In the age of private spaceflight, who can become an astronaut?

The title of "astronaut" is one of the rarest designations that man can carry, as only 652 people on our planet have ventured into outer space since Yuri Gagarin, the world's first astronaut. Figuring out how to leave Earth on a rocket was a really difficult task, requiring resources and manpower that only government institutions could provide, but today private companies can send people into space. In the early days of the space race, NASA accepted only experienced military pilots (mostly white men) into the astronauts, resulting in a significant restriction on those who had the opportunity to go to space in the United States. The Soviet space program selected only the best and most trained pilots to go into space. But in the past few decades, the spaceflight landscape has changed dramatically. NASA is no longer the only director of space travel in the United States, and many private companies — such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and others — have now successfully launched humans into space. Some of these companies claim that their goal is to make space travel more accessible to the public, but it is still a unique and rare opportunity to join one of these missions. So, who can really become an astronaut these days?

Who can become an astronaut?

When most people think of an astronaut, they think of images of rigorously trained and impressive people walking in spacewalks. In America, since the eighties, with the dawn of the Space Shuttle program, NASA missions included not only military pilots, but also mission specialists who were experts in a branch of science or engineering. At present, applications for NASA astronauts are open to all who meet the basic requirements: U.S. citizenship, a master's degree in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, three years of post-degree professional experience, and the ability to pass a physical exam.

The role of politics and money:

Being an astronaut at NASA is a full-time job, but even in the eighties, a few people who weren't professional astronauts climbed into space aboard the Space Shuttle, but were important figures on government committees that oversaw NASA's budget and activities. Their dispatch may have played a role in NASA's funding. But space shuttle flights remained almost entirely limited to "real" astronauts, and the first U.S. private space flight (sponsored by NASA) did not begin until 2001, when one investor spent a whopping $20 million to go to the International Space Station. In fact, his trip was thanks to the Russian Soyuz program, which worked with the American company Space Adventures to book places for those who wanted and could pay. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the company sent six other customers to the International Space Station for money, including a businessman, a video game developer, and a tech billionaire.

There are still a lot of wealthy people paying to go to space today, some of them go for minutes or hours on a quick round trip, such as Virgin Galactic flights, which have just reached the agreed boundary of outer space known as the Kármán Line at an altitude of 100 kilometers above sea level. A seat in Virgin Galactic costs nearly half a million dollars. Blue Origin is strictly confidential about its prices and seems to tailor its costs to what applicants can afford. A French businessman who traveled with Blue Origin, told French media: "Yes, it's expensive, but someone would buy a beautiful red car with that money.

If you don't have the money:

There are other ways to get one of these trips. As these space companies proliferated, many private astronauts were employees of the company running the launch, to make sure everything went smoothly and to see how they could improve their technology. Aboard Virgin Galactic, for example, Beth Moses flies as the company's professional astronaut trainer, and Christopher Hoy as a senior member of their engineering team. Others were selected for other reasons, some of whom were cancer survivors and some fitted with a prosthesis. A place on Blue Origin was recently given to Ed Dwight, NASA's first black American astronaut who was never able to fly, correcting a decades-long mistake. Scientific institutions have funded sending their researchers to make new discoveries; for example, the fifth Virgin Galactic mission in 2023 sent planetary scientist Alan Stern and science writer Kelly Girardi to collect vital data, and wear monitoring devices on themselves to understand the effects of launching a rocket and returning to the Earth's atmosphere on our bodies.

Finally, and the most democratic of the current options, a handful of people have won seats on a space trip through a contest or charity fundraiser for nonprofits.

The end:

Given that most private astronauts have stepped up over the past five years, we can say that the era of private spaceflight has just begun. A century ago, flying on an airplane was an expensive luxury, and now it's quite commonplace, and spaceflight may take a similar path, and become more accessible over time.