#Nasa astronauts how to#

That training, as you can imagine, is pretty intense, with the candidates learning how to fly T-38 supersonic jets, practicing walking around underwater in spacesuit that weigh 181 kg (400 pounds), and surviving what's called the vomit comet, which simulates weightlessness through freefall. To me it's the highest thing a human being can achieve,' McClain told Ginny Graves in an exclusive interview for Glamour magazine at the end of last year. The application process alone took 18 months of rigorous medical and psychological testing, and the recruits are now going through two years of training before they'll officially join NASA's 46 currently active astronauts.īut what's really cool is that they're the first class to be candidates for the mission to Mars. 'If we go to Mars, we'll be representing our entire species in a place we've never been before. That's a fierce 0.0013 percent success rate. The class of is made up of eight recruits in total - Josh Cassada, Victor Glover, Tyler Hague, Christina Hammock, Nicole Aunapu Mann, Anne McClain, Jessica Meir, and Andrew Morgan - selected from a pool of around 6,100 applicants.

'We never determine how many people of each gender we're going to take, but these were the most qualified people of the ones that we interviewed,' Janet Kavandi NASA's deputy director at the Glenn Research Centre explained in a Google Hangout when the 2013 class was announced. Would you go to Mars? Meet the four women astronauts who can't wait to go: Via /BRjoyZX1C3- NASA January 7, 2016 This service is provided by the International Space Station program and the JSC Earth Science & Remote Sensing Unit, ARES Division, Exploration Integration Science Directorate. It's well established by now that women make kick-ass astronauts (hello Sally Ride and Valentina Tereshkova), so that statistic shouldn't be particularly exciting or notable.īut given the fact that, as of 2011, females still only hold 24 percent of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics jobs in the US, it's a pretty huge deal, and it makes us even more hopeful about the future of Solar System exploration. But what you might not know is that the latest class of NASA astronauts, recruited in 2013 and already in training, will also be candidates for the first trip to Mars, and for the first time in NASA history, 50 percent of them are female.

Nasa astronauts