No Portuguese has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the class of five new career astronauts, it was known on Wednesday.
The European Space Agency has selected, as part of a recruitment campaign launched in March 2021, three men (from Spain, Belgium and Switzerland) and two women (from France and the United Kingdom).
Among the new astronauts are pilots, a physician and a neuroscientist.
The new career astronauts, announced at a ceremony broadcast live from Paris, France, will begin the training program for future space missions next year and join the current active corps of seven ESA astronauts – from Italy (2) and Germany (2 ), United Kingdom (1), Denmark (1) and France (1).
The European Space Agency has also chosen, for the first time, an astronaut with a physical disability, as part of a program that works to study the conditions and technologies that guarantee safe missions for these people.
As for the recruitment campaign launched in 2021, that is, more than ten years after the previous campaign, 320 Portuguese applied, out of a total of more than 22 thousand of different nationalities.
ESA opened the new recruitment process by thinking about future missions to the Moon or even Mars and wanted to increase the number of women in space—currently the agency has an active female astronaut, Italian Samantha Cristoforetti, who this year became the first European woman to pilot the International Space Station.
