In the 1960s, NASA sent a rejection letter to a hopeful astronaut simply because she was female. At the time, there was no impetus to set up a training program for women. How times have changed: The latest class of NASA astronauts is comprised of 50 percent women for the first time in history, as reported by The New York Times.
The latest people training to be astronauts for NASA were recruited in 2013. All of them are potential candidates for human missions to Mars, something NASA announced they were aiming to achieve by the end of the 2030s. Of course, female astronauts aren’t new: Helen Sharman, Sally Ride, and Valentina Tereshkova have all already shown that being an astronaut isn’t dependent on gender.
via IFLScience
