#Nasa careers series#

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to investigate this opaque selection process for bias. While the process is announced and conducted with fairly high visibility, the mechanics and demographics of astronaut selection are not transparent to the public nor easy to elucidate. Over the history of these selections, the types and durations of missions have changed, and in selecting quality operational personnel, NASA has needed to consider variances in budgets and missions, retirements and other factors, while attempting to achieve race and gender balance. Since 1959, NACA, and later NASA, has been selecting personnel for operational spaceflight roles. There are no restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. The specific roles of both authors are articulated in the “author contributions” section. The funder, Gregory Kovacs, provided support in the form of consulting payments to Elite Research for several personnel including co-author MS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: The study was personally funded by Gregory Kovacs. Received: ApAccepted: JPublished: July 27, 2017Ĭopyright: © 2017 Kovacs, Shadden. Darby Children's Research Institute, 173 Ashley Avenue, Charleston, SC 29425, UNITED STATES Analysis of the public-source data for all selections since the beginning of the astronaut program revealed significant age trends over time including a gradual increase in selectee age and decreased tenure at NASA after last flight, with average age at retirement steady over the entire history of the astronaut program at approximately 48 years.Ĭitation: Kovacs GTA, Shadden M (2017) Analysis of age as a factor in NASA astronaut selection and career landmarks. Applicants younger or older than approximately 40 years were significantly less likely to receive invitations for interviews and were significantly less likely to be selected as an astronaut. The results for the FOIA data revealed a nonlinear relationship between age and receiving an interview, as well as age and selection into the astronaut program, but the most striking observation was the loss of age diversity at each stage of selection. The second used public data on age at selection and age at other career milestones for every astronaut selected from 1959 to 2013 to analyze trends in age over time using ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression and Pearson’s correlation.

#Nasa careers series#

Using a series of multinomial and logistic regressions, the data were analyzed to uncover whether age of the applicants linearly or nonlinearly affected their likelihood of receiving an invitation, as well as their likelihood of being selected into the astronaut program. The first utilized data requested via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on NASA astronaut applicants for the 20 selection years. This research was an effort to determine if biases (specifically age) exist in the process and, if so, at which points they might manifest. The MAGIK team is responsible for setting the groundwork for and investigating the feasibility of planned robotic operations on board space stations, but most of what Miller worked on was concerned with the International Space Station specifically.NASA’s periodic selection of astronauts is a highly selective process accepting applications from the general population, wherein the mechanics of selection are not made public. It's a fun story of how one engineer's life got turned upside down, making an unexpected career change from tinkering with commercial airliners to designing hardware used by astronauts during spacewalks. 'I got an interview for a job working on airplanes, then got a call back saying, 'Hey, there's a different job that we think you might like and it's for the Manipulator, Analysis Graphics, and Interactive Kinematics (MAGIK) team,' he recalled in the video, which has been viewed more than nine million times at the time of writing.

'I worked on a lot of stuff that went up to the station.' Oops, NASA JobĪ viral TikTok is making the rounds about an engineer named David Miller telling an unusual story about how he accidentally got a job at NASA.