During the reveal of the recruits of ESA’s astronaut class of 2022, the first Paralympian astronaut was announced, and he is identified as John McFall. John is a sprinter who hails from the United Kingdom and he hopes to inspire people with his story.
John is set to join the European Space Agency training corps, to work alongside designers and engineers, to see if he can be the first disabled person to make it to space. In other words, John will now join the training corps as a para-astronaut as part of a study to see what adaptations and redesigning is needed.
John is a British Paralympic sprinter from Surrey, who unfortunately lost his leg in a motorbike accident when he was 19-years-old. It may take years before John might actually go to space because the training with the ESA can go on for years. A clear example of this situation, is from the story of a British astronaut named Tim Peake who trained with ESA in 2009 before finally going to space in the year 2016.
The European Space Agency announced the list of the Astronaut Training Class of 2022 in a press conference at Paris on Wednesday 23rd of November 2022. According to Josef Aschbacher, 50% of the recruits this year were females, and he said that, there was a strong representation of countries across Europe in the final selection. Samantha Cristoforetti also mentioned that only one of the recruits in the last recruitment drive was a woman.
Esa’s New Astronaut Recruits
Earlier today at the Grand Palais Ephemere in Paris, the European Space Agency (ESA) revealed its astronaut recruits for the year 2022. Some old astronauts at the agency expressed their delight in the quality of astronauts that were recruited this year.
The European Space Agency recruited six new astronauts to join their team for the first time in years, since the last recruitment happened in the year 2008. The space agency is looking forward to grow its team, hence the recruitment of its new members. More than 22,000 people applied to join the ESA program, and this number was two and half times more than the number of people that applied in their last recruitment in 2008.
The Director General of ESA said that, all the new recruits are “unique” because they look for all the intellectual capability they have, they can make good decisions and they make sure they push the right buttons. He said that it was fun interviewing the new recruits, and there were a lot of tests and evaluations they had to pass through, one of them being the medical test.
Amongst the privileged top recruits is British astronomer, Rosemary Coogan, who has been recruited as one of the new career astronauts. With two masters degrees from the University of Durham , Rosemary Coogan’s masters research was focused on gamma-ray emissions from black holes. She further pursued her PhD in Astronomy at the University of Sussex.
UK Science minister, George Freeman who was in Paris for the event, was pleased with the announcement of three British recruits who were now ESA astronauts. He said Tim Peake “inspired a whole generation” and Rosemary Coogan is going to be a representative for women in space. He was also pleased that the UK will be the first country to send a para-astronaut to space, and his statements indicated how proud he was of the new British ESA recruits.
READ ALSO: Raising VAT Rate Will Not Be A Good Idea- Economist
