A Statistical Comparison of the Anthropometrics of Civilian Workers to Astronauts and Astronaut Applicants

In this paper, an anthropometric study was undertaken in order to evaluate civilian office workers from a multinational petrochemical company. The purpose of the assessment was to generate a description of the workforce and compare civilian body dimensions to those of a reference population of astronauts and astronaut applicants from 1985 to 1991. In this paper, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was performed to determine whether the anthropometric dimensions of the civilian workers are normally distributed. Our results show that of the eleven dimensions tested on the population as a whole and within the male population, only one parameter, hand length, was not normally distributed. Within the female population, only shoulder breadth was not normally distributed. Additionally, a t-test comparison of our database to the reference population found that when comparing the whole population, only height could be considered statistically comparable.