NASA Astronaut Group 21 of more than 18,300). Traditionally, the upcoming class is given a nickname by the previous class. Following this custom, the class of 2009 (also known as "The Chumps") christened the 2013 class the "Eight Balls" in reference to the fact that there are eight of them. In an interview with Bob Behnken, then Chief of the Astronaut Office, stated that the name further represents that, "The eight ball [in billiards or pool] is played last and the hope from the preceding class is that the [2013 astronaut candidates] will be assigned after all of them [fly]." The team consists of
Chinese as a foreign language further. In a Biblical vein similar to Kircher's, he tried to demonstrate that Chinese was the Primitive or Adamic language. In his "An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language" (1669), he suggested that Chinese was the language spoken before the confusion of tongues. Inspired by these ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a "characteristica universalis" modelled on Chinese. Thus wrote Bacon: Leibniz placed high hopes on the Chinese characters: The serious study of the language in the West began with missionaries coming to China during the