The result was 35 new astronauts: six women (including Jewish-American Judith Resnik), three African-Americans and one Asian-American, Onizuka.Ī montage of individual images of the 1978 astronaut class at NASA. It came with celebrity flair, as Black ' Star Trek' actress Nichelle Nichols ('Uhura' on The Original Series) stepped in to lead publicity for the campaign. The astronaut recruitment for 1978 was the first in nearly a decade, in anticipation of frequent space shuttle missions. Schmitt was a trained geologist but was only reassigned from the canceled Apollo 18 flight after the scientific community lobbied NASA for his inclusion. NASA hired male scientist-astronauts in 1965, although it didn't fly the first of them (Harrison Schmitt) until Apollo 17, the final mission of the Apollo program, in 1972. Related: 'Hidden Figure' Katherine Johnson tells her own story in young readers' book Many women in crucial ground roles were also put in the background, such as talented Black female mathematicians and engineers later known as ' Hidden Figures' in tribute to their success in flying space missions safely. Certainly, NASA had diversified somewhat from the late 1950s and early 1960s, when it sought experienced (white) male test pilots to join the astronaut corps.īut the agency was also famous for rebuffing more than a dozen highly qualified female pilots from early space missions those women were later known as the Mercury 13, in a nod to the first set of NASA human spaceflights in the Mercury program. The public sector also benefits: Today, NASA identifies diversity as aligning with values of integrity, teamwork and excellence, which the agency deems 'central to mission success.'īut the conversation around diversity was different in the era of the 1978 astronaut class. It found that companies that prioritized gender diversity in management were 25% more likely to have better-than-average profitability. Numerous studies have pointed to the value of diversity, such as a 2019 analysis by McKinsey across dozens of countries.

The New Guys by Meredith Bagby