The UK Space Agency and space startup Vast just signed an agreement to send Paralympic sprinter and below-knee amputee John McFall into orbit as early as 2027. Most coverage framed it as a victory for inclusion. As a space health researcher, I think something far more interesting happened.
For 70 years, spaceflight has assumed a rigid archetype: a healthy white man with a military background. The assumption was that physical uniformity minimised risk. As we prepare for Mars , the evidence increasingly suggests the opposite .
Star Trek understood this decades ago: exploration rewards difference. The further you travel into uncertainty, the more kinds of human experience you need. It debuted in 1966 with a Black female communications officer, a Japanese helmsman, a Russian navigator, a biracial Vulcan, and a captain who made mistakes and felt his humanity down to the last drop.
What strikes me now as a scientist is not how idealistic that vision was, but how practical. Despite decades of spaceflight, we still cannot reliably predict how one person’s health will change in space. Consider Mars 500 , a 520-day simulated isolation mission between 2007 and 2011 where six male crew members in identical conditions diverged dramatically in psychological resilience. Two participants remained stable; three developed severe sleep disturbances; and one suffered persistent depression.
Additionally, around 17% of astronauts experience significant physical deterioration in spaceflight despite following identical exercise regimes. Disability does not necessarily introduce uncertainty into spaceflight; uncertainty is already the norm.
Who performs best in space?
Sometimes those excluded perform better. In 1961, several female pilots outperformed the men of Mercury 7 programme, the first US astronauts. Jerrie Cobb scored in the top 2% of all candidates ever assessed by NASA. Several of the women outperformed the men on cardiovascular endurance. And the late Wally Funk remained in an isolation tank for over ten hours while the male Mercury astronaut record was just over three . But the women never flew. NASA insisted on military jet pilot experience as an entry requirement, while simultaneously barring women from flying military jets.
About a decade earlier, NASA recruited eleven deaf men to study motion sickness, a condition affecting 60 to 80% of astronauts in their first days of weightlessness. Motion sickness happens when conflicting inner-ear signals cause nausea and disorientation severe enough to impair performance. Most of the eleven men had lost vestibular function (the inner-ear balance system) following childhood meningitis. In rotating rooms and on rough seas, as experienced test pilots were sick around them, the deaf participants played cards. The trait that excluded them from military careers made them unusually tolerant of the environments that undid everyone else.
Researchers are finally investigating this issue: like asking whether amputees, who carry less mass and respond differently to microgravity, offer advantages in space. People with lower-limb mobility impairments or vascular differences may be naturally adapted to the headward fluid shifts of weightlessness that cause brain swelling and vision changes in around 70% of astronauts .
When a cooling leak filled Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano’s helmet with water during a 2013 spacewalk, it left him nearly blind and deaf to mission control. He survived by navigating back to the airlock using touch alone. On Mars where dust storms reduce vision to near-zero, blind people would have an advantage here as they are dependent on other senses.
There is no perfect astronaut
The myth of the perfect astronaut has always been just that – a myth. Chuck Yeager, celebrated as the gold standard of what an astronaut should be, broke two ribs the night before he broke the sound barrier in 1947. He concealed the injury, improvised a way to seal his cockpit door using a broom handle, and flew anyway. The right stuff was never about physical perfection. It was about adaptation.
In 1985, Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh manually docked with the dead and uncontrolled Salyut 7 station and spent a week manually rewiring it in freezing pitch-black conditions to bring it back to life. For many people in the disability community, navigating broken infrastructure, sensory issues and isolation is an everyday reality. Disabled people spend their lives adapting to environments designed for somebody else. That makes us experts at navigating the unknown.
The real “right stuff” is interdependence: being creative together with your crew when a plan fails. When Apollo 13’s oxygen tank exploded in 1970, the crew came home not because of perfect engineering, but because people depended on each other under pressure. A Mars mission, years from home and communication delays of 20 minutes each way , will demand it. Astronauts will face problems nobody could anticipate, because that is the nature of exploration.
Disability is an extreme environment
Every person who lives long enough will experience disability at some point. It is my normal. In my research career, I have improvised creative solutions to inaccessible equipment, and learned to pace my energy carefully. Even getting into the building or having access to a bathroom could be my engineering problem for the day.
I’ve been told using a mobility aid is unprofessional and for years, even doctors dismissed my symptoms . When they finally had an answer, it came with a caveat: there is no cure and no treatment pathway. The medical system had reached its limit. I had not. These experiences forced me to monitor my own health, adapt and advocate for myself. On a Mars mission, millions of miles from the nearest specialist, every astronaut will need exactly that skill.
Perhaps the most undervalued asset the disability community brings to space is its relationship with joy . Disabled people do not survive extreme environments through stoicism alone. They survive through humour, putting flowers on their wheelchairs (like mine), and deeply loving communities. On a three-year Mars mission, that may be the most critical thing of all.
Design can be better too. Deaf pilot Sheila Xu described in June 2026 at the United Nations how she designed a colour-changing light signal system to use instead of auditory cues during parabolic flights, aircraft that fly a steep arc to produce brief periods of weightlessness, used in astronaut training. It improved safety for everyone on board, deaf or not, when engine roar made verbal commands impossible. This is the “curb cut effect” : solve for the margins, and you make the system better for everyone.
The good news is we are seeing a paradigm shift. In 2021, Hayley Arceneaux spent three days in orbit on SpaceX’s Inspiration4, becoming the first person with a prosthetic bone to reach space. In 2025, ESA engineer Michaela Benthaus became the first wheelchair user on a suborbital commercial flight. McFall’s selection marks the first time a major space agency has cleared a disabled astronaut for long-duration scientific work in orbit.
Progress does not come from excluding each other, but from discovering what becomes possible when the universe’s criteria finally replace our own.
The goal, then, should not be simply to send one disabled astronaut to space and call it progress. It is to involve disabled thinkers, engineers, and designers at every stage of mission planning. The systems they would help build would be demonstrably better for it.
Adaptation, more than perfection, may turn out to be what matters most.
