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Kohl's Department
As one of 208 finalists, Lucid was invited to come to the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, for a week of interviews, evaluations and examinations, commencing on August 29, 1977. She was part of the third group of twenty applicants to be interviewed, and the first one that included women. The eight women in the group included Rhea Seddon, Anna Sims, Nitza Cintron and Millie Hughes-Wiley. On January 16, 1978, NASA announced the names of the 35 successful candidates, of whom 20 were mission specialist candidates. Of the six women in this first class with female astronauts, Lucid was the only one who was a mother at the time of being selected. George Abbey, the Director of Flight Crew Operations at JSC and the chairman of the selection panel, later stated that this was not taken into consideration during the selection process. Group 8's name for itself was "TFNG". The abbreviation was deliberately ambiguous; for public purposes, it stood for "Thirty-Five New Guys", but within the group itself, it was known to stand for the military phrase, "the fucking new guy", used to denote newcomers to a military unit. Much of the first eight months of their training was in the classroom. Because there were so many of them, the TFNGs did not fit easily into the existing classrooms, so for classroom instruction they were split into two groups, red and blue, led by Rick Hauck and John Fabian respectively. Classroom training was given on a wide variety of subjects, including an introduction to the Space Shuttle program, space flight engineering, astronomy, orbital mechanics, ascent and entry aerodynamics and space flight physiology. Those accustomed to military and academic environments were surprised that subjects were taught, but not tested. Training in geology, a feature of the training of earlier classes, was continued, but the locations visited changed because the focus was now on observations of the Earth rather than the Moon. Astronaut candidates had to complete survival