Thursday, September 20, 2007

Fly me to the moon...

(Above CC licensed photo linked from misterbisson's flickr stream)

My buddy Joe recently blogged about this interesting little bit of information:

NASA posted a hiring notice for new astronauts Tuesday, seeking for the first time in almost 30 years men and women to fly aboard spacecraft other than the shuttle.

So I'm thinkin' I gotta apply, right? I mean, sure, I'm not remotely qualified. Not in my wildest LSD-induced dreams (not that I do, or have ever done that kinda stuff, cuz that would disqualify me too, I imagine). But how many people can say that they even *applied* to be an astronaut? It's got to be good for at least 2 or 3 minutes of cocktail-party conversation.

So, just to see *how* unqualified I really am (before submitting my un-qualified resume), I'm looking over the job qualifications required and my aspirations of spaceflight are stopped dead in their long-strided tracks by this:

* Standing height between 62 and 75 inches

Goddamn our miniature astronaut force!! What the hell is America going for? Dwarves in space? If there's a war for the moon, we sure as hell don't need a bunch of little people up there battling it out with bigass Ruskies (or MoonTerrorists). We need some big, hearty flyboys, damnit! So, NASA, I call on you to abandon the mini-nauts program and open the astronaut force up to us "big-n-tall" types. At least raise that upper limit to 78".

Ah well. More institutionalized height discrimination. What can you do?

My favorite part of the job overview for astronaut...and I quote:

*Frequent travel may be required

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