75% are active-duty or former military (all O-4 or higher), and most are graduates of one of the service academies. Without taking anything away from their accomplishment, it's safe to say these individuals were already high-achievers to begin with.
I fail to grok the vastly disproportionate number of candidates from a military background. At the very least, it gives me a (mostly-unfounded) perception that the astronaut program must operate on a military-like hierarchy. On the flip side, this gives me great hope for non-government space operations a la Space-X.
It surprises me how different is the astronaut profile between the NASA and the ESA. Herein Europe they don't look for pilots at all, they mostly look for scientist that have published a lot and that have good public relationship skills (90% of european astronaut's work seems to be PR, they don't get much spacetime)
It was a disapointment when I learned that, I never had a chance anyway as my courriculum is really really far from being as good as these!. But being a pilot I hoped I had a chance some how. Personally, I think that it makes more sense to have scientists on board, the times when there was a pilot skill needed are long gone.
That wasn't my experience. I got through the first 3 rounds in ESA's most recent astronaut selection, and near the end about half of the candidates were from a military or commercial flight background. The rest typically had significant research experience but almost all them had some kind of flight experience too (private license, parachuting, stunt flying, gliding, etc).
Man, I'm looking forward to the private spaceflight folks to get to the point where even near-sighted heavy mid-20s engineers like myself can go up and try to do things.
I don't even care if my capsule asplodes--if we're going to pull of colonization, we need more zerging.
EDIT:
Further thought...how depressing is it to work at NASA, I wonder? You get to work with the highest-tech and most insane things the human race has ever produced, and yet you know that the vast majority of the public doesn't give a hit and that every politician views you as nothing but an excuse to enrich the contractors in their districts. I can't imagine that's a good plus to be.
[+] [-] packetslave|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beambot|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omegant|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simoncoggins|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biofox|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Peake
[+] [-] rpmcb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angersock|12 years ago|reply
I don't even care if my capsule asplodes--if we're going to pull of colonization, we need more zerging.
EDIT:
Further thought...how depressing is it to work at NASA, I wonder? You get to work with the highest-tech and most insane things the human race has ever produced, and yet you know that the vast majority of the public doesn't give a hit and that every politician views you as nothing but an excuse to enrich the contractors in their districts. I can't imagine that's a good plus to be.
[+] [-] mturmon|12 years ago|reply