NASA selected its first group of scientist-astronauts in 1965 and a second group in 1967. These are people selected for their scientific credentials — physicists, geologists, doctors — who then went through pilot training.

They’ve been waiting a long time to fly.

The original astronaut groups (1, 2, 3) were all test pilots. Group 4, selected in 1965, was explicitly “scientist-astronauts” — six people, all with doctorates. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a geologist from Harvard. Owen Garriott, an electrical engineer. Joe Kerwin, a physician. Ed Gibson, a physicist. Curtis Michel, a physicist and solar wind expert. Duane Graveline, a physician (who left the program early).

These six are now seven years into the program, having spent years learning to fly jet aircraft and then waiting for mission assignments. The pilot astronauts had Gemini and early Apollo to fly; the scientists have been in line behind them.

The irony: Jack Schmitt, who trained the Apollo pilots in geology — who walked them through the training sites in Iceland and Hawaii and Arizona, who explained the difference between basalt and anorthosite and breccia — has watched those pilots bring back samples from the Moon and describe what they were finding, sometimes incorrectly, sometimes missing things a geologist would have noticed immediately.

Schmitt will be on Apollo 17, the last mission. He’ll walk on the Moon with Cernan and bring a geologist’s eyes to the Taurus-Littrow valley. The scientific community fought hard for this assignment; they argued that with the program ending, the one scientist who had to fly was the geologist.

They were right.

The first scientists are heading to space. Garriott is flying on Skylab 3. Kerwin on Skylab 2. And Schmitt on the Moon.

Seven years of waiting. The science is finally going to happen the right way.