Is it Time to Redefine the Term Astronaut?
Not everyone who visits space deserves the title. Time to make a distinction between those who do, and those who don't.
Take your seat, relax, and look up at the stars. Feel the engines gradually roar to life, their vibrations filling the cabin. Before long you are airborne, the powerful rockets forcing you back into your seat as your capsule hurtles upwards at tremendous speeds. For two minutes the world is chaos, a roaring shaking mess, and then, suddenly, all is calm.
You are gliding now, and outside the sky is an inky black, the curve of the Earth a vibrant blue. You unbuckle your seatbelt and float, weightless while your capsule soars along its arc, high above the planet. Minutes later - just two or three - gravity reasserts itself, your falling capsule buffeting against the upper atmosphere. Then, no more than ten minutes after it all started, you find yourself back on the solid Earth.
Somewhere along that short trip you crossed an invisible but significant line. One hundred kilometres, or sixty miles, above sea level lies the Kármán Line, the boundary between Earth and Space. The moment would have gone unnoticed: there is nothing particularly special about that altitude, no clear sign that you have left the realm of the living, blue Earth and entered the dark, dead Night.
Nevertheless, crossing that line implies something special. You have become an astronaut, one of the select few heroes brave enough to venture beyond Earth into a place utterly alien and inhospitable to living beings. If you are an American you may qualify for Astronaut Wings, even if yours come with the qualifier "Commercial". In short, you join an elite list, a list with less than six hundred names.
This kind of trip may soon become commonplace. Two companies - Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic - are offering flights that skim the atmosphere, carrying paying passengers briefly into space. Each of those will, under current rules, become an astronaut, even if their sojourn beyond our world lasts nothing more than a few seconds.
That means, to put it starkly, that Oliver Daemen, an eighteen year old student and son of a wealthy hedge fund owner, became, when he flew to space with Blue Origin, the youngest astronaut in history. From the record books he displaced Gherman Titov, who, in 1961 at the age of just twenty-five, became the second man to orbit the Earth.
Titov's flight was undoubtedly more courageous and deserving of the title. He spent more than twenty-four hours in orbit, took the first manual photographs of the Earth and was the first person to sleep in space. The risks he took were immense. Nobody knew quite what might happen to his body after hours of weightlessness; whether the sudden release from gravity would plunge him into insanity, stop his heart or prevent him from sleeping. The rocket he flew on was, without question, dangerous - previous flights had exploded, sometimes killing the animals riding them to space.
Daemen, by contrast, spent mere minutes in space, reaching just seven kilometres beyond the official boundary. His training was minimal, the risks well known and reduced as far as possible. Should that really qualify him to be considered among the ranks of men and women like Titov? Are the other wealthy passengers of Bezos and Branson really worthy of the same title as heroes like Armstrong and Gagarin? And if not, where do we draw the line between astronaut and everybody else?
The question of whether everyone who travels in space should be called an astronaut has been quietly debated for a while. The first stirrings came with the earliest space tourists; vastly wealthy men and women like Dennis Tito, who paid a small fortune to visit the International Space Station. Such trips lasted for days or weeks, however, and often included useful scientific work, making them at least slightly more worthy of the label.
As the prospect of frequent space tourism has grown closer, the debate has started to grow louder. Some find the idea of being able to buy an astronaut title repugnant - witness the open criticism of Musk and Bezos in much of the media. Others believe the term should be exclusive, a title reserved for the elite who risk everything to push the boundaries of human ability.
In truth, we now stand at a transition between two eras of space travel: from a time when it was both rare and dangerous to an age when it will be safe and frequent. In this, space flight rather resembles the early history of flight, when a heady age of pioneering aviators gave way to regular commercial travel.
This transition is inevitable, and should, perhaps cautiously, be welcomed. But it also throws into question the meaning of the word astronaut. Is anyone who ventures across the invisible line an astronaut? Or should the word be reserved for those who push boundaries, those who undertake great personal risk to expand the sphere of human knowledge?
Some are tempted to raise the minimum bar needed to qualify as an astronaut. Perhaps we could put a minimum time in space - seventy-five seconds is hardly very long after all - or require reaching orbit instead of just skimming the atmosphere.
Doing so, however, risks invalidating the achievements of some of the first astronauts. Alan Shepard's first flight lasted just fifteen minutes for example, but no one would dare strip him of the title. What's more, the bar will need to be continuously raised. We are not so far away from a time when orbital space tourism will become regular. Will they then require a Moon landing to qualify?
But in another sense a separation can easily be made: between those who are paid to travel to space - the professional astronauts - and those who pay to be there - the tourists. This distinction, between professional and passenger, is something we happily make in other fields. We don’t label ourselves pilots after boarding a single jet plane, for example, so why should buying a ticket to space allow you to call yourself an astronaut?
This distinction - of professionals and the rest - may be better suited for our space-faring future. In the years to come many thousands of people will venture beyond our world. Few of them will undergo the rigorous training we now associate with astronauts. Even fewer will take the kind of risks Titov took. Yet we will still want a way to distinguish the intrepid few that do.
Eventually we will see a proliferation of titles awarded to space travellers, depending on what they do once they get there. Settlers, perhaps, founding the first cities on Mars. Explorers, visiting untouched planets and moons. Scientists, carrying out research in orbital stations. Tourists, visiting for pleasure.
Space will gradually become more integrated with the realm of human activity. As it does, it will lose the sense of mystery and danger that it currently holds. With that, the magic of term “astronaut” will fade into the ordinary, if we use it too widely.
Will we then forget the achievements of the first humans to venture into space? Is their bravery and determination destined to pale into the commonplace? We face now a choice. Either we keep the term astronaut for every space traveller, and let it lose its meaning, or we make a distinction between the professionals and the tourists.
Call, then, Branson's and Bezos' passengers what they are: space tourists. Leave the term astronaut for those who earn it.
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