The Josh Fruhlinger Experience

Zut alors! I am in space!

So the European Space Agency (yeah, they have one!) is holding tryouts for astronauts! They’ll pick the first Euro-spacepersons since 1992(!). When this was announced, apparently reporters were badgering the ESA spokesdrone with questions like “From which of the countries that fund your agency will the space-men come?” and “Will some of the space-men be ladies?”, because she kept repeating over and over again that “excellence” was the only criteria for selection.

Here’s the thing, though: there will be four space-persons picked, out of 8,400 applicants. That’s like 0.04 percent. I’m pretty sure that there will be more than four totally excellent people in the pool; it’s not like you’ll be able to stick them all into some kind of excellence-quantifying machine and rank them by EQ (excellent quotient). So, you know what? I think that, once you’ve got the pool winnowed down to the, say, two or three dozen excellentest folks who come out of this process, it’s totally legitimate to start making decisions based on, say, making sure the governments who pay your bills are not pissed off, or on not continuing to exclude women from macho jobs.