NASA Selects 8 New Astronaut Trainees, Including 4 Women

illiteratehack writes "NASA has selected a 39-year-old chief technology officer to become a trainee astronaut. Josh Cassada is the current chief technology officer and co-founder of Quantum Opus, a firm that specialises in photonics. Cassada is one of eight individuals selected by NASA from 6,100 applicants for astronaut training, though what their future mission may be has yet to be revealed." Of the astronaut trainees selected, four of them are women — a new record.

Comments

To Mars!

[Gothmolly]

I think I've seen this Archer episode.

Why so many military folks?

[h4rr4r]

I would think it would be easier to train PhDs to be astronauts than Military folks to be PhDs.

I get it that NASA started out testing planes, but there is nothing for the astronaut to fly anymore. Even the shuttle should have been automated.

Re:Why so many military folks?

[MightyYar]

I gather that they know what they are doing, but I imagine that "makes decisions well while under pressure" might be a pretty big criteria that might already be tested in a military pilot.

Re:Why so many military folks?

[alen]

the Naval and Air Force Academies are some of the best engineering schools in the world. You have to be in the top 5% or higher in your high school class to even be considered to attend. and they have phd's as well

Re:Why so many military folks?

[Shinobi]

Most military pilots already have a fair amount of schooling in science and engineering, as part of becoming pilots.

Add to that the fact that military pilots, during their entire training, are taught to operate under heavy physical and mental stress, while following instructions from remote Controllers, and also to handle their plane according to check-lists and routines, as well as crisis management, and teamwork. Then there's also the routine psychological check-ups in many armed forces, which means you have fewer people with mental disorders that can disrupt team cohesion/efficiency(ADHD, Asperger etc etc). There's also the fact that the military people also are used to strict daily physical excercise.

On the other hand, many PHD's don't do much in the way of physical excercise at all, and for those who do, most only gym or similar light excercise a couple of times per week, they have no training in working under a combination of psychological AND physical pressure, no crisis management, little in the way of deep, life-dependant teamwork etc. Many have a deep-seated resentment against "jocks", mental disorders such as ADHD, Asperger etc are not exactly uncommon among PHD's etc, meaning the available candidate pool becomes very small.

There are exceptions of course.... But it's not weird that the military is a readily-available candidate pool.

Re:Why so many military folks?

[Sarten-X]

Military pilots are, from even before astronaut training, also more likely to understand the acceleration stress of a launch, and to be reasonably comfortable when the realization hits that they're strapped to a giant rocket whose goal is to explode fast enough to hurl them into orbit, but slow enough to not kill them.

Human brains aren't evolved for this kind of treatment, so it takes a good deal of psychological training to function appropriately under the conditions of spaceflight. In addition to the rapid sequence of events, the acceleration, and the small space, there's the nagging feeling that the shaking, roaring beast is going to end in a sudden yet painful death. I imagine it to be like playing chess on a shaky roller coaster (without gluing down the pieces), but worse.

Re:Why so many military folks?

[dywolf]

the Buran flew once.
it did so and was developed over 10 years after the shuttle and was nothing more than a cheaper smaller copy of the shuttle.
it only flew automated because it was unmanned, as befits a test flight that they dont even know will work (believe it or not, even the russians didnt want to risk losing astronauts...they're kinda hard to replace)
it never flew again.
it never did anything again.
and "From the very beginning Buran was intended to be used in both fully automatic and manual mode", meaning it was ntended to have people, and people in control. if we had had the tech to test the shuttle unmanned initially (and recover it), we likely would have too before moving to manned missions.

and if youre going to have people along for the ride anyway (EVA, repair the Hubble, experiments, etc etc) it makes no sense for them to be at the mercy of a computer that might fail when you could just as easily add some extra training so they can fly the damn thing if need be and add yet another layer of safety to the system and increase the odds of everyone's survival.

meanwhile there are multiple instances where the has shuttle faced a problem inflight that either did require the pilot to correct, or potentially would have, and the technology to have an automated system recover the aircraft did not exist at that time. moreover, several of these incidents would have called into question the ability of such a system to make the right corrections. spaceflight and launch and recovery is a very dynamic scenario encompassing multiple modes of flight. the pilot IS the computer you seek capable of taking all the data being fed him by the hundreds of men in mission control and performing the correct actions, and he's easier to train and produce than such a multi-modal control computer.
1985 July 29: STS-51-F: Space Shuttle in-flight engine failure. They almost aborted launch and detached the shuttle frm the boosters engines before reaching altitude in order to fly cross atlantic to a recovery field. No computer at the time could have handled such a maneuver. Even today it owuld be hard pressed thing to do...its rather hard to test and develop such a system because you dont exactly go around destroying shuttles to perfect a system. (they ended up aborting to orbit rather than aborting to xatlantic)

1999 July 23: STS-93: main engine electrical short and hydrogen leak: Five seconds after liftoff, an electrical short knocked out controllers for two shuttle main engines. The engines automatically switched to their backup controllers. Had a further short shut down two engines, Columbia would have ditched in the ocean, although the crew could have possibly bailed out. Concurrently a pin came loose inside one engine and ruptured a cooling line, allowing a hydrogen fuel leak. This caused premature fuel exhaustion, but the vehicle safely achieved a slightly lower orbit. Had the failure propagated further, a risky transatlantic or RTLS abort would have been required.

1981 Apr 12: Columbia STS-1 - the perfect example of why your computer still needs a pilot. the computer demands predictable flight characteristics. but if you pay attention, in the very first shuttle flight a flight control was knocked out of alignment. A computer cannot handle such a thing. A computer cannot "feel its way" through the modifed flight envelope.

Re:Why so many military folks?

[ebno-10db]

Military pilots are ... reasonably comfortable when the realization hits that they're strapped to a giant rocket whose goal is to explode fast enough to hurl them into orbit, but slow enough to not kill them.

While the engineers who designed that not-quite-bomb sit a mile away behind several feet of reinforced concrete. The obvious inference is that pilots are not too bright.

Re:Why so many military folks?

[Moofie]

Space exploration is an intellectual curiosity. Space colonization and exploitation is, in the medium to long term, the only thing that matters.

they have kitchens in space?

[alen]

i though they didn't need to cook their food up there

Re:Good thing they selected some women

[lightknight]

Actually, this is a good thing. Women in general weigh less than men, which, when it comes to payload calculations, is something you do care about; neurologically speaking, they are as capable as men. The only downsides are the traditional ones -> should an oddball scenario arise where having that much more extra upper body strength is somehow the difference between life and death (the space station is pushed out of orbit, and you need to realign the Space Shuttle engines feeds with a giant crowbar, or face a fiery re-entry), and gender wars (you absolutely can't have one on a space shuttle / space station...you have a job to do, any strife / problems that arise must be resolved quickly and decisively). I do recall that NASA does not have a spotless track record here: Lisa Nowak. On the plus side, they do tend to eat less than men, and probably consume less air, so if the Space Shuttle somehow is dislodged with a meteor while simultaneously taking out the cafeteria / life support / Soyuz capsule, you actually stand a fair chance of surviving long enough for a new one to arrive.

On a related note...

[bradgoodman]

I am recruiting astronauts for my own agency, to fly my own manned spacecraft fleet - which I am proud to say is just as large as NASAs.

"Riding Rockets" by Mike Mullane

[Dusty101]

Just a quick book recommendation that addresses (amongst other things) the PhD vs. military tensions during the early period of the space shuttle program:

http://www.amazon.com/Riding-Rockets-Outrageous-Shuttle-Astronaut/dp/0743276833

It also candidly covers some of the pressures of being in the astronaut corps, warts & all. It's also by turns inspiring, tragic, irreverent and very funny, and not at all like many of the officially endorsed astronaut autobiographies. The author became an astronaut via the military track, and describes the mental and sociological adjustments he had to make as an (initially) male chauvinist jock astronaut, training alongside scientists and (shock horror!) women.

Disclaimer: Not affiliated with the author in any way, just a fan of the book.