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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @04:36PM
Why do we pretend that we don't know the answer to this question?
- Go look inside in any upper division aerospace engineering classroom and report back the demographics.
- Go look inside any upper division psychology classroom and report back on the demographics.
- Go look at whose on a basketball scholarship and report back on the demographics.
As much as our current education system sucks balls on a long-term macro level, on a short-term micro level it means pretty much anybody can go to any college that will accept them and study pretty much whatever they want. But things aren't changing. Norway, what many now regard as the most egalitarian country there is, saw something similar. They had a major push to try to get women into atypical roles. And they saw a small and relatively constant boost from this. Yet as soon as the push subsided, so too did that boost. For whatever reason, it turns out that different groups are drawn to different things. You can deny this reality, like any, in fiction. You, however, cannot deny it in reality.
As an aside, men also have faster reflexes than women [tandfonline.com], are substantially more resistant to radiation [hps.org], and also more base benefits such as less complex hygiene and hormonal regulation. I definitely think women should be encouraged and involved in space - a sausage fest on Mars would be rather gay, but in general they're likely to remain minorities except when the hiring agency is a government with a list of identity checkboxes to tick off. In my opinion this is at least part of the reason that the next generation of space likely belongs to China. They're going to be focusing on task optimization while we're building our teams based around happy headlines for Twitter and yellow journalism.