NASA welcomes its newest class of astronauts after two-year training in Houston

The Johnson Space Center welcomed 12 new astronauts – 10 Americans and two from the United Arab Emirates – after the class completed a two-year training program through NASA.

These astronauts will be assigned missions to the International Space Station and future commercial space stations, and will also focus on missions to the moon in preparation for Mars.

Luke Delaney, a retired United States Marine Corps major from DeBary, Florida, said graduating from the program was a dream – for some, a dream that was decades in the making.

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When putting on his spacesuit, Delaney said he felt like he made it.

"The first time you put that on, and you’re getting in the water, it’s impressive. You just feel like you’ve made it in some ways," he shared.

The class, which was made up of scientists, doctors, engineers and researchers, was chosen two years ago from over 12,000 applicants.

After making the cut, they moved to Houston and have been training physically and mentally for their first spaceflight.

Jack Hathaway, a commander in the United States Navy from South Windsor, Connecticut, described the different types of training the astronauts underwent as part of the training program.

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"We learned about the space station systems. We learned to speak a little bit of Russian. We learned how to fly the T-38. We do spacesuit training in the neutral buoyancy lab. And, we learned how to operate the Canadian arm – the robotic arm that’s on the space station right now," Hathaway said. 

Hathway shared his excitement about all the opportunities available to astronauts, declaring there is "really not a bad job in the astronaut office."

"There’s so much in front of us right now. Whether it’s a Starliner flight or a Dragon flight, or getting to work on a development program or to work on current operations with what’s going on in the space station right now," Hathaway said.

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Though they won't immediately hop on a flight, the new astronauts are prepared for their time out of this world. 

"The science that we’re doing on the International Space Station, there’s nowhere else in the universe that we can do that science. We’re learning things about medicine and the human body. Space gives us a laboratory to work with that we don’t have here on the ground," said Chris Williams, a medical physicist from Boston.

The Johnson Space Center director said it will be at least one year until any of the newly graduated astronauts get their first flight assignment.

Applications are now open for the next round of astronauts.