Posted on 08/04/2018 1:15:57 PM PDT by BenLurkin
A former Naval Academy soccer star who led her squad to an undefeated league season has been named to another team that goes above and beyond.
NASA announced Friday that it had assigned Marine Corps Lt. Col. Nicole Mann to a new crew of astronauts who will fly a privately developed spaceship, marking a return of U.S.-manned space flight after the shuttle program ended in 2011. Since then, Americans have relied on Russian spacecraft for space travel.
Mann will be a part of a three-person crew to fly Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on a mid-2019 mission, the spacecraft’s first manned flight. NASA said in a tweet that the astronauts will launch from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to the International Space Station. The Starliner will dock and undock with the station before returning to Earth.
Mann, an NCAA Academic All-American on the academy’s soccer team, was commissioned to the Marine Corps in 1999, earned a master’s degree in engineering from Stanford University and flew F/A-18 Hornets. She deployed twice on the now-decommissioned aircraft carrier Enterprise and flew missions in Operation Iraqi Freedom. She later joined one of the Navy’s test pilot squadrons, a common assignment for aspiring astronauts. NASA selected her for astronaut training in June 2013.
(Excerpt) Read more at capitalgazette.com ...
Girls on college soccer teams. WNBA. Etc etc.
High percentage of carpet muncher. Just saying.
She got ballz.
She’s a better person than I am. Or at least very much more accomplished than I’ll ever be.
I hope she gets to go into space and something really cool happens, like “Stargate” or something.
She’s married (to a male) and has a child.
No wai! Aren’t all physically-fit women lesbians!?! (/s)
Well that’s good.
I remember Sally Ride came out shortly before her death.
Go her!! Took my daughter to the NASA Space Center in Huntsville, AL this summer. She got to see and hear a woman (a Space Camp alumni) in the International Space Station communicating with the people in the control center. I will definitely have to show this story to my daughter- she loves playing soccer too!!
Total stud, this young, brave, competent Marine!!
Since the recent Boeing test was a bust, I’d be surprised to see them make a 2019 manned launch.
Chuck Yeagar refused to become an astronaut. He wanted to be a pilot. This is not to denigrate the courage of astronauts in any fashion. It takes an entirely different set of skills. And women are generally smaller and lighter with better dexterity and might be better for the job.
Also, he didn’t have a college education, which had become mandatory by that time.
And for those who were hoping that the Boeing Starliner was something like this:
No. It's this:
BEHOLD THE CHODELINER!
There’s a lesson there.
Degrees are highly overrated.
Absolutely.
but I thought they said these were manned flights?
Nicole Mann. Ok so I guess it will be a “Mann”ed flight. This is confusing.
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