NASA Astronaut Group 8


NASA Astronaut Group 8 was a group of 35 astronauts announced on January 16, 1978. It was the first selection in nine years of astronaut candidates since Group 7 in August 1969, and also included NASA's first female astronauts. Due to the long delay between the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972 and the first flight of the Space Shuttle in 1981, few astronauts from the older groups stayed with NASA. Since then, a new group of candidates has been selected roughly every two years.
In Astronaut Group 8, two different astronaut groups were formed: pilots and mission specialists. Of the 35 selected, six were women, three were male African Americans, and one was a male Asian American.

Special achievements

Within this group a sizable number of American spaceflight firsts were achieved:
Of this group, Scobee, Resnik, Onizuka, and McNair would perish in the Challenger accident. These four astronauts, plus Lucid, would all receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, giving this astronaut class five total recipients of this top NASA award. This is second to the New Nine class which won seven.

Career highlights

After the Challenger accident, Sally Ride would serve on both the Rogers Commission and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. By 2008, only Anna Fisher remained on active duty eligible for a flight assignment, By 2011 she was no longer eligible for space travel and had become a management astronaut, She currently works jointly for the Capsule Communicator and Exploration branches of NASA, working as a station CAPCOM and on display development for the Orion project. Fisher's tenure was interrupted by a maternal leave of absence from 1989 to 1996. Shannon Lucid's tenure was continuous since selection, and while she, too, was no longer eligible for flight assignment, she continued to perform ground-based duties, serving as CAPCOM for shuttle missions to 2011, including the final flight day of the final mission. She retired at age 69 in 2012.

Nickname

Group 8's name for itself was "TFNG." The abbreviation was deliberately ambiguous; for public purposes, it stood for "Thirty-Five New Guys"; however, within the group itself, it was known to stand for an off-color military phrase, 'the fucking new guy', used to denote newcomers to a unit.

Group members

Pilots

, the first Jewish-American, and the second American woman in space.
, the first American woman in space.