Do you want to be an astronaut when you grow up? Yeah, you and 12,000 others: NASA flooded with folks hoping to visit Moon, Mars If the current coronavirus pandemic has got you wanting to leave Planet Earth, you’re not alone. More than 12,000 people answered NASA’s latest call for astronauts to explore the Moon and Mars. Unfortunately, if you’re still thinking about it, you’re a little too late. Applications have just closed after being open for a month …
Anyone who completes the training program will be there on merit. What sort of requirement were you imagining that would disqualify half the citizens of America? The Artemis program will, surely, send more than two people in total to the Moon, so, as a consequence of the discriminatory selection procedure for the Apollo program, a woman candidate will become the first woman on the moon.
Unless, of course, China or India get there faster.
I hate prejudice and discrimination. Saying that the next crew to go to the Moon *will* include a woman is prejudice.
The next phase of Moon exploration will not require the test pilot skills of the 60s.
"Anyone who completes the training program" - really? At that level there is still competence vs. incompetence. I cringed when Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper dropped her toolbag, particularly *because* it would fuel sexism.
It depends what you're doing - read Chris Hadfield or Tim Peak or "Riding Rockets".
If you're looking at Mars, small women make sense - they need much less food.
@Dom 3 - "Saying that the next crew to go to the Moon *will* include a woman is prejudice."
I did say that it was a consequence of the discriminatory selection procedure for the Apollo program. If the Artemis program gets as far as putting anyone on the moon, then the probability of one of those being a woman, assuming perfectly non-discriminatory selection, would rapidly approach 1. When 5 people had landed, if none of them were a woman, then most scientists would reject the null hypothesis, "there is no discrimination against women in the selection" at the 95% confidence limit. Most non-scientists would say there's discrimination if the first 2 were men. The selection will be influenced by the political need to "redress the balance" of past discrimination.
"At that level there is still competence vs. incompetence." Well, I'm sure everyone has the occasional bad day. Maybe the training program doesn't accurately reveal the "true merit" of the candidates, but that doesn't change the fact that the decision was made based on the best available measure of the merit of the candidates.
When I was a kid it was generally believed that by the year 2000, going into space would be routine. The comics I read (Eagle, Look and Learn, etc.) regularly featured cut-away drawings of atomic rocket-ships, space-stations and "Moon Hotels".
I can't help feeling something went wrong somewhere ...
When I was a kid it was generally believed that by the year 2000, going into space would be routine. The comics I read (Eagle, Look and Learn, etc.) regularly featured cut-away drawings of atomic rocket-ships, space-stations and "Moon Hotels".I can't help feeling something went wrong somewhere ...
I blame it on people not wearing the silver aluminized fabric clothes that these publications always showed 21st Century people dressed in.
"Alumnized fabric"
Are you talking about my hat?
I think what went wrong was, although the space race was initially driven by the cold war, subsequently it was the cold war and military spending that has taken precidence over manned space exploration.
I wonder how far the money spent on Iraq and Afghanistan would have got us?
Well, I'm just guessing - and I'm probably reaching a bit - but I think it might be because the US government isn't really bothered with ensuring that Native Americans are educated to the point of being able to get a degree. In anything.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong, though.
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