(Bloomberg) — NASA’s next class of 10 astronaut candidates includes more women than men for the first time in the space agency’s more than 60-year history.
The six women and four men include engineers, scientists and former military personnel. Notably, two are former employees of SpaceX, including Anna Menon, who flew to orbit in 2024 as part of the company’s Polaris Dawn mission, which included the first commercial spacewalk. Menon is also the first astronaut candidate to be selected who has already flown to orbit before.
The new astronaut group comes on board as NASA works to advance its Artemis program to send humans back to the moon. NASA has said the program’s goal is to learn how to sustain a human presence on the moon and use those lessons on future missions to Mars.
NASA is also racing to return to the moon before China reaches the lunar surface with its own astronauts.
“I’ll be damned if the Chinese beat NASA or beat America back to the moon,” Sean Duffy, US Transportation Secretary and NASA’s acting administrator, said during a ceremony at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We’re going to win. We love challenges. We love competition.”
The new astronaut candidates will spend the next two years training before they will become eligible for flight assignments, which could include missions to low Earth orbit or to the moon. One of the candidates could also one of the first Americans to set foot on Mars, Duffy said.
“No pressure, NASA,” he said. “We have some work to do.”
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