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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
After completing more than two years of basic training, the six women and seven men were chosen from a record-breaking 18,000 applicants representing a wide variety of backgrounds and specialties, from experienced pilots to scientists, engineers and doctors.
The group includes two candidates from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which has participated in a joint training program with the US since 1983. "They are the best of the best: they are highly qualified and very diverse, and they represent all of America," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. They include five people of color, including the first Iranian-American astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli who flew combat missions in Afghanistan and holds an engineering degree from MIT.
The group, known as the "Turtles", wore blue flight jumpsuits and took turns approaching the podium to receive their astronaut pins, as one of their classmates paid tribute to their character and shared playful and heartfelt anecdotes.
After being selected in 2017, the class completed training in spacewalking at NASA's underwater Neutral Buoyancy Lab, robotics, the systems of the International Space Station, piloting the T-38 training jet and Russian language lessons.
They are the first to graduate since NASA announced the Artemis program to return to the Moon by 2024, this time on its south pole, as the US plans to place the next man and first woman on lunar soil and set up an orbital space station.
-- submitted from IRC
Related: Eyeing Moon, NASA hosts first public astronaut graduation ceremony
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @01:38PM (7 children)
The current real best candidates would probably be from the US Nuclear Submariners...
Able to:
0) Spend long periods of time stuck in a cramped space with no way of getting out early, all while remaining useful.
1) Accept a higher risk of death from accidents that you may have zero control over.
2) Learn to understand and operate complicated systems.
3) Follow all sorts of rules, written and unwritten.
4) Hold your pee/poo for hours.
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/confessions-of-a-u-s-navy-submarine-officer-1715113243 [jalopnik.com]
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/06/politics/life-on-uss-missouri-nuclear-submarine/index.html [cnn.com]
https://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-submarine7.htm [howstuffworks.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @01:47PM (2 children)
And there's a height limit, so they'll weigh less.
There's a weird rule that astronauts are supposed to be pilots, but I'm not sure there's any reason for it, except for the Space Shuttle, which is definitely not relevant any more.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday January 13 2020, @05:02PM (1 child)
Hey man, you never know when there'll be an accident on the ISS and the only person left conscious will have to fly the thing back to Earth! /sarcasm.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 13 2020, @06:34PM
Maybe not fly the ISS back to Earth, but some escape vehicle. But then, aren't those vehicles more like flying an iPad than an aircraft?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @03:06PM
Then all you need is a good nurse.
Who doesn't have to be female, BTW.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Monday January 13 2020, @09:29PM (1 child)
Test pilots are more likely to be used to things like varying weight (G forces), being able to react while the ground is rapidly approaching and being good at reacting while spinning around, think Neil Armstrong in that Gemini that was spinning out of control as well as being much more used to being in the sky then submariners.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @07:46AM
And beyond this, manual piloting is still very much a thing.
For instance Boeing's argument for why their recent catastrophic launch failure wasn't a catastrophic launch failure is because if there were astronauts on board then they would have overriden everything and started driving it manually. And there's probably some truth to that. And in a situation like that the best candidate, by far, is a fighter pilot because that is as close as you can get to getting an intuitive understanding and feel for what it's like to try to navigate something in space traveling thousands of miles per hour and is suddenly way off course.
Like you allude to stress control is also a big one. I imagine being thousands of miles above Earth knowing you have nobody to rely on besides yourself in the ~2-5 other astronauts on the station could be stressful to many people. For other people, it wouldn't bother them in the slightest. And, again, I imagine fighter/test pilots fall just about 100% into the latter category.
(Score: 1) by webnut77 on Tuesday January 14 2020, @03:25AM
So that's why the astronauts don't offer each other a 'high five'.