NASA Astronaut Group 8

NASA's Astronaut Group 8 was the first selection in nine years of astronaut candidates since Group 7 in August 1969. Due to the long delay between the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972 and the first flight of the Space Shuttle in 1981, few astronauts from the older groups stayed with NASA. On January 16, 1978 a new group of 35 astronauts, including NASA's first female astronauts, was selected. Since then, a new group of candidates has been selected roughly every two years.

In Astronaut Group 8, two different astronaut groups were formed: pilots and mission specialists. (With shuttle classes, NASA stopped sending non-pilots for one year of UPT.) Of the 35 selected, six were women, three were male African Americans, and one was a male Asian American.

Within this group a sizable number of American spaceflight firsts were achieved:

(The previous seven groups had only Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps officers and civilians, with the West Point graduates having accepted commissions in the Air Force.)

Of this group, Scobee, Resnik, Onizuka, and McNair would perish in the Challenger accident.

After the Challenger accident, Sally Ride would serve on both the Rogers Commission and the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. By 2008, only Anna Fisher remained on active duty eligible for a flight assignment, By 2011 she was no longer eligible for space travel and had become a management astronaut, She currently works jointly for the Capsule Communicator and Exploration branches of NASA, working as a station CAPCOM and on display development for the Orion project. Fisher's tenure was broken by a maternal leave of absence from 1989 to 1996. Shannon Lucid's tenure was continuous since selection, and while she, too, was no longer eligible for flight assignment, she continued to perform ground-based duties, serving as CAPCOM for shuttle missions to 2011, including the final flight day of the final mission. She retired at age 69 in 2012.

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