When Loral O’Hara was a middle-school student in Sugar Land, she would often attend mission debriefs at the Johnson Space Center, eager to see returning astronauts and hear them talk about their time in space.
“I remember one mission in particular which was Eileen Collins’ first mission as commander,” O’Hara said. “She was the first female mission commander, and I got to come to that debrief and everyone on the crew signed the crew photo.”
More than 20 years later, O’Hara stood on stage Friday at the space center and received her silver pin — a tradition dating back to the Mercury 7 astronauts — as one of 13 new astronauts who could step foot on the moon as part of the agency’s Artemis program.
It was a homecoming of sorts for O’Hara, 36, who first visited the space center with her second-grade class, delivering tomato plant seeds to be flown on a space shuttle. Her parents, who now live in Brenham, were in the audience, as were her brother and sister. O’Hara reflected on coming full circle.
“I grew up coming to NASA Johnson Space Center and we got to do that science experiment, so it was just kind of always a part of my life,” O’Hara said. “I’ve been saying I wanted to be an astronaut since I was in second grade.”
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The class of 11 NASA candidates, as well as two Canadian Space Agency candidates, was winnowed from a record-setting pool of more than 18,000 applicants in 2017. The new graduates may be assigned to missions destined for the International Space Station, the moon and possibly Mars. NASA’s goal is to return humans to the moon by 2024, with a crew that includes a female astronaut.
“The title of astronaut has always carried a sense of sweeping excellence,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in his opening remarks at the ceremony. “This excellence is earned every day through a rare combination of meticulous effort. Our graduates today have demonstrated uncommon focus, uncommon commitment and dedication during the last two years of very intense training.”
Friday’s ceremony was the first public graduation ceremony for astronauts the agency has ever hosted. Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz of Texas were in attendance, as well as several local politicians.
“One of the really fun things about today is seeing each (astronaut) after that journey of two years,” Cruz said. “That teamwork I know has been built through a cauldron of incredibly difficult training and adversity, but it’s impressive to see how much the team has come together over the course of two years.”
Astronaut candidates went through more than two years of basic training to become eligible for spaceflight. The astronauts’ training program included spacewalking, robotics, International Space Station systems, T-38 jet proficiency and Russian language. Based at Johnson Space Center, many new astronauts are not assigned to flight for years and do things like backing up other astronauts in orbit at Mission Control and working with international partners at training facilities.
Including the current class, NASA now has 49 active astronauts in its corps. The space agency is also considering plans to open the application process this spring for the next class of astronaut candidates.
The new class of astronauts includes members of every branch of the armed forces as well as civilians with research and engineering backgrounds.
O’Hara, the lone Texan in her astronaut class, has extensive research experience, having been a research engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., where she worked on the engineering, test and operations of deep-ocean research submarines and robots. She earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas and a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from Purdue University.
“There’s really no one way to get there,” O’Hara said. “We’ve all followed completely different paths, done completely different things, which is one of the cool things about being part of the group: We get to learn from each other and go through this experience together and learn to speak each other’s languages.”
As each astronaut’s name was called during the graduation ceremony, a classmate stood and shared information about the graduate. Fellow astronaut Frank Rubio, an Army lieutenant colonel, called O’Hara “incredibly tough.”
“She is strong, tough as nails, and she can run any of us into the ground,” Rubio said. “Intellectually and physically, she’s as good as it gets.”
O’Hara’s experience working with robotics also equipped her with skills that could be easily transferable to her new career as an astronaut. The robots she worked with function similarly to the International Space Station’s mobile servicing system, a robotic system that moves equipment and supplies around the station.
“Just trying to look at a two-dimensional image and figure out where the giant three-dimensional system is and what it’s doing is somewhat transferable,” she said.
Having plunged into the ocean depths aboard a small, three-person submarine is also a plus. O’Hara designed, built and tested Alvin submarines — manned deep-ocean research subs owned by the Navy and operated by Woods Hole — even taking one out for a sea trial 1 mile deep in the Pacific off the coast of California.
“Just going to sea and being on a research vessel in kind of a confined environment far away from home in tough environmental conditions, working with a small team — and you have a pretty focused goal — and as things break you have to fix them with the resources you have on hand, it’s pretty analogous to space flight,” O’Hara said.
But even for those with the requisite skill set, the astronaut training program can be grueling. O’Hara said on a typical day she would shuttle from Russian language classes to an airport tarmac to fly a jet, followed by another class on systems engineering.
“You’re mentally shifting from totally different subjects and just going straight between them, just kind of juggling all those things in your head,” she said.
As for whether she prefers a future mission to the International Space Station or going to the moon, O’Hara said she would be happy with either. She would love to participate in the science experiments during a space station mission but admitted walking on the lunar surface “would be epic.”
“I can imagine the feeling of standing on the moon and looking back on the Earth and the perspective that gives, the experience of doing real exploration,” she said.
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