Word: nasa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fourth flight, Hoffman served as a media representative for NASA, helping to explain the shuttle program on CBS and National Public Radio. Over the past few years, NASA has also sent Hoffman on speaking tours of public schools...
Hoffman and his colleagues differ from their predecessors in another, perhaps even more important, way When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1978 announced the selection of the astronaut group that included Hoffman, a reporter asked the director of the Manned Space Flight Center in Houston to comment on his new charges Christopher C. Kraft Jr. said the new astronauts--the first picked by NASA in more than eight years--were "extremely highly qualified and motivated, because, unlike previous applicants, many have wanted to become as turnouts since they were 10 or 12 years...
...while however. Hoffman never thought be would have a chance to work for the government --or at least for NASA. But in 1977, Hoffman saw a poster in an MIT lab announcing NASA's recruiting drive...
...Given an opportunity to apply there was no way i could say no, Hoffman says. But the odds were not encouraging: out of 8079 applicants for pilot and mission specialist openings, NASA selected 20 mission specialists and 15 pilots. After first making the finalists group of 208, Hoffman was flown to Houston for a week of interviews and medical exams. Shortly thereafter, many of Hoffman's relatives, friends and colleagues started getting calls from the FBI, inquiring about all the personal details that NASA needed to know before putting someone in the back seat of their billion-dollar space plane...
Difficult as the application process was, it was easy compared with NASA's basic training Hoffman says that much of the year he spent as an astronaut candidate "was like going back to school," with courses ranging from aeronautics to astronauts...