Who wants to be an astronaut? 22 thousand questions in the ESA competition

Closed since last Friday, there are many applications to become astronauts of the European Space Agency: over 22 thousand. France, Germany, United Kingdom and Italy are the countries with the highest number of applications

(Photo: Nasa) The road is long, but the journey of the next astronauts and the next astronauts of the European Space Agency (ESA) is already came alive. In fact, the agency today announced the first results relating to the competition for the search for new staff to be sent to space. The selection is long - after an initial screening phase of the applications received, it includes a series of psychological, practical, medical and interview tests - and will end with the announcement of new ESA members only at the end of next year. But certainly there is no shortage of candidates: the response to the ESA competition was incredible compared to the last call by the agency, in 2008, almost three times as much: over 22,500 compared to 8,400 at the time. The countries that have come forward most are France (in absolute lead the ranking, with over 7,000 applications), Germany (3,700), the United Kingdom (just under 2,000) and Italy (1,860).

The numbers released during the first press conference on the new ESA selection confirm not only that, to use the words of the ESA general manager Josef Aschbacher, that of the astronaut is still a dream job, but that female participation is also much higher than in the past: 5,400 women candidates, against less than 1,300 in the last competition (from which, we recall, our Samantha Cristoforetti was selected, next to the command of the International Space Station in her new mission) . "It is good to see an increase in the gender distribution of candidates and candidates in this selection - commented David Parker, Director of Human and Robotics Exploration of ESA - but the numbers also show that there is still a lot to do to achieve a gender balance in the space sector ". Instead, 257 applications came from disabled people (60 of whom were women). In fact, the ESA competition was born with the intention of making space increasingly accessible, opening the doors to people with physical disabilities as well.

Four to six new astronauts will have to come out of all these questions, an astronaut with physical disabilities and up to twenty reserves. What will they do? The agenda in the short and medium term (from now to about 2040) for space exploration is dense: in addition to the activities of the Space Station, the next astronauts will be grappling with the project of the cislunar space station Lunar Gateway, the exploration of the lunar surface and beyond: that of nearby Mars.


Space - 18 Jun

The "Cold test" of probes directed at Jupiter

adsJSCode ("nativeADV1", [[2,1]], "true", "1", "native", "read-more", "1 "); Space - 11 Jun

Hera, the new ESA mission, told in a cartoon

adsJSCode ("nativeADV2", [[2,1]], "true", "2" , "native", "read-more", "2"); Space - 9 Jun

Life Beyond Earth, the spectacle of life on the Moon at the Venice Biennale

Topics

Astronauts Esa globalData.fldTopic = "Astronauts, Esa"

This opera is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.