What it means to be an astronaut in the celebrity space age of ‘Elon Musks’
HOUSTON: The journey to outer space for American astronauts for the past seven years has begun at a Soviet-era launch site in Kazakhstan, deep in Central Asia. There, they pay homage to Russian cosmonauts and graciously participate in the rituals of their hosts, even the tradition of urinating on the right rear tyre of the bus that ferries them to the rocket.
The landscape is barren and desiccated, resembling the moon or some distant celestial body, a reminder that the astronauts are a long way from Cape Canaveral.
Now, human space flight is returning to the place where the American Space Age was born.
As soon as this year, NASA expects to end its reliance on Russia and launch American pilots from US soil for the first time since the final shuttle mission in 2011. But this time, the astronauts will fly on rockets unlike any NASA has ever seen.
These first flights will be the fruits of US$6.8 billion worth of contracts that NASA awarded to Boeing and SpaceX and mark a fundamental shift in America’s human space programme outsourcing access to Earth’s orbit to private sector companies, some of which hope to eventually bring tourists to space.
Those chosen by NASA for its upcoming missions are a quartet of former military pilots and NASA veterans who combined have spent more than a year in space over eight flights. They were all carefully selected not just to fly to the International Space Station but to help reinvigorate NASA’s often-overlooked human spaceflight programme.
Yet unlike their predecessors from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes - heroes and household names whose “one giant leap” was imprinted in the national lexicon and whose lunar footprints endure undisturbed decades later - today’s astronauts are largely anonymous.
The stars of the new Space Age are instead a group of billionaire entrepreneurs, led by SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson, who value technology over bravery, algorithms over instinct, and whose rockets and spacecraft may one day turn ordinary people into astronauts.
In the digital age, the mantle of “the right stuff” is being bequeathed to the engineers and the programmers, who are collapsing the line between pilot and passenger one line of code at a time.
They are the ones calling for the Kennedy-esque vision of space travel, which has attracted the public’s attention, and also investors. Musk talks of colonizing Mars. Branson boasts that Virgin Galactic already has 700 people signed up for tourist jaunts to the edge of space. And Jeffrey Bezos’ Blue Origin says its goal is nothing short of “millions of people living and working in space.”
NASA does its best to promote its astronauts. Otherwise, they are government employees, performing a job that has an entry-level salary for civilians of US$69,904 (RM279,600) a year. — Washington Post