After three days in the forest above Rangeley – sleeping outdoors, trekking with survival experts and feeding on freeze-dried military dinners – Christopher Cassidy still looked blow-dried and freshly pressed. Go figure.

The 34-year-old York native survived combat in the caves of Afghanistan, earning a Bronze Star. And he’s planning for another extreme destination: the moon.

“I would like to go to the moon and put my size 11’s on there,” Cassidy said Thursday. He may get his shot.

This May, Cassidy was one of 11 Americans chosen to be astronaut candidates, potentially bound for the moon or Mars. They are in the early stages of an 18-month training regimen, which brought them to Maine.

In the Navy’s 14,000-acre preserve above Rangeley, the class was taught survival fundamentals: foraging for food, making fire and signaling rescue planes. It’s needed not for survival from a crashed spacecraft but in case they crash in their training planes.

The class – Cassidy included – did well in the woods, said Brad Webb, a Navy survival instructor.

“They were all outstanding,” said Webb, a former crewman aboard P-3 Orions. They were a bit different from most survival students, though. “Just about every one of them has a master’s degree.”

Cassidy was a 1993 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. He became a Navy SEAL and in 2000 earned a master’s degree in ocean engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Just two weeks after 9/11, he was deployed to Afghanistan, eventually serving two six-month tours. Cassidy interviewed with the space agency just before his second tour in Afghanistan. He was deployed before they chose the final 11. The astronaut candidates were picked from a pool of 2,800 people, the best and brightest from military and civilian sectors.

Though he didn’t grow up wanting to be an astronaut, Cassidy always had a fascination with space.

Only the intensity of his deployment kept the anticipation of working for NASA from becoming unbearable.

“I had something to keep my mind busy,” he said. When he returned home in late March, he and his wife began waiting for NASA’s call. When it finally came in May, he was ecstatic.

“I wouldn’t want NASA to know this, but I was skipping around the house,” he said.

Even as the space agency was offering to make him an astronaut, his wife was calling his mom and dad in Maine.

Jack and Janice Cassidy, who still live in York, never prepared themselves to send a son into space.

“It’s hard to imagine,” said Janice.

The couple and their other son, Jeff, 31, drove to Brunswick Naval Air Station Thursday to meet the class as they finished the Navy training and prepared for their return to Houston, where they are based.

“I’ve never known anybody who knew an astronaut,” said Jeff Cassidy, who works for a Boston software company. “All of a sudden, someone we love is an astronaut.”

The training is scheduled to continue through 2005. Then, Cassidy will qualify for technical assignments within the agency.

“It will be a few years until I get into space,” Christopher Cassidy said.

By that time, NASA hopes to be firming up plans for manned flights to the moon and Mars.

“I’ll be ready,” Cassidy said.