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posted by janrinok on Monday January 13 2020, @10:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the let's-hear-it-for-the-girls dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @03:05PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @03:05PM (#942742)

    Yeah, it's so much more interesting when you start out with preconceived notions that all astronauts should be white males for no logical reasons whatsoever.

    Wake me up when discriminatory idiots like you have all been bred out of the human race.

    Aside from that, nice troll.

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  • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @06:12PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @06:12PM (#942809)

    Logically, the place ought to look like the CalTech campus. That is 43% Asian, but only 1% black.

    For 13 candidates, there should be 5 or 6 Asians. The 1% rounds down to zero, so there should be no blacks. That leaves 7 or 8 whites.

    • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday January 13 2020, @10:12PM (1 child)

      by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Monday January 13 2020, @10:12PM (#942877)

      Logically, the place ought to look like the CalTech campus.

      Why should it? That is not logical.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @07:58AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @07:58AM (#943020)

        The job of an astronaut is to run and maintain experiments that are pushing the scientific edge. Because of this high end 'hard' science education is pretty much the baseline for an astronaut. Some allowance can be made for piloting, medical, and other tertiary skills that can prove vital, but there tends to be a decent overlap between the latter and the former. Though the more overlap there, the even less diverse the applicant pool tends to become. And so it's quite logical to expect a correlation in 'true' demographics vs what you would see given an average sample of those who have the typical qualifications.

        This [nasa.gov] page has a listing of the astronauts alongside their qualifications. Click on their name to go to a page that has a more extensive bio. You will find the qualifications mentioned exist, with remarkable success, for those who got in on merit. But for the diversity hires don't even meet the qualifications and go an entirely different route. That's not to say they're fools or below average by any means. They are not. They're all well above average, yet they are clearly being held to a radically softer standard than those getting in on merit.