Nasa astronauts 2016 professional#
Nasa astronauts 2016 windows#

Teamwork and good communication, for example, have always been 'paramount.'īy the time the applicants emerge from the discipline-specific review boards, the pack has been whittled down significantly to several hundred 'highly-qualified' candidates, Roemer says. The core skills that make for good astronauts haven't changed much over the years, Roemer says. 'They're looking for a combination of educational preparation, experience in their technical discipline,' Roemer says, as well as qualities such as leadership and what she calls 'followership,' or the ability to work in a group. Reviewers include current astronauts and others who have backgrounds in each field. She's often heard of applicants who have framed their rejection letters.Īpplicants who pass that first round of scrutiny are then divided by disciplines-such as engineering, biological sciences, medical sciences, physical sciences and pilots-and sent on to corresponding review boards. 'There are a lot of people that apply because they want the rejection letter,' Anne Roemer, NASA's astronaut selection manager, tells Newsweek.

Historically, about a third of applicants get weeded out at this stage because they don't necessarily meet the initial criteria.

Nasa astronauts 2016 professional#

To start, the agency has human resources experts do an initial review to determine which applicants meet the basic qualifications, which include a bachelor's degree in a STEM field (specifically in engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science or mathematics), as well as three years of professional experience in that field, or 1,000 hours of pilot-in-command time in jet aircraft. Related: Stanford Is a Pushover Compared With NASA's Astronaut Program The acceptance rate for astronauts is always miniscule, but for the 2017 class it will be especially so, coming out to somewhere between 0.04 and 0.08 percent. Out of that large pool of hopefuls for the 2017 class, NASA is expected on Wednesday to name only eight to 14 'astronaut candidates.' That's the number the agency believes it needs to bolster its astronaut corps for missions in the coming years. The agency does not have a regular application cycle like colleges and universities, so aspiring astronauts must seize the opportunity when it comes around-recently, that's been roughly every four years. NASA received more than 18,300 applications during its most recent round of recruitment between December 2015 and February 2016, roughly three times as many as it got last time for its 2013 astronaut class and greatly surpassing the previous record of 8,000 applications in 1978. They are NASA astronauts assigned to missions on the International Space Station with their Russian, Japanese, European and other colleagues, performing science experiments, taking spacewalks to fix equipment and advancing space exploration and human spaceflight.

From this unique perspective, they take in colorful daytime views that look more like abstract art than geography and nighttime snapshots that turn the lights of cities and villages into illuminated connect-the-dots tableaus.

Nasa astronauts 2016 windows#

But a handful of men and women can do just that, gliding regularly past a cupola of windows they can peer through to see the blue planet from above. It's not in every job that you wake up where you work, weightless and floating in microgravity, more than 200 miles from the surface of the earth.