Eric Ingram - pioneering accessible space exploration

[00:00:00] Viv Mullan
We would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we record this podcast. The Gadigal people. This is their land, never ceded, always sacred and pay respects to the elders past, present, and emerging of this place.

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[00:00:19] Eric Ingram
If you were able to design commercial air travel from the beginning how would you design it to be accessible?

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[00:00:28] Viv:
Meet Eric Ingram, Scout Spaces, CSO and Disability Advocate, pioneering new heights, creating accessible spaces in space. Eric, it is so lovely to have you here for an episode of Remarkable Insights. To start, I would love you to just say hello and introduce yourself at any key parts about how you choose to identify that you'd like our audience to know.

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[00:50] Eric Ingram:
Hello, thanks for having me. A little bit about myself as I am an entrepreneur in the space industry. I am the founder, chairman of the board and chief strategy officer for a company called Scout Space. I'm also very involved in a lot of other organisations. I sit on the board of directors for the Space Frontier Foundation and also am on the leadership team for Mission Astro Access, which is working to make spaceflight accessible to everyone. I have a physical disability. I use a wheelchair, my everyday life and tied into a whole bunch of stuff. So I'm wearing like five hats on any given day.

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[00:01:22] Viv:
How did it start? Where did your interest in the space industry begin and why?

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[00:01:26] Eric Ingram:
I don't really have a specific origin point where the light switch flipped. It's just always been something intrinsically in me to have an interest in space and space exploration and helping humanity to become a space faring civilization. You know, when I was in school in undergrad, I joined an organisation called ‘Students for the Exploration and Development of Space’, or SEDS, which got me tied into the ecosystem and helped me build out my network. And from there, just took any space job I could find that made sense. 

And so I jumped into helping organisations. My first job was being a terrible engineer at an asteroid mining startup, which was fun. And, you know, I've done everything from hands-on engineering work all the way to regulatory stuff. So, you know, I've kind of dabbled in a bit of everything and just done whatever I could to make my skills useful.

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[00:02:22] Viv:
And when we're talking about the intersection of how disability and accessibility can evolve and improve and benefit the space industry and space travel, What does that mean?, And what's the current situation we're looking at?How accessible is it?

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[00:02:38] Eric Ingram:
It's not, is the short answer. So Astro Access, as I mentioned, is working to make space flight accessible to persons with mobility impairments, hearing impairments, and or visual impairments. And we do test flights on a parabolic Aircraft. So it's an aeroplane that goes up and down. And on the down parts, we get zero gravity or microgravity, and we're able to test solutions and also de-risk different things about travelling to space. And so we've done a few of those. And in there, we're trying to find… “What are the solutions we need, for instance, like a person with mobility impairment to move or not move in microgravity?”, “How does a blind person navigate in microgravity when there's no down to direct them?”, “How does a person with hearing impairment know what's going on?”, How do they get the situational awareness to know critical moments or critical events are happening? 

And we have the benefit of space really being in its infancy. Human space flight started, let's say, in the 1950s. In the entire history of humanity, that is a blip. And in the entire future of humanity, there's a lot more to be done. So if you look at it, we have the opportunity to design from the beginning. “If you were able to design commercial air travel from the beginning, how would you design it to be accessible?” So you don't have to retrofit.

And so we have the benefit of hindsight of other industries and also being at the beginning of this industry where we can incorporate things. And as everyone seemed like things that are put in place to help people with disabilities or impairments help the general public. You know, people rarely complain about ramps or automatically opening doors and things like that. And so the more we're able to incorporate things like well-placed handholds for navigation or tactile surfaces for being able to diagnose where in the spacecraft you are, that could be usable for everyone. And, you know, the simpler the design, the more useful it is. And so we kind of incorporate all of that into our research.

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[00:04:39] Viv:
And I remember a key example that you shared with me once was how the design of what an experience for someone who is blind or low vision could benefit everyone because you're in space and there's a blackout and all of a sudden your vessel, if that's what we want to call it, is fitted in a way that people know how to navigate it without the need for being able to see. Are there any sort of key examples of things like that? The benefit has been so obvious and that people have been open to creating the design based off the experience of people with disability?

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[00:05:10] Eric Ingram:
Yeah. And they're really simple and obvious and things that you'd be like, that is a design consideration. So for instance, we set up a lighting system, which described what portion of flight the aircraft was in. So I think green meant we're in microgravity, blue meant we were at level flight, and red meant we were going into hypergravity when the airplane was going up. And you can communicate visually quicker than you can communicate audibly. So everyone in the plane ended up using the light signals to understand which portion of flight we were going into when it was really mainly designed for the hearing impaired group to do things. 

And as you mentioned before, having tactile surfaces, is great for knowing where you are if the lights go out and navigating if you touch this panel right here, you know you're in this specific area due to whatever, and you have this information and you know, let's say there's a fire and there's smoke so you can't see, you can navigate to a fire extinguisher to help put it out. So it's very simple things that seem intuitively obvious, but it's not always the thing you're thinking about when you're designing a very complicated spacecraft. You know, and so being able to provide these inputs and show that things that might be perceived as risky is helping us take that step forward.

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[00:06:33] Viv:
And how open is the greater space industry to working with the disability community?

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[00:06:39] Eric Ingram:
It's getting there. This is a new conversation within the space industry. For decades, the only people who went to space were government sponsored astronauts who had, you know, air quotes, the right stuff. And we're getting into a point where members of the general public are and will be flying to space regularly. And that really opens the aperture on the types of people you're dealing with. Not everyone is like an elite athlete going to space anymore. We've seen that with William Shatner, who is 90, who went up in a Blue Origin spacecraft last year sometime. There's almost no 90 year old that doesn't have some form of a disability. And so that's something we can take into account.

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[00:07:22] Viv:
And what is the project you're working on now? Is there any future plan for you to be jetting off to outer space?

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[00:07:29] Eric Ingram:
I am always trying to find my ride to space. That is a goal of mine. There is nothing currently on my schedule to do that, but working in that direction.

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[00:07:40] Viv:
Amazing. And with what Scout is doing, are there any really practical things that you're working on right now that intersect the tech design and space travel?

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[00:07:49] Eric Ingram:
So Scout, which is my main day job, is a company working on vision systems for satellites to be able to look around in space. So you can think about the sensors and software that Tesla's use to drive themselves, but in a satellite. Also longer range imagers that you can kind of think of like traffic cameras looking at other stuff in space. And so, you know, we're very deeply ingrained in efforts to make space a safer and more transparent environment to operate in. The more information we have, the more data we have, the less risk there is. And, you know, that's something we're actively working on. We just launched our second payload to space very recently and are looking forward to getting the first bits of data from that. It's a very exciting time.

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[00:08:34] Viv:
And when we're looking to the future, like what are some designs that you're working
on or concepts that you would love to see in the space industry about the tech that's being created for it?

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[00:08:45] Eric Ingram:
It's a pretty wide category. There's a lot of stuff going on in the space industry. You know, my company, Scout Space, is working on some really great technology for de-risking and making operations in space autonomous. And there's a lot of exciting stuff there. On the Astro Access side, you know, we're constantly looking at ways that we can work with the human space flight companies to help them with their designs and training and everything they do so that when... a person with a disability ends up on their travel list, you know, it's not something they have to scramble to figure out. We want to make it so that if you have the opportunity to go, accessibility is not the thing preventing you from doing so, which is easier said than done. 

But, you know, me, I think there's a lot more design we can do about the design of spacesuits is a big thing, as well as, you know, the design of the seats that are actually used in space flight, a lot of the infrastructure around the human interaction with the spacecraft and stuff, I think there's a lot more work to do. But again, we're at a time where we are early enough where we can design those things, which is pretty cool. And you're rarely able to do that with pretty much any other industry.

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[00:09:58] Viv:
And in your experience in the zero gravity simulations, as a wheelchair user, is it a matter of you don't take your wheelchair onto the aircraft at that time?

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[00:10:08] Eric Ingram:
We take the wheelchairs onto the aircraft to transfer into, actually have airline seats in there, which is kind of funny given the rest of the conversation. The back third of the airplane is just normal airplane seats. So we take our wheelchairs onto the plane, we transfer onto the seats. They take our wheelchairs out of the plane. And I will say it is like a cargo plane, so it's not like a typical airliner, and we come back to the place we take off from, so it's not going anywhere else.So yeah, we don't need them on the flight. Again, just a different way of thinking that...your typical earthbound experience just doesn't allow for and again, I'm hoping we can have as many people as possible get to experience the wonders of space and microgravity and perhaps the therapeutic benefits that, you know, it can provide. 

I think there's a whole avenue of research of how things like zero gravity or lunar gravity, which is one sixth of earth's gravity can be utilised for. Things like, you know, traumatic injury recovery, like for spinal cord injuries and things like that. Like there's a lot of interesting things that pop up. And so the more we can get down those routes and get over the barrier of thinking, “Oh my gosh, space?!” Once we get past all that, it's like, well, what can we do with it? And it opens up so many doors of possibilities and so many avenues for excitement that I'm trying to drag humanity there as hard as I can, as quickly as I can so we can get to all those fun questions and start trying to solve all these interesting and probably awesome problems that I haven't even thought of yet.

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[00:11:41] Viv:
So cool, Eric. I mean, you're going to have to drag me pretty hard. I'm a little bit scared, but you know, I'll back you. I'll be your cheerleader. I want to ask you if there's, we call them
‘Remarkable Insights’, but if there's something that you want to leave people who've listened or enjoyed this episode to think about moving forward as a piece of advice about design or just about. you know, space travel, what would you like to share?

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[00:12:05] Eric Ingram:
Space and the space industry is not something that should be put up on a pedestal. It's something that humanity equally should have participated in. And, you know, as much as we can normalise it for humanity in general, but also for people with disabilities in all ways, shapes or form, I think the better off we will all be in the long run. So again, I think there's a ton of opportunity there and a lot of avenues of change and creativity and invention that we can access if we all work towards those common goals.

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[00:12:0]
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