1980
May 29 – NASA Group 9 – USA
- Pilots: John Blaha, Charles Bolden, Roy Bridges, Guy Gardner, Ronald Grabe, Bryan O'Connor, Richard N. Richards, Michael J. Smith
- Mission specialists: James Bagian, Franklin Chang-Diaz, Mary Cleave, Bonnie Dunbar, William Fisher, David Hilmers, David Leestma, John Lounge, Jerry Ross, Sherwood Spring, Robert Springer
- International mission specialists: Claude Nicollier, Wubbo Ockels
- Of this group, Franklin Chang-Diaz would become the first Hispanic-American in space, Michael Smith would perish in the Challenger Disaster, while John Blaha would fly aboard the Mir space station. Both Jerry Ross and Chang-Diaz currently jointly hold the record of number of manned spaceflights flown at seven. Charles Bolden was chosen in 2009 to become the second NASA astronaut and the first African-American to the post of NASA Administrator on a full-time basis (although Frederick Gregory, who is also African-American and a former Shuttle commander, held the post on a temporary basis between the departure of Sean O'Keefe and the appointment of Michael Griffin in 2005). The announcement, made a day before the conclusion of the STS-125 flight to the Hubble Space Telescope, was coincidental, because Bolden was the pilot on the telescope's deployment flight in 1990.
July 30 – LII-1/IMBP-3/MAP/NPOE-5/AN-2 Cosmonaut Group – Soviet Union
- LII-1: Anatoly Levchenko, Alexandr Shchukin, Rimantas Stankevicius, Igor Volk
- IBMP: Galina Amelkina, Yelena Dobrokvashina, Larisa Pozharskaya, Tamara Zakharova
- MAP: Svetlana Savitskaya
- NPOE: Yekaterina Ivanova, Natalya Kuleshova, Irina Pronina
- AN-2: Irina Latysheva
1980 – CNES Group 1 – France
- Patrick Baudry, Jean-Loup Chrétien
- Chrétien and Baudry would become the first Frenchmen in space. Chrétien flew with Soviets to Salyut 7 in 1982, and Baudry on Space Shuttle STS-51-G flight in 1985. Chrétien would later fly to the Space Station Mir and would become a Shuttle Mission Specialist in the 1990s.
Read more about this topic: List Of Astronauts By Year Of Selection
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