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 by the moon in November 2024. Artemis III, planned for 2025, will actually land on the moon, and Americans will once again play golf on the lunar surface.
Sadly, it’s too late for you to get onboard these current moon missions, but many space experts estimate NASA will be flying people to Mars by the 2030s, which should give you plenty of time to secure your spot on the first manned interplanetary flight.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it: The odds of anyone becoming an astronaut are slim. So far, only 600 humans have been to space over the course of human history (not counting astronauts in any secret space programs, of course). NASA isn’t having trouble finding people who want to join that elite 600 either. In 2021, more than 12,000 people applied for astronaut training. NASA accepted 10 of them, and they only inducted new classes of astronauts every four years or so. But don’t let the long odds deter you; you’re as good as any of them, and you miss every shot you don’t take.
The basic-basics of becoming an astronaut
The minimum basic requirements to become a NASA astronaut are as follows. You must:
Be a U.S. citizen.Possess a master’s degree* in a STEM field, including engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science or mathematics, from an accredited institution.Have at least two years of related professional experience obtained after degree completion or at least 1,000 hours pilot-in-command time on jet aircraft.Be able to pass the NASA long-duration flight astronaut physical. This means having 20/20 vision without glasses of contacts (LASIK surgery is acceptable, as long as it was done more than a year previously.) It also means meeting the “anthropometric requirements for both the spacecraft and the spacesuit.” Back in the old days of the Apollo missions, that meant being less than 5-feet, 11 inches tall, but these days there’s no specific requirements publicized.The finer points of becoming an astronaut
If you meet their minimum requirements for NASA’s Astronaut Candidate Program, the space agency’s HR department will review your resumé, check your references, and if you’re deemed a viable candidate, invite you to begin a lengthy interview process. This will be way more in-depth than any job interview process you have previously experienced.
Along with your experience, intelligence, and competence, NASA will be keenly interested in your physical and psychological characteristics. They don’t list specifics, but they’re looking for people to send to space, and you’ll be crammed together with others for a very long time in a uniquely stressful situation. I imagine you’d have to be both an over-achiever (to be chosen in the first place) and also easy-going enough to handle the interpersonal nightmare of a manned space mission. Plus, you have to be physically able to perform the wide variety of tasks space flight requires—there are no waivers for any kind of physical limitation in space.
Do you actually want to be an astronaut?
The perks of the job are obvious—seeing the north and south pole at the same time, being among the first humans to ever set foot on another world, etc.—but the pay isn’t that great. A civilian astronaut’s salary starts at $104,898 per year. That’s OK money, but if you’re exceptional enough to pass the screening process, you could probably do better.
There’s also the danger to consider. Astronaut is the most deadly profession on Earth. One in 25 astronauts who has trained for space flight has died on the job. You’d be safer taking up lion-taming. You’d also possibly be dealing with longer term health problems that come from cosmic radiation and alien attacks.
How to apply for the job of astronaut
If the strict requirements and likelihood of death don’t deter you, you can apply for any NASA job, including astronaut, at USAjobs.com, the catchall “I want to be part of the federal employment” job board. (Unrelated: There are no openings at the CIA at this time, which is exactly what you’d think they’d say.)
If you are active duty military or you have previous flight experience, the astronaut application process is slightly different. Here’s the link.
“That all sounds like a lot of work. Isn’t there an easy way to get to space?”
Different nations have different requirements for astronauts, but it’s safe to assume that no country wants to launch an unprepared nobody into space. There’s a way around it, though. Like anything, if you’re wealthy enough, you can still do what you want even if you don’t deserve it.
From 2001 to 2009, seven space tourists paid between $20 and $25 million to fly in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. Russia halted the program in 2010, but NASA has said they’d like to revisit the idea, planning to team up with SpaceX to offer would-be rocket jockies a trip to the ISS priced at $35,000 per day with an estimated $50 million for the ride there and back. No word on when or if this is actually going to happen, though.
Shorter trips and suborbital space flights for rich jerks are possible, but haven’t taken off in the way some people hoped. Virgin Orbit, Richard Branson’s space-folly, just filed for bankruptcy, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX didn’t made good on its promise to send paying customers on trips around the moon by 2018 either. William Shatner gave suborbital space flight a try through Blue Origin and said “All I saw was death,” and “It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered,” so there’s that. There are various other companies who say they plan to send tourists into space in the future, but whether it pans out remains to be seen.
If you want to experience the weightlessness of space without actually going off the planet, it costs about $8,000 for a trip on the “vomit comet,” a plane that allows you to experience weightlessness. But bouncing around in a padded plane is a far cry from going to another world. It sounds like an absolute nightmare to me.
A possible side-channel into space: masonry skills
If you don’t meet NASA’s requirements and you don’t have a spare $80 million in your bank account, there might be a way for you to get into space anyway: Be a brick-layer.
Establishing a permanent base on the moon has been a dream of space agencies and science fiction fans for decades, but it presents massive logistical problems. Simplified: You have to bring a lot of construction material to the moon to build anything there. To solve this problem, some scientists are working on turning lunar dust into bricks, envisioning a future where humans and robots use pressed moon dust to build laboratories and space-casinos.
That might sound pretty cool, but working in a brick factory doesn’t top most people’s “dream job” list, and the moon is actively hostile to everything humans need to live. Toiling away in a lunar brick factory sounds like something they’ll force people like you to do, if I know my dystopian science fiction. But at least you’ll get to go to space.
