by A nervous Jack Hathaway there was one last hurdle to overcome before becoming a NASA astronaut candidate: getting to the time to hear the news.
Hathaway was awaiting a call in 2021 from NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, then chief of the astronaut office, to hear if he too could join the agency. But Hathaway was on the carrier USS Truman, far at sea and flying with Strike Fighter Squadron 81. So the US Navy commander and pilot didn’t miss the crucial call, he told Space.com.
“Finally, at the end of the evening, he sent me an email,” Hathaway said on March 5. Hathaway finished his daily pilot duties, read his e-mails and scurried to a room ready to use an open line, that is “you know. , group area.” Unfortunately, when Wiseman told Hathaway that the carrier pilot needed to start packing for NASA training, a group of officers walked by on patrol and saw an excited Hathaway quietly putting his hands on his head.
The Hathaway officers, who graduated from astronaut training this month, knew all too well: they were “paddles,” the people responsible for grading each Navy aircraft carrier landing. “They watched my reaction,” said Hathaway, “and they immediately walked down the length of the ship to talk to all the other ready rooms. They told everyone they saw. So I failed, to keep it a secret .”
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Hathaway and 11 other astronaut candidates – 10 from NASA and two from the United Arab Emirates – completed 2.5 years of basic training this month and are eligible for future missions.
They have a rich range of spaceflight possibilities to enjoy: possible lunar or space station lunar flights for the Artemis program, months-long missions on the International Space Station (ISS) and missions to commercial space stations under development in the future.
To be sure, the process won’t be without obstacles: the first two planned Artemis crewed missions were delayed in January due to technical gremlins, and NASA faces a smaller budget in fiscal year 2025 that could have an additional impact on mission planning. But the new astronauts feel energized, and hopeful, as they look at a longer time scale of a decade or more.
“There’s just so much to be excited about,” Hathaway said. “The whole team has a lot of hard work to do. It’s all a great time to be a part of [astronaut] office. You’re coming into the office with all the commercial partners doing lunar landings and lunar missions, and you have the opportunity to have multiple commercial partners building lunar landings and human landing systems. I’m excited about this.”
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New astronaut and US Navy lieutenant commander Jessica Wittner, an aviation machinist in training, said she is excited about how her “tinkering around the garage” will help some spacecraft programs.
The aging ISS will require more maintenance work, and commercial stations will need attention when they come online in the 2030s. In the meantime, every experiment she works on in space or on the ground will require people who are comfortable being “very strong with the equipment.” One of her first tasks after graduation will be working on new space suits for astronauts.
“It’s a very busy time to be part of NASA, and to be part of the space industry in general. And I think the astronauts are going to continue to be a big part of that industry,” a she said, pointing to the astronauts. flight experience they can bring to various engineering teams and companies looking to expand their low Earth orbit experience for future commercial space stations.
As humans fly to different environments, both lunar and orbital, flight surgeon and new astronaut Anil Menon said there will be new medical conditions to manage along the way. Companies like Axiom Space are also flying civilians to the ISS, presenting a wider range of people (medically speaking) than you would normally see in a group of NASA astronauts.
“I think that opens doors for learning, for all of us,” Menon told Space.com. “When we go to the moon, when we go to Mars, when we think generations down – we want everyone to be able to fly and participate in the space program… (but) we have to for us to start learning about how different people react when they get up there. This is the first step in that direction.”
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Artemis is the big program on the horizon for the new astronauts. Four Artemis 2 astronauts have been named and are in deep training for their 2025 lunar mission. Artemis 3 has not yet had its crew designated to land on the moon until 2026, leaving little chance for the new astronauts to be participating. Artemis 4 and beyond, not to mention missions to NASA’s planned Gateway lunar space station, are stronger possibilities for the new group of astronauts.
“What excites me is that it’s new. I’ve always been interested in new things; I like developing things,” new NASA astronaut Andre Douglas told Space.com about Artemis. Indeed, Douglas always has learning opportunities in mind when it comes to career moves. That’s why he left the Coast Guard to join the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as an engineer before signing up with NASA.
“I needed to solve new problems and face new challenges, because I believe strongly in pushing ourselves, to understand our true potential – me as an individual and within each of us as a species,” he said. “Going to the moon, and then going to Mars, that just blows my mind. We’re going to put the things we’ve seen in Hollywood and try to make it happen. So instead of fearing the unknown, let’s try. tackle it. That’s my motto.”
Asked what excites him about the Artemis program, naval aviator and new astronaut Jack Delaney said, “What’s not exciting?” But the retired U.S. Marine major said he is interested, as a pilot, in learning how to manage power during erratic moon landings, which was also a difficult task for military pilots of the Apollo program in the 1960s and early 70s.
“You can’t put an unlimited amount of power on a vehicle,” he said. “So what instrumentation do you put in there, effectively [and] basically on the moon to avoid obstacles while landing at the south pole, where the sunlight is at such a low angle?”
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Thinking about the “dark pockets” and “visual illusions” that the deep polar shadows would bring, Delaney stressed that a spacecraft would need to be “in the loop to make real-time decisions”. capable” equipped with the appropriate instrumentation. ” These are all questions, he said, “I’m interested in getting involved, and starting to make choices about our long-term presence there.”
New astronaut and medical physicist Christopher Williams emphasized that his team is ready to go to the moon, and use their skills to get there. “It gives me goosebumps that some of the people I walked across the stage today, I think, are going to be on the moon,” he told Space.com. “We’re not just growing, but expanding our portfolio, going beyond low Earth orbit. I think it connects with a lot of people in terms of exploration and getting out there.”
