Hey short waivers, Emily Quang here. So for the past day, I have been going gaga over those

gorgeous images released by NASA from the James Webb Space Telescope. They're the sharpest images

of space ever released, giving us a glimpse into distant galaxies and a picture of the makings

of our universe. It's super cool stuff. We're going to delve into those pictures tomorrow.

But today, we're going to revisit this episode on space travel and how one organization is working

to ensure that disabled people have the chance to go to space. All right, enjoy.

You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

When a perva varia was in the ninth grade, he was watching the television and the way he describes it,

he saw all these people in like orange space suits sitting on this vessel and then he's seeing

this countdown of 10, 9, 8, and then he saw stuff coming out of the bottom of the rocket and then

all of a sudden the rocket shoots up into the sky and disappears and he was like, wait, where do

they go? That's Amanda Morris with The New York Times and she says a perva was amazed by what he

was seeing on TV, except he kind of didn't know exactly what he was watching. Because at the time,

remember, this is decades ago, there was no captions on his TV. So he could see what was going on,

but he didn't really know what was actually happening because he couldn't hear the narrator.

What a perva saw was a crew of astronauts heading into space.

And he was like, I want to go to space and I want to be an astronaut. So he immediately wrote a letter

to NASA and he learned everything he could about space. But then he got a letter back. It was a big

envelope. There was a letter inside that said, thank you for writing and unfortunately we can't accept

that astronauts right now, but maybe we can in the future. Despite this letter, he wasn't deterred

from making space a big part of his life. So he went on and earned advanced engineering degrees

and then went on to work for NASA. He has directed space missions and helped design

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