it would be too dark to see in space. Once you get up there, technically speaking, you’re getting more solar exposure than anyone on Earth.
Can you imagine what would happen if astronauts tried to conduct a spacewalk using lip reading?
Space-Walking Astronaut: “Guys! Turn on my air!”
Astronaut Back on Shuttle: “What’s wrong with your hair?”
Space-Walking Astronaut: (bangs helmet) “My air! Air!”
Astronaut Back on Shuttle: (to Captain) “He’s bitching about his haircut.”
Captain: “Tell him to quit screwing around and get the heater repaired before we all freeze to death!”
See? It wouldn’t be pretty. A NASA dependent upon lip reading is a NASA full of frozen, asphyxiated astronauts slowly orbiting this fine blue marble of ours—a public relations nightmare, in other words. And in the midst of a media landscape already punctured by bits of combusted space shuttles, the last thing you want is some orbiting astronaut’s helmet (which he took off so his pals could see him better) dropping from the sky and possibly taking out a senior citizen.
So I figure Deaf Education could possibly pick up a few pointers here. It has been around a lot longer than NASA has, after all… Yet many of its employees still can’t seem to comprehend why lip reading might not always be the best way to go.
[Editor's Note: The original version of this essay was published in Bug: Deaf Identity and Internal Revolution (2007) by Gallaudet University Press.]
