Everybody Wants to Go to the Red Planet

It would seem that everybody wants to go to the Red Planet under NASA’s fosterage. Or at least that’s what the number of applicants says, even if ‘everybody’ is an overstatement. Still, following NASA’s advert that it’s looking for its next class of astronauts that will most likely get to go to Mars in person over the next couple of decades, no less than 18,300 Americans have signed up to the program to become an astronaut.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration opened the position just two months ago and an astounding number of people already submitted their resumes. While the enthusiasm for the mission is surely flattering for both NASA and humanity as a whole, the ‘new class of astronauts’ will only be able to be comprised of 12 people, which one could say is a little less than the number of applicants.

This huge amount of interest is relatively hard to explain, especially when one looks at the numbers and realizes this time around the number of applicants is three times larger than the number recorded for the hiring session that NASA held 4 years ago.

And yet, the prerequisites of being an astronaut are not to be taken lightly, and it’s still surprising that so many are qualified to put forward their resumes and recommendations in order to hope for a chance to be one of the very few who will embark on what is probably the most important mission of mankind up to this point in time.

The selection process will drag on for a shocking 18-month period and it’s far from your regular job interview kind of system. Testing, background checks, health verifications and even more than just that are some of the stages of the interview that applicants will be taken through in order to become one of the few.

The lucky ones who end up being selected will have a long trek of trials and tribulations ahead of them before they can even step foot into a space craft and leave for milestones as close to our planet as the International Space Station. The ones who make the cut will have to undergo 2 years of initial training that involves practicing on simulated spacecraft systems, spacewalking, learning how to speak Russian and many more.

A realistic trip will not happen until the early 2020s most likely, however. And before the Mars Mission will even have a chance to happen, there will be plenty of other manned missions planned for NASA astronauts, including ISS boarding, two commercial crew space crafts under U.S. companies brands as well as the Orion deep-space exploration vehicle.

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Roxanne Briean

I am a geek, a gamer and a writer. I have always been fascinated with the online community. At the moment I work as a full-time writer and study interior design. When I'm not scouring the net in search of interesting new gadgets and software I spend my time in MOBAs or drawing.