The New Team Of NASA Astronauts Is 50% Female

Last year was quite remarkable for space researches. Amongst them, many crucial efforts were made by NASA to announce its plans to land humans on Mars in the 2030s, and then breaking the Internet when they put a call out for people to sign up. Within some years, NASA could be sending astronauts to Mars. NASA unveiled the class of astronauts enrolled in 2013 and are being trained now, these astronauts are nominated for the first trip to Mars. Four of the eight candidates, NASA announced are women.

When the 2013 class was announced Janet Kavandi, NASA's director of flight crew operations at Johnson Space Center in Houston explained that the women selected for training in the new class were not chosen because of their gender, but these were the most proficient people we met with.There were more than 6,100 applicants for the class of eight. The selected astronauts are Josh Cassada, Victor Glover, Tyler Hague, Christina Hammock, Nicole Aunapu Mann, Anne McClain, Jessica Meir, and Andrew Morgan. That’s a competitive 0.0013% success rate. It took about 18 months of meticulous medical and psychological analysis. 

And these will be trained for two years before they'll officially join NASA's 46 currently active astronauts.

These candidates will be trained extraordinarily, their training includes how to tackle such unusual conditions.

At the end of the last year, McClain said “If we go to Mars, we’ll be standing on the behalf of our entire species in a place we’ve never been before. For me it’s the greatest thing a human being can experience.”

Jason Crusan, the director of advanced exploration systems at NASA told "It's not like the Moon, it’s a three-day trip. When you go to Mars, you're going. You can't abort."

It is evaluated that this voyage is about 56 million kilometers one way, which will take six to nine months. The astronauts would make this journey successful in case if they brought valuable information about the red planet. Otherwise, it would be like to receive a title of one of the humans to step on Mars for the first time.

Meir said that this idea of exploring Mars has always been a part of the human interest. It can tell us a lot about our planet Earth and can help to understand our place in the universe, what drives me more than anything.

Mccain added to this by saying “From space, you can’t see borders. What you see is this lonely planet. Here we all are on it, so angry at one another.

I wish more people could step back and see how small Earth is and how we rely on one another.”