‘Lifetime of effort’ launched astronaut hopefuls

Deniz Burnham was staying with her mom in California when a Houston area code popped onto her phone. Was it the call she'd been waiting for?

“Working in oil and gas, getting a phone call from a Houston area code is not abnormal,” said Burnham, a drilling engineer who lived in Alaska at the time. “So when I see the number I'm thinking like, ‘Maybe? Could it be?' ”

Jack Hathaway missed his phone call. The naval aviator was in a pre-deployment exercise off the coast of Virginia. He opened his email at the end of the day and recalled reading a message that said, “Jack, you have missed the phone call. What are you doing? Please call me.”

These calls were the culmination of a rigorous, months-long interview process. And last week, NASA named 10 people, including these two, to join the 2021 astronaut candidate class. They were selected from more than 12,000 applicants.

“It always renews my faith in humanity,” said astronaut selection manager Anne Roemer. “We have so many talented Americans who are interested in exploring the solar system.”

NASA accepted the applications in March 2020. And for the first time, a master's degree (or similar academic degree, such as a doctor of medicine, or completion of a test pilot program) was required to apply.

The agency had previously said a master's was preferred, though most astronaut candidates it selected had this level of education or had completed test pilot school (or both). So the requirement was an effort to be more transparent, Roemer said.

NASA whittled its list down to roughly 3,000 people by cutting