The Book of the Week is “The Ordinary Spaceman” by Clayton C. Anderson, published in 2015. This book describes everything you ever wanted to know– including all the disgusting details– about riding and living in a spacecraft via NASA employment.
There were 338 men and women who left earth’s atmosphere between 1959, when NASA first began hiring astronauts, and 2013, when the probability of being hired was .6%. NASA has a laborious, rigorous annual recruitment process. The author was hired on his fifteenth try. Prior to that, he had worked for NASA as an engineer.
Once someone beats the odds and wins approval to go on a mission, they require months or years of training in extreme conditions, such as handling diverse, high-pressure physical and mental tasks underwater, atop a blizzardy mountain, in the desert, and in a device that imposes centrifugal force. Working in a tightly confined vehicle calls for a specific set of social and physical skills and talents. Read the book to learn the degrees to which the author possessed different ones, and how he fared in space.