When the Mission: AstroAccess Flight 1 Boeing 727 took off from Long Beach, California, it included Bowling Green State University professor Sheri Wells-Jensen, Ph.D. and this week she starts teaching a course based on things she learned on that trip.

The Space and Disability course is a one credit honors undergraduate class that she created this semester.

Wells-Jensen took her flight on Mission: AstroAccess on Oct. 17.

Floating in that zero-gravity parabolic flight changed her. She already asked big questions, but her added awareness of the bigness of space has grown the scope of those questions.

“Going to space isn’t something we do to feel cool because rockets are nice. We have an obligation to our species to protect the planet from the occasional flying asteroid, or to reap the benefits of space technologies, like GPS and orbiting weather satellites going,” Wells-Jensen said. “We need to realize that space has worked its way into our modern lifestyle. Here’s the thing we are just now starting to realize how going out into space is done and who is going to do it.”

The organization had a goal of making space accessible to everyone by removing regulations that have traditionally kept most people from being considered for space related jobs.

As part of the course Wells-Jensen will talk about their successful flight and what it feels like to float in zero gravity, but there will also be those bigger questions that underlie opening space for everyone.

“So this is the basic question. Who goes to space and why? It’s an interesting problem, but like all interesting problems it’s got a really interesting back story.

“We have to sort out our cultural hysteria about disability,” Wells-Jensen said. “Part of the class is going to be ‘what is disability, really?”

While she is a linguistics professor and xenolinguistics expert, that inaugural zero-gravity flight group also included disabled researchers with a mix of backgrounds and disabilities. There were scientists, veterans, students, athletes and artists. Wells-Jensen, who is blind, said that there were also deaf and several differently mobility disabled individuals. Each of them brought something different to the trip.

“Because of the way we have our environment set up, some kinds of our body differences are no big deal. Some kinds of body differences, and emotional differences and mental differences cause all kinds of problems. Is it that those differences are bad, and difficult, or is it that we have the environment set up to favor some kinds of bodies and minds and emotions? We really need to sort that out for the good of humanity,” Wells-Jensen said.

Zero-gravity also made her realize that the Earth is very fragile. Very basic questions appear to her now, like why she, and random objects, don’t just float up. It’s not an intellectual question, but a rhetorical one that you hear as a wonder in her voice. It’s a wonder that wasn’t there prior to the trip.

“So right now humanity is at the inflection point in the quest to understand space and to live and move in outer space, and whether or not, we may need to be in space to combat climate change, and it might be important for the survival of the human race,” she said. “How can we learn to be more loving and more just?

“I think that knowledge is a great way to push us in all the right directions.”

This is not just going to be a course on philosophy. There will also be practical questions.

“So the idea of who our astronauts are going to be is now a very, very important one and it’s right this minute when we need to make the decisions on who our astronauts are going to be, because we need to know how to set up our space capsules,” Wells-Jensen said.

A scenario she laid out might be a voyage to Mars.

“If one of (the astronauts) becomes disabled on the voyage, we can’t just chuck that poor soul out the airlock. We have to make sure the environment around them is set up so that they can still do their job. If you become blind or deaf, from injury, illness or accident, on your voyage, can you still do your job? Because if you are halfway to Mars, you better still be able to do your job,” she said.

She’s hoping this inaugural course will spur the students to ask questions that have not yet been asked of the space program, as a continuation of what started with the Mission: AstroAccess Flight 1.

The class is not yet full and Wells-Jensen recommends people jump for the few open slots that are left.

“We are going to do all the cool things. That’s basically the subtitle for the class.”

She hopes that if it goes well, it will become a three-credit course next year.

In addition to her BGSU course, the Wood County District Public Library will be hosting Wells-Jensen on Jan. 31 at 7 p.m. to talk about her flight in the maiden voyage for Mission: AstroAccess.