This week, NASA introduced its first-class of latest astronauts since 2017, hiring 10 candidates to coach at Johnson House Heart in Houston for the following two years.

There isn’t any assure that every of these six males and 4 girls, ages 32 to 45 and all with extraordinarily spectacular resumes, will full the coaching and change into full-fledged astronauts. However one factor is evident: They’re arriving at NASA at an auspicious time.

“That is the golden age of human spaceflight,” mentioned Reid Wiseman on Monday throughout a ceremony at an airfield close to Johnson House Heart welcoming the brand new astronaut candidates.

Wiseman would know. Now chief of the astronaut workplace, Wiseman was chosen in August 2009. At the moment, the house shuttle was as a result of retire. Neither he nor any of his classmates would fly on the US car. The vast majority of them would make their first spaceflight on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. And on the time there was no coherent deep-space exploration plan—nominally NASA was on a “journey to Mars,” which was mocked as a “journey to nowhere.” The courses of 2013 and 2017 additionally confronted related uncertainty.

However now NASA has SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft to fly 4 folks at a time into low Earth orbit. And inside the subsequent two years, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft ought to come on-line. By the mid-2020s, NASA’s Orion spacecraft can even enter service, and SpaceX can also be growing its massive Starship car for Moon landings and extra. By no means earlier than in its historical past will NASA have so many human spaceflight automobiles out there.

And whereas NASA has vibrant analysis ongoing on the Worldwide House Station, it additionally has a reasonably strong plan for lunar exploration with the Artemis program. Lots of the 10 individuals who walked onto the stage inside a T-38 upkeep hangar Monday will in all probability stroll on the Moon inside the subsequent 10 or 15 years.

Wiseman, who led the choice course of, mentioned the company sought folks with a variety of talent units, who can do every part from develop protein crystals on the house station to drill for water on the floor of the Moon.

“We’re at all times on the lookout for good, devoted folks of their present fields,” Wiseman mentioned in an interview after the ceremony. “We would like workforce gamers, folks that we all know we will ship as much as the house station, or to the floor of the Moon, and get together with the workforce. And we need to know once we’re selecting you, that you’ve got the sort of the motivation and the prowess to get the job performed. These persons are all complicated downside solvers, and they’re all workforce gamers.”

The brand new astronaut candidates, accordingly, got here from a wide range of backgrounds to NASA, from the standard check pilots to grease drilling to nationwide championship monitor biking.

“You would possibly assume that my path as a bioengineer and a bike owner is somewhat bit on the market, nevertheless it was actually all of these abilities that I gained from these experiences that helped me get right here,” mentioned Christina Birch, 35, who has a doctoral diploma in organic engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how and gained the US particular person biking pursuit title in 2016 and 2017.

NASA additionally sought to pick a various group of people that have been consultant of the entire nation. The brand new astronauts got here from throughout the USA, from Puerto Rico to Alaska, from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds.

“We actually need each little child rising up in America to take a look at the NASA Astronaut Workplace and see themselves projected into the longer term,” Wiseman mentioned. “That is crucial to us. We have been extraordinarily fortunate this time that we had a unbelievable, numerous group of candidates that got here out and simply crushed it.”

NASA chosen the most recent class from greater than 12,000 candidates. Wiseman mentioned out of these there have been 500 folks he might simply have chosen to change into astronauts. NASA gave the authority to pick as much as a dozen folks, however these 10 stood head and shoulders above the remainder. The company will in all probability choose one other class in 2025, when the Artemis program begins to ramp up.