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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @07:29AM
The astronauts are all listed here [nasa.gov]. Click on any candidate's name to get to a further page that has a complete bio. Feel free to compare. It's night and day in numerous cases. This is not to say that the diversity hires are not well above average - they are. But they're far below the standards of those who got in on merit. So we are setting two radically different standards for people based on skin color. This is racism, and we're going to look back at this time in history as no less shameful than any other period of racism. Because we seem to forget that every single era thinks their racism was justified - it's not.
I offered one comparison and argument for why this is not a good idea elsewhere in this thread. Since you tend to downmod everything you disagree with, I'll let you find it on your own since I find you rarely, if ever, engage in good faith and are extremely immature with your modding of posts. I only respond here because at one time I was like you. I don't know if it was time, experience, or knowledge that changed me. In any case something did. So there's hope, yet. ;-)