What does it take to become an astronaut? Here?s what NASA says.

NASA’s astronaut selection manager Anne Roemer stands with the most recent class of astronaut candidates selected in 2017 from more than 18,000 applicants. During a brief window in March, 12,040 hopefuls applied to be members of the space agency’s next class of astronauts.The first round of on-site interviews, originally scheduled for late September or early October, has been pushed back to next spring because of the pandemic, says Anne Roemer, NASA’s astronaut selection manager. One of the people they select could even be the first human to walk on Mars.Roemer spoke to National Geographic about how NASA chooses its astronauts, what she’s looking for in candidates, and what she thinks about being inside the current fleet of space capsules. We do some team reaction exercises, individual performance exercises, and a bunch of things to assess whether they have the competencies that we're looking for to be a good astronaut.In the last selection cycle, we received over 18,000 applications. We had always stated that a master's degree was preferred, but [this time] we were just more overt, because when we looked back at our last classes, we really hadn't selected anyone with just a bachelor's degree.We tend to focus on operational experience in situations where they’re going to have to make real-time decisions in a relatively high-stress environment.