What is it in Space-Age Russian? by Michael S. Vartanoff

NASA does its best to promote its astronauts.

Bezos’s Blue Origin says its goal is nothing short of “millions of people living and working in space.” (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Branson boasts that Virgin Galactic already has 700 people signed up for tourist jaunts to the edge of space. They are the ones calling for the Kennedy-esque vision of space travel, which has attracted the public’s attention, and also investors. 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. 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. Photos of the footprints on the moon and astronaut Edwin “Buzz“ Aldrin have remained iconic, but the nature of who can be an astronaut is changing. Yet unlike their predecessors from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs - 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.įROM LEFT: The Apollo 11 lunar module is seen from the command service module July 20, 1969. They were all carefully selected not just to fly to the International Space Station but to help reinvigorate NASA’s often-overlooked human spaceflight program. 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.

These first flights will be the fruits of $6.8 billion worth of contracts that NASA awarded to Boeing and SpaceX and mark a fundamental shift in America’s human space program - outsourcing access to Earth’s orbit to private sector companies, some of which hope to eventually bring tourists to space. But this time, the astronauts will fly on rockets unlike any NASA has ever seen - built and operated by companies trying to turn spaceflight into a sustainable business. soil for the first time since the final shuttle mission in 2011. As soon as this year, NASA expects to end its reliance on Russia and launch American pilots from U.S.

What is it in Space-Age Russian? by Michael S. Vartanoff