>>It really does boggle the mind. NASA astronauts have to be among the world's most exclusive and pre-screened employee groups.
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>That's the first thing I thought too. She would have been filtered out during one of the many psychological tests. This story is really out of this world.

On second thought, it's not. First, NASA can't have the creme de la creme of talents for astronauts. It's budget was slashed several times, its programs were delayed, its launches seem to be delayed more often than not, and the media don't really make astronauts celebrities anymore. As a kid, I knew the names of most of the kosmonavts and astronauts, because they're everywhere. Nowadays, a pool player gets more air time.

So screening... screening what pool of talents? Pilots willing to risk their lives on contraptions which may work or not, with components built by who knows which subsubsubcontractor, with the danger of one subcontractor doing metric and another doing imperial units, or an important decision to shift some voltage from 9V to 24V not being propagated throughout all of the hierarchy and bureaucracy?

While the Russians got the entrepreneurial spirit to sell rides to rich tourists.

I somehow don't see NASA as attracting the brightest minds anymore. And, as Stanislaw łem would put it, "we aren't looking for any aliens, we only look for ourselves out there". So astronauts re just the same as we are. Regular humans with hi tech jobs.