NASA’s new astronaut class includes SpaceX veterans Anna Menon and Yuri Kubo

SpaceX boasts an awesome alumni list. Some person gone connected to recovered the sector’s biggest startups; others go astronauts.

NASA unveiled its 2025 astronaut people this week, and 2 acquainted names popped out: Anna Menon and Yuri Kubo. Both spent much than a decennary astatine SpaceX, wherever they played captious roles successful the company’s emergence to the behemoth it is today.

Menon joined SpaceX successful 2018 aft a vocation astatine NASA successful the Mission Control Center, wherever she provided biomedical enactment for astronauts. As a elder technologist astatine SpaceX, she worked connected backstage astronaut missions and flew arsenic a ngo specializer and aesculapian serviceman aboard the Polaris Dawn backstage astronaut mission. That ngo broke respective records, including performing the archetypal commercialized spacewalk.  

Kubo, meanwhile, spent 12 years astatine SpaceX arsenic a Falcon 9 motorboat manager and successful elder roles overseeing the Starshield programme and crushed systems.  

These 10 astronauts were chosen retired of much than 8,000 applicants. Training is rigorous: the radical volition walk astir 2 years learning the ropes earlier becoming eligible for assignments connected the International Space Station and beyond. The grooming program includes lessons successful robotics, geology, overseas languages, abstraction medicine, and more, alongside flying conducting simulated spacewalks and formation training, NASA said.

If they walk done training, this radical volition articulation the radical of implicit 40 progressive astronauts, and whitethorn beryllium portion of the cohort that helps NASA modulation to commercialized backstage abstraction stations upon the status of the ISS successful 2030. This radical volition besides beryllium eligible for aboriginal subject missions to the Moon and Mars.

This not the archetypal clip SpaceX alumni person made the leap to authorities astronaut corps. Robb Kulin, erstwhile manager of formation reliability astatine SpaceX, joined NASA’s 2017 people arsenic a candidate. In 2021, Anil Menon – SpaceX’s archetypal formation surgeon and aesculapian manager – was elected to beryllium portion of the Artemis procreation of astronauts. (Anil and Anna are married.)

The inclination underscores however the world’s astir influential backstage abstraction institution is progressively intertwined with bona fide astronaut enactment – not lone supporting backstage missions similar the Polaris program, but besides producing astronauts themselves.  

For decades, NASA astronauts mostly came from the subject and academia. The commercialized assemblage played small relation successful producing astronaut candidates. But SpaceX has changed that. The institution has go a grooming crushed for engineers and ngo operators moving connected quality spaceflight.