Astronaut
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An astronaut is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member of a spacecraft. Although generally reserved for professional space trave
NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II using a Manned Maneuvering Unit outside Space Shuttle Challenger on shuttle mission STS-41-B in 1984.
Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7 (1961)
The first sixteen NASA astronauts to be selected, February 1963. Back row: White, McDivitt, Young, See, Conrad, Borman, Armstrong, Stafford, Lovell. Front row: Cooper, Grissom, Carpenter, Schirra, Glenn, Shepard, Slayton.
The first eleven Soviet cosmonauts to fly, July 1965. Back row, left to right: Leonov, Titov, Bykovsky, Yegorov, Popovich; front row: Komarov, Gagarin, Tereshkova, Nikolayev, Feoktistov, Belyayev.
Women in space
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Women have flown and worked in outer space from the beginning of human spaceflight. Overall women have been significantly less often chosen to go to space than men, and in June 2020, constituted only
A record four women simultaneously in space aboard the International Space Station in 2010 (Expedition 23 and STS-131). Clockwise from lower left: Tracy Caldwell Dyson, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Naoko Yamazaki, and Stephanie Wilson
Jerrie Cobb with a Mercury capsule (c. early 1960s)
Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman in space, in 1963 aboard Vostok 6
Mae Jemison, the first woman of color in space, aboard STS-47 in 1992