Space is for all
November 24, 2022 3:45 AM   Subscribe

ESA has announced their Astronaut Class of 2022. Comprising 17 astronauts from 12 countries, of which almost 50% are women, the cohort includes 5 career astronauts, 11 reserve astronauts, and 'parastronaut' John McFall, the world's first disabled astronaut. Although not guaranteed to go into orbit, the former British Paralympian will be part of a feasibility project to see what the requirements would be for that to be possible.

John McFall at ESA - biography, video.

Previously: announcement of the Parastronaut Project
posted by atlantica (4 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
The moon belongs to everyone...
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:32 AM on November 24, 2022 [1 favorite]


They seem like a great bunch overall, but I was especially pleased to see Swiss astronaut dude with a handlebar moustache. Astronauts with handlebar moustaches were something I didn't know I needed. Thank you.
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:39 AM on November 24, 2022


This is an extremely obscure video game complaint, but in the game Surviving Mars one of the things you do is go through candidates to settle your Mars base. For computer game reasons, you get a limited set of like 100 colonists to choose from, and most of them have "flaws" like being gamblers or alcoholics or lazy.

But then you look at the real world and it's like" we got 22,000 applicants" and they're not idiot gamblers, they're Swiss special forces paratroopers who are also urologists with a research interest in robotic surgery. Or a French helicopter test pilot who got her second engineering degree from MIT, speaks five languages and is also a certified yoga teacher.
posted by Superilla at 7:28 AM on November 24, 2022 [8 favorites]


Universal design! What better place to implement it than in space?

Signed,
One of the lazy ones who will never get on a Mars crew.
posted by BrashTech at 11:34 AM on November 24, 2022 [1 favorite]


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