How to Become an Astronaut

The hopeful, heroic people you see above are the crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen will fly to the Moon in November 2024. Artemis III, scheduled for 2025, will actually land on the moon, and Americans will play golf on the moon again. lunar surface .

Unfortunately, it’s too late for you to get on board these current missions to the Moon, but many space experts believe that NASA will be sending humans to Mars by the 2030s, which should give you enough time to secure your place in the the first manned interplanetary flight.

I will not embellish: the chances of becoming an astronaut are small. So far, only 600 people have been in space in the entire history of mankind (not counting astronauts in any secret space programs, of course). NASA also has no problem finding people who want to join this elite 600. In 2021, more than 12,000 people applied to train astronauts. NASA accepted 10 of them and they recruited new classes of astronauts every four years or so. But don’t let big odds hold you back; you’re as good as any of them, and you miss every shot you miss.

The Basics of Becoming an Astronaut

The minimum basic requirements for becoming a NASA astronaut are as follows. You must:

• Be a US citizen.
• Have a master’s degree* in a STEM field, including engineering, biology, physics, computer science, or mathematics from an accredited institution.
• Have at least two years of relevant post-degree professional experience or at least 1,000 hours of service as a jet commander.
• Be able to complete a long NASA astronaut flight phys. This means having 20/20 vision without contact glasses (LASIK surgery is acceptable if more than a year old). It also means meeting “anthropometric requirements for both the spacecraft and the suit.” In the old days of the Apollo missions, this meant being less than 5 feet 11 inches tall, but no specific requirements are published these days.

The subtleties of becoming an astronaut

If you meet their minimum requirements for the NASA Astronaut Candidate Program, the space agency’s human resources department will review your resume, check your references, and if you are found to be a suitable candidate, invite you to begin a lengthy interview process. This will be a much deeper process than any other job interview process you’ve come across before.

Along with your experience, intelligence and competence, NASA will be very interested in your physical and psychological characteristics. They don’t give specifics, but they are looking for people to send into space, and you will be in a unique stressful situation with others for a very long time. My guess is that you have to be both an A student (to be selected in the first place) and also calm enough to deal with the interpersonal nightmare of a manned space mission. In addition, you must be physically able to perform the wide range of tasks that space flight requires – there are no waivers of any physical limitations in space.

Do you really want to be an astronaut?

The benefits of the job are obvious – seeing the north and south poles at the same time, being one of the first people to set foot on another world, etc. – but the pay is not so great. The salary of a civilian astronaut starts at $104,898 per year. It’s not bad money, but if you’re exceptional enough to pass the verification process, you could probably do better.

The danger must also be taken into account. Astronaut is the deadliest profession on Earth. Every 25th cosmonaut preparing for a space flight dies on the job. It would be safer for you to take up lion taming. You may also be dealing with long term health issues that come from cosmic radiation and alien attacks.

How to apply for a job as an astronaut

If the strict requirements and the likelihood of death don’t deter you, you can apply for any job with NASA, including astronaut, at USAjobs.com , the “I want to be part of the federal employment service” universal bulletin board. (Off-topic: There are currently no vacancies at the CIA , and that’s exactly what you think they’ll say.)

If you are on active duty or have previous flight experience, the astronaut application process is slightly different. Here is the link .

“It all sounds like a lot of work. Isn’t there an easy way to get to space?”

Different countries have different requirements for astronauts, but it’s safe to assume that no country wants to launch an untrained person into space. However, there is a way around this. Like everyone, if you’re rich enough, you can still do whatever you want, even if you don’t deserve it.

From 2001 to 2009, seven space tourists paid between $20 million and $25 million to fly a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. Russia suspended the program in 2010, but NASA has said they would like to revisit the idea, planning to team up with SpaceX to offer potential rocket scientists a trip to the ISS at $35,000 a day with roughly $50 million per flight. drive back and forth. However, there is no word on when and whether this will actually happen.

Short trips and suborbital spaceflight for wealthy jerks are possible, but not in the way some people hoped. Virgin Orbit, Richard Branson’s space venture, just filed for bankruptcy , and Elon Musk’s SpaceX has also failed to deliver on its promise to send solvent customers flying around the moon by 2018. William Shatner tried suborbital spaceflight via Blue Origin and said “All I saw was death” and “It was one of the most intense feelings of grief I’ve ever experienced” so here it is. There are other companies that say they plan to send tourists into space in the future, but it is not yet known if this will succeed.

If you want to experience the weightlessness of space without leaving the planet, then a trip on a “vomit comet” – an airplane that allows you to experience weightlessness – will cost about $ 8,000 . But jumping in a soft plane is far from a trip to another world. It sounds like an absolute nightmare to me.

Possible side channel into space: mason skills

If you don’t qualify for NASA and don’t have an extra $80 million in your bank account, you still might have a way to get into space: become a bricklayer.

Establishing a permanent base on the moon has been a dream of space agencies and science fiction fans for decades, but it poses huge logistical challenges. Simplified: you need to deliver a lot of building materials to the moon in order to build something there. To solve this problem, some scientists are working on turning moon dust into bricks, envisioning a future in which humans and robots will use pressed moon dust to build laboratories and space casinos.

It might sound pretty cool, but working in a brick factory isn’t on most people’s “dream jobs” list, and the Moon is actively hostile to everything people need in order to live. Working in a lunar brick factory sounds like people like you would be forced to do it if I know my dystopian science fiction. But at least you’ll go into space.