NASA Introduces 10 New Astronaut Candidates (cbsnews.com) 59
NASA has unveiled 10 new astronaut candidates drawn from over 8,000 applicants. The diverse group includes four men and six women -- pilots, scientists, and medical professionals -- who will train for future missions to the ISS, the moon, and eventually Mars. CBS News reports: This is NASA's first astronaut class with more women than men. It includes six pilots with experience in high-performance aircraft, a biomedical engineer, an anesthesiologist, a geologist and a former SpaceX launch director. Among the new astronaut candidates is 39-year-old Anna Menon, a mother of two who flew to orbit in 2024 aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon as a private astronaut on a commercial, non-NASA flight. [...]
The other members of the 2025 astronaut class are:
- Army Chief Warrant Officer 3 Ben Bailey, 38, a graduate of the Naval Test Pilot School with more than 2,000 hours flying more than 30 different aircraft, including recent work with UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47F Chinook helicopters.
- Lauren Edgar, 40, who holds a Ph.D. in geology from the California Institute of Technology, with experience supporting NASA's Mars exploration rovers and, more recently, serving as a deputy principal investigator with NASA's Artemis 3 moon landing mission.
- Air Force Maj. Adam Fuhrmann, 35, an Air Force Test Pilot School graduate with more than 2,100 hours flying F-16 and F-35 jets. He holds a master's degree in flight test engineering.
- Air Force Maj. Cameron Jones, 35, another graduate of Air Force Test Pilot School as well as the Air Force Weapons School with more than 1,600 hours flying high-performance aircraft, spending most of his time flying the F-22 Raptor.
- Yuri Kubo, 40, a former SpaceX launch director with a master's in electrical and computer engineering who also competed in ultimate frisbee contests.
- Rebecca Lawler, 38, a former Navy P-3 Orion pilot and experimental test pilot with more than 2,800 hours of flight time, including stints flying a NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft. She was a Naval Academy graduate and was a test pilot for United Airlines at the time of her selection.
- Imelda Muller, 34, a former undersea medical officer for the Navy with a medical degree from the University of Vermont's Robert Larner College of Medicine; she was completing her residency in anesthesia at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore at the time of her astronaut selection.
- Navy Lt. Cmdr. Erin Overcash, 34, a Naval Test Pilot School graduate and an experienced F/A-18 and F/A-18F Super Hornet pilot with 249 aircraft carrier landings. She also trained with the USA Rugby Women's National Team.
- Katherine Spies, 43, a former Marine Corps AH-1 attack helicopter pilot and a graduate of the Naval Test Pilot School with more than 2,000 hours flying time. She was director of flight test engineering for Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. at the time of her astronaut selection.
The other members of the 2025 astronaut class are:
- Army Chief Warrant Officer 3 Ben Bailey, 38, a graduate of the Naval Test Pilot School with more than 2,000 hours flying more than 30 different aircraft, including recent work with UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47F Chinook helicopters.
- Lauren Edgar, 40, who holds a Ph.D. in geology from the California Institute of Technology, with experience supporting NASA's Mars exploration rovers and, more recently, serving as a deputy principal investigator with NASA's Artemis 3 moon landing mission.
- Air Force Maj. Adam Fuhrmann, 35, an Air Force Test Pilot School graduate with more than 2,100 hours flying F-16 and F-35 jets. He holds a master's degree in flight test engineering.
- Air Force Maj. Cameron Jones, 35, another graduate of Air Force Test Pilot School as well as the Air Force Weapons School with more than 1,600 hours flying high-performance aircraft, spending most of his time flying the F-22 Raptor.
- Yuri Kubo, 40, a former SpaceX launch director with a master's in electrical and computer engineering who also competed in ultimate frisbee contests.
- Rebecca Lawler, 38, a former Navy P-3 Orion pilot and experimental test pilot with more than 2,800 hours of flight time, including stints flying a NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft. She was a Naval Academy graduate and was a test pilot for United Airlines at the time of her selection.
- Imelda Muller, 34, a former undersea medical officer for the Navy with a medical degree from the University of Vermont's Robert Larner College of Medicine; she was completing her residency in anesthesia at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore at the time of her astronaut selection.
- Navy Lt. Cmdr. Erin Overcash, 34, a Naval Test Pilot School graduate and an experienced F/A-18 and F/A-18F Super Hornet pilot with 249 aircraft carrier landings. She also trained with the USA Rugby Women's National Team.
- Katherine Spies, 43, a former Marine Corps AH-1 attack helicopter pilot and a graduate of the Naval Test Pilot School with more than 2,000 hours flying time. She was director of flight test engineering for Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. at the time of her astronaut selection.
Re: Hail Trump! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Also, these people were already in the pipeline before Trump was sworn in.
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And as soon as he notices, they will be out of the pipeline.
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Having a large candidate pool relative to the number chosen makes it easier to show bias and still get high-quality candidaes, not harder.
Just saving weight? (Score:2)
But don't be rude and ask the new astronauts how much they weigh.
However if you have to feed the sock puppet, do you also have to propagate the troll's irrelevant Subject?
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If you can't figure it out yourself, then words will never convince you. (I am not participating in the gender war or saying anything is ok or not, I am just saying if you can't see how they could choose ten out of 100 candidates and show a bias, then you are hopelessly lost)
(I gotta laugh, the CAPTCHA is carols, carol is a 'feminine' name in my experience)
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This isn't amateur hour. The people listed have a lot of good reasons why they will be good astronauts. For example, 249 aircraft carrier landings is pretty good. With the printed qualifications, NASA has some really good astronauts they can pick from.
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SIGH.
1 in 8 is 12,5%.
African-American without mixed race in 2024 is estimated at 46,3M, or 14,2%
With mixed race, that rises to 51,6M, or 15,8% of the population.
Some hispanics have dark skin, some light. In 2023 there were 62,5%, representing 19% of the population (though there's a small overlap with black - doesn't affect the numbers much).
In 2023, Asians were 25,8M people, or 7,7% of the population. This is
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BTW, re: the Congo in particular: the most common traditional type of fishing is basket fishing with woven funnels suspended in the rapids [alamy.com]. You sure as hell [pinimg.com] better know [npr.org] how to swim [rackcdn.com] if you want to do that [101lasttribes.com].
Famous angler Jeremy Wade referred to the local Congo fishermen as nearly suicidal [youtu.be], just diving into the rapids to get nets unstuck and the like.
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Nazism isn't an internet insult. It was an actual, real thing that happened in this world, with an actual, real ideology, and the core of this ideology was racial-based social Darwinism.
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There is far more genetic diversity within a given "race" than between them.
So? Your point?
The concept of "race" as a distinct biological category is not supported by modern genetics.
Considering that a geneticist can look at a DNA sample and determine the race of the person it came from, I'd call that a rather glaring deficiency in modern genetics. This has all the credibility of a physicist telling us gravity is a social construct.
Sciences that consistently "disprove" the crashingly obvious should be regarded with the utmost suspicion.
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With a strict definition of dark skin, you're probably talking like 1 in 6 or so (~16,7%). With a looser definition, you could be talking upwards of 40% or more of the population.
I can go along with that.
Here are the actual odds of selecting no dark-skinned people at different population percentages being "dark skinned", by one's definition of "dark":
15%: 1 in 4
20%: 1 in 8
25%: 1 in 17
30%: 1 in 34
35%: 1 in 73
40%: 1 in 165
That's if we assume all else is equal, and we can't assume that.
Yes, white athletes tend to have an advantage in swimming. A 1,5% advantage. While a 1,5% advantage may be of good relevance at the highest level of a sport, it's hardly meaningful in a "can you tread water with a flight suit on" test.
Consider the racial demographics of the different military branches found here: https://demographics.militaryo... [militaryonesource.mil]
Then consider the swimming standard for "self rescue" the US Marines found here: https://www.fitness.marines.mi... [marines.mil]
The marines are about 80% White with a few more light skinned races on top, the other services have racial demographics closer to that of the general American population. The survival swim standa
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It is racist to assume, incorrectly, that the differences are physical.
It is the physical differences among groups of people that we use to define races. I don't understand your point.
It is racist to assume that averages within a population are an appropriate way to evaluate individuals.
Is that what you took from my comments? NASA didn't start their selection process for astronauts by looking at family history, or the color of their skin. They ran the candidates through various kinds of physical training and testing to select their candidates. It just happens that at the end of the selection those that performed the best have light skin.
Do you honestly believe that NASA coul
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514 words just to be racist and wrong
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there was no one with dark skin who was also a qualified applicant?
How dark?
#e0ac69 should be good enough, but maybe #c68642 just to be sure.
Re:Hail Trump! (Score:4)
I'm sure there were many black skinned qualified applicants. Just not more qualified than these 10 people.
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They mostly seem to be military too.
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They mostly seem to be military too.
That's easily explained, unlike racial makeup which could need more digging to explain.
Consider that in any crew to space there's going to be a pilot and the commander/co-pilot, and if we assume the rest of the crew is the medical officer and the mission specialist then about half of the candidates are going to be pilots. I haven't finished my coffee yet so I might not even be able to count right now but I see 6 of the 10 are pilots. As this is a program looking for the best pilots in America that means l
Re:Hail Trump! (Score:4, Insightful)
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With the current administration actively doing their best to not only get rid of anything "DEI" but actively reversing any sort of diversity and doing their best to white-christianize the USA, its neither a conspiracy nor "contributing to racial friction", just pointing out the obvious.
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Obvious in your conspiratorial woke mind maybe. If it had been 10 black people I doubt you'd be posting asking where the white candidates were.
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Yes, I actually would. Diversity means just that, something that actively represents the diverseness of the american populace. There are no hispanics or blacks in this group, which make up over 1/3 of the population. Could even be a pacific islander or an asian who wasn't a Musk-friend. If you're telling me these are literally the top qualified candidates then it just proves how desperately affirmative action is needed, since historical inequity and not some genetic superiority is what causes this lopsided
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Save it for the undergraduate sociology class. NASA picked the best candidates, end of. If there are no brown people there its because they weren't good enough whether that meets your ideological approval or not. There have been a number of black astronauts in the past so your claim of some conspiracy is just BS and if Trump had an issue with brown people he wouldn't have picked a VP with an Indian wife!
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Another one for Godwin.
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Regardless, that's an impressive roster.
Re:Hail [sock puppets and trolls]! (Score:2)
Sock puppet's Subject was propagated about 80% of the way down a fairly active discussion--but still no Funny.
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Space force operates national security assets in space as controllers, communications providers and counter the other nations space measures, not space marines with chainsaws and flamethrowers after mars demands brains.
I understand that. It was mostly a joke in response to people losing their shit on seeing so little racial variation among the astronaut candidates. It's also a friendly dig in that a military branch supposedly dedicated to operating in outer space sends so few into actual outer space.
The Space Force is the smallest military branch, and certainly the youngest, so no real surprise that there's no representation from the Space Force among so few candidates for astronaut training. Do note that the Space For
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You generally want pilots, particularly pilots with experience in high Gs, if not for anything that they are less likely to faint, or worse, in a high G takeoff. Which is why the helicopter pikot is a bit odd. But I suppose they have other qualifications.
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You generally want pilots, particularly pilots with experience in high Gs, if not for anything that they are less likely to faint, or worse, in a high G takeoff. Which is why the helicopter pikot is a bit odd. But I suppose they have other qualifications..... Actually, let me check that.... "She was director of flight test engineering for Gulfstream Aerospace Corp.". Hmmmm, well I guess they can direct things or something....
Truth be told, it looks like a fairly regular best-person-for-the-job selection for
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The ISS cannot last long and NASA has no real hope of sending anyone to the Moon in the next 10 years.
ISS should be in orbit for another 5 years. It appears that NASA plans to have at least one commercially operated space station from which they can effectively rent space and continue their experiments in human spaceflight. It would be disappointing if NASA leaves ISS before there are NASA astronauts on a different space station, that would be a break in many years of continuous orbital operations.
So these people only need to train for a job they know they won't really need to perform, and have free health monitoring the whole time keeping them healthy. And getting paid the whole time!
It appears that all the candidates already had very nice jobs with top notch health care plans, so this new j
No gen Z on the list. (Score:2)
The space programme is saved.
Ultimate Frisbee? (Score:1)
I love that one of the candidates thought his Ultimate Frisbee experience was important enough to add it to his astronaut bio! As an Ultimate player, I approve.
More female astrautauts (Score:1)
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s/weight/weigh/
But I tried the same joke and still no Funny around here.
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I must be meeting wrong women then.
Lots of pilots ... (Score:2)
.. an engineer, medic and a rock nerd.
I thought they flew space x stuff on remote, or with your phone, or some doofus single point of failure tesla touch screen.
Good luck to them. Shows us the best we can be.
They've Been Dubbed the Three Musketeers (Score:2)
Good (Score:2)
I'm glad they're promoting this.
We need to celebrate excellence again; astronauts should be our best and brightest.
I wish them all the success in (& outside of) the world.
Whoopdedo! (Score:2)
Ok, the new astronauts were a big deal in 1965. Not so much now.
Oh look, sexism (Score:1)