The names of 10 new astronauts were announced Wednesday by NASA and Boeing, the companies that will compete to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
Among the 10 new recruits are college students and Nasa veterans.
Joining with Boeing will be astronauts from six Nasa astronaut corps that have all been graduates of the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The 10 astronauts will meet later this month in Huntsville, Alabama for initial training at the same facility that produced the Apollo moon landers and the space shuttle. They will undergo five months of intensive training, to be split between training facilities in Houston and Boeing’s Starliner Launch Pad in Mississippi.
The new recruits are assigned to crews of three astronauts, including one or two flying station-flown “experts” as well as a crew member who is either a NASA veteran or trained in a different mission.
“This is a really great time to be an astronaut because we have a different method of flying than we have had in the past,” said George Zamka, NASA program manager for exploration systems. “It’s one that does have a lot of safety and reliability benefits.”
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The 11 new astronauts are listed below, with the addition of the six.
• Megan McArthur is the youngest woman to ever be selected for NASA training. She is a former test pilot who flew multiple types of rockets in support of NASA’s long-range studies and with the National Reconnaissance Office. McArthur has flown in the shuttle and International Space Station programs and is now studying for a masters degree in aerospace engineering at St Andrews University in Scotland.
• Kimiya Yui is a military officer who left the Air Force to join NASA in 2013. Yui flew on the ground operations portion of the space shuttle Discovery’s final mission in 2011. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Duke University and a master’s in engineering science from the University of Houston.
• Jack Fischer is a Navy veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom. He received a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Utah and then became an active-duty navy officer. In 2018, Fischer joined NASA’s astronaut corps.
• Gregory H. Johnson is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he holds joint appointments with the university’s Applied Physics Laboratory and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Johnson flew on the International Space Station in 2014 on a space station station mission with the European Space Agency. He is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• Clay Anderson is a retired US Navy lieutenant commander who served as the program’s chief flight controller on the space shuttle Endeavour’s final mission in 2011. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and a master’s and doctorate in civil engineering from Purdue University. Anderson spent several years of active duty flying F/A-18s, as well as time in the US Air Force.
• Ryan Forrester is a veteran of eight years of pilot training with the US Coast Guard and a US Navy rescue swimmer. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and graduated from Naval Station Norfolk and the US Naval Academy.
• Raymond L Barnett has also served in the US Coast Guard and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physical science from Texas A&M University and a master’s in civil engineering from Johns Hopkins University. He was awarded a command and command staff commission by the Coast Guard and is currently stationed in Washington, DC.
• Bob Behnken is a former military officer, who has served in the US Coast Guard and the United States Navy. During his career, Behnken commanded the Coast Guard cutter Chickasha in Lake Champlain, New York, and the Coast Guard cutter Tahoma in Puget Sound, Washington. Behnken trained aboard the National Security Cutter Monomoy in March 2018, during his last weeks of active duty. He is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and is now with NASA.
• Jeff Williams is a NASA veteran, who has logged more than 538 hours in space as a member of the US space shuttle Discovery, and on its most recent mission, STS-133. Williams is scheduled to launch on his fourth space mission in July. He holds the space agency’s record for most consecutive hours in space by a US astronaut, and has logged more than 34 million miles in space. Williams has his bachelor’