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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.
I think I've seen this Archer episode.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.