NASA's Search For Astronauts Yields a Deluge of Applicants

NASA, notes Ars Technica, has just produced a bumper crop of applicants for the coveted job of astronaut. 18,300 would-be astronauts applied to be part of the 2017 hiring class. It would be good to keep a backup job in mind, though: NASA's astronaut applications have surged even as its flight opportunities have fallen by about 90 percent. Back in the early 2000s during the peak of the space shuttle program, NASA had more than 150 active astronauts. That's because the shuttle, with six to seven launches a year, afforded 40 to 50 annual flights into space. The number of active astronauts is now about one-third of that peak due to the shuttle's retirement in 2011. With no Shuttle, and only one real destination (the International Space Station), those 18,300 astronauts will be whittled down to 8-14 candidates.

Fix unicode already!

[mark-t]

An increasing number of submissions lately have had text copy-pasted right out of the article, only to get mangled by Slashdot's inability to cope with UTF8.

It's 2015, can Slashdot please join the 21st century already?

Re:Fix unicode already!

[Anonymous Coward]

In some places, it's even 2016. What happened, off your meds?

Re:

[mark-t]

Right you are. I didn't notice the typo

Re:Fix unicode already!

[whipslash]

Gah. Fixed the story. Unicode will be supported soon.

Re:

[dwywit]

Thanks, and thanks for keeping an eye on these and other issues.

Re:

[Daniel Matthews]

" ' , 21 ."

Filter error: Your comment looks too much like ascii art.

uh huh... OK /. if you say so. http://qaz.wtf/u/convert.cgi?t... [qaz.wtf].

Re:

[Maritz]

Yeah. It's being posted to a site with potentially hundreds of thousands of eyes looking at it. Why not give it a quick fucking read first?

Wowâ(TM)zers

[zamboni1138]

Thatâ(TM)s a pretty amazing turn-out. Iâ(TM)m interested to see how they plan to use this new crop of star voyagerâ(TM)s.

Iâ(TM)ll try not to get my hopes up given our current financial situation. But maybe theyâ(TM)ll be able to figure something out.

Re:Wowâ(TM)zers

[ClickOnThis]

It's funny; I've become so accustomed to shitty unicode support that I rarely notice problems like this. My brain just screens out the junk and I see the word that was meant, unless I stop and really look at it.

All you see now is blonde, brunette, redhead?

Re:

[Kjella]

Heh, I'm starting to feel like that at work. I must have dozens of attributes, hundreds of code values memorized by now without really trying to, I work so much with XML and the data tables where I don't have the labels - there are of course documentation and views for that - that I for the most part don't need them anymore. I know what code 22 here, code 3 there, code 6 in this field and code 4 in that field means. It actually tends to freak people out that I don't need to look it up...

Re:

[whipslash]

A few more weeks and we should have it taken care of. Story fixed.

Re:Wowâ(TM)zers

[PopeRatzo]

A few more weeks and we should have it taken care of. Story fixed.

You do that and I'm gonna plant a big wet kiss on your forehead, you sexy Slashdot overlord you.

http://www.tvworthwatching.com... [tvworthwatching.com]

Re: Wowâ(TM)zers

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you a fag?

Re: Wowâ(TM)zers

[PopeRatzo]

What are you a fag?

No, I'm a unicode whore.

Re:

[currently_awake]

By the time they finish training, the only thing they will be able to ride in will be the vomit commit. No space station, no space shuttle, no orion, no moon base, no mars base. Maybe China is hiring.

all hoping to be chosen

[turkeydance]

as immigrant workers

Re:

[TheRealHocusLocus]

probably 2% are baseline qualified

The figure is closer to 100%. That 18,000 number sounds suspiciously close to the number of humans whom, if properly rendered reduced and freeze-dried, would comprise a perfect nutritional supplement for a long term Mars Mission and colony. Everybody gets to go into space! It's a win.

SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE

Bigelow Aerospace

[WindBourne]

Seriously, if we have multiple human launchers, then Bigelow will be up there with their space station alpha that holds 12 - 18. NASA will no doubt want to take some of the slots so that they can train more ppl for going to deep space, moon, and mars.
But, where this will REALLY matter, is that Bigelow wants to put a base on the moon around 2020-2022. NASA will likely take most of the slots for that.

Next: search for a purpose

[slashping]

NASA's next job will be to figure out a useful purpose for astronauts. Maybe they can show on camera how they drink water in microgravity ? Or see how plants grow ?

Re:

[slashping]

They license the patents to privileged cronys instead of just giving the knowledge to the world

You realize that in order to get a patent, you have to give the knowledge to the world ? So, what useful science has come out of this orbiting laboratory ?

Yeah, but ...

[PPH]

... most of them are Kerbals applying via the H-1B program.

It never was easy to become an astronaut

[k6mfw]

Though it seems they are seeking different type than before who were mostly test pilots (know of developmental programs, can deal with high stress emergency situations, cleared for security, used to guvmint bureaucracies). These days much of spaceflight time is transit (constant on orbit and hopefully some time will be long transit time from earth some place in space). There isn't a lot of fast paced dynamic situations i.e. in one week you go from launch to TLI, lunar orbit, land, walk around, take off, lun