Over the course of the next year and a half, a selection board will whittle down the applications and invite only the most highly qualified candidates for interviews at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas. In the end, a mere eight to 14 lucky individuals will be asked to report for training.The number of applications for a spot in Nasa’s 2017 class is almost triple the amount that came in during the last recruitment call for the 2012 class. They also have to be physically fit and pass a “Nasa long-duration ast-ronaut physical.”. In its call for recruits, Nasa encouraged pilots, engineers and other scientists to apply.
Nasa has received a record 18,300 resumes from people keen on becoming astronauts, the US space agency has said. Qualified candidates need to be US citizens and have at least a bachelor’s degree in engineering, science, computer science or maths, as well as three years of professional experience or at least 1,000 hours of pilot-in-command time in jet aircraft. And it shatters the previous record of 8,000 in 1978.

It’s not at all surprising to me that so many Americans from diverse backgrounds want to personally contribute to blazing the trail on our journey to Mars,” Nasa administrator Charlie Bolden, a former astronaut, said in a statement on Friday.Those who make it through will be given technical duties at Johnson’s Astronaut Office. Training for the chosen candidates includes a focus on spacewalking and teamwork, as well as some command of Wholesale Cube vacuum storage bags Russian language.Nasa has received a record 18,300 resumes from people keen on becoming astronauts, the US space agency has said. With the American spaceflight program grounded since 2011 when the space shuttle was retired, Nasa’s current active corps currently comprises 47 members, down from 149 in 2000 at the peak of the space shuttle era.But only a chosen few will actually see their galactic career goals realised. Nasa expects to announce its new class in mid-2017.

They will then be assigned to the ISS, the Orion spacecraft for deep space exploration or one of two commercial crew spacecraft currently in development, SpaceX’s Dragon crew capsule and Boeing’s CST-100 Starli-ner. The timeframe for submitting applications opened on December 14 and closed Thursday, with the space agency taking to the social media to get the word out