Posted by:
Dave the Atheist
(
)
Date: June 16, 2018 07:05PM
"Three more headed for the ISS last week onboard a Russian Soyuz. Even though one of those was a American woman whose resume was chock full of jaw-dropping astronautiness—a double-three physician and engineer with a decade working as a NASA flight surgeon who also spent months in Antarctica searching for asteroids embedded in ice—and even though she was named in this space just last week, you’d likely be hard pressed at this point to recall her name. That would be Serena Auñón-Chancellor, whose time in the spotlight was some 1000x less than that of a raccoon.
But there are four astronauts whose names may soon become almost as familiar as those of 1960s and 70s space heroes. As the Post puts it “a quartet of former military pilots and NASA veterans who combined have spent more than a year in space over eight flights.” Yes, they’re very Right Stuff, but what makes this group memorable isn’t so much their stellar resumes, as the nature of the rides they will be taking.
Their names are Robert Behnken, Eric Boe, Doug Hurley and Sunita Williams. They are the ones chosen for NASA’s next big missions. But instead of flying on rockets designed and operated by the space agency, their rides will come courtesy of a pair of contractors — SpaceX and Boeing — hired to provide a taxi-like service to the International Space Station.
These are the four astronauts who will take seats in the next manned space flights to be launched from the United States, the flights that should finally give the US a direct patch back into space, rather than making us high-priced passengers on Russia’s space-Uber."