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size and weight...they expect someone bigger--a larger-than-life presence (3) my eating habits--interviewed by health magazines, etc...]

The lore surrounding astronaut training has accumulated over the last 20 years, and it's easy to understand why. The media and the public are interested in good visual effects and exciting stories. No reporter wants to sit through a 5 hour meeting on satellite deployment procedures, or a 3 hour discussion of flight rules, or a 2 hour briefing on the shuttle electrical system. TV producers want the cameras to capture astronauts being plucked from the ocean by helicopter, being shot up ejection seat rails, or repelling [[rappelling]] down the side of a space shuttle mock-up. Those activities occupy less than 1% of an astronaut's training but more than 90%
of the coverage. The result is that the public gets a very distorted view of an astronaut's typical day.

What does our training involve?

Nobody, least of all the astronauts, really knows how or why people are selected for spaceflights--that's one of the best-kept secrets at NASA.  One day an astronaut will be summoned to the office of the Director of 
Flight Operations, and on the way to this mysterious meeting, will bump into 4 other astronauts who have been similarly summoned..that's the first clue that those two pilots and three mission specialists will be flying in space together.