Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by chromas on Wednesday March 06 2019, @05:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the fortunate dept.

Soon, Hundreds of Tourists Will Go to Space. What Should We Call Them?:

Perhaps within a matter of a months, a handful of customers will board a spacecraft and fly above Earth's atmosphere to float for a few minutes, where they will presumably gawk at our planet's graceful curvature. Shortly after this, dozens, and soon hundreds, will follow. Space enthusiasts have made such promises about space tourism for nearly a decade, but in 2019 it's finally coming true.

In the last three months, Virgin Galactic has completed two crewed test flights above 80km. And with its flight-tested New Shepard launch system, Blue Origin remains on track to blast its own people into space later this year. Both spacecraft can carry up to six passengers. Neither company has begun commercial operations, but these flights appear imminent. Later this year, suborbital space tourism should finally transition from long-promised to something you can do if you're rich enough. Next year, we will likely see dozens of commercial flights.

These welcome successes have raised a question, however: just what do we call these people?

Until now, it has been fairly easy to call men and women who have gone to space astronauts (or cosmonauts in Russia, and taikonauts in China). About 560 humans have gone to space, nearly all of them into orbit, and a lucky two dozen have gone beyond. Twelve have walked on the Moon.

In 2004, the private SpaceShipOne venture clouded the picture a little bit by making a private suborbital flight. The pilots, Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie, had not trained as government astronauts, so the US Federal Aviation Administration created a new designation for them—commercial astronauts. Since then, the five crew members of Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity flights in December and February have also earned that designation. But the FAA will only recognize "crew," not passengers.

For now, there remains no official word on what to call non-crew members. Are they astronauts, too? Space passengers? Astro-nots?

Ignoring the question of whether 80km is really "space" or one needs to reach 100km (the Kármán line), Ars Technica queried Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, former NASA astronauts and others. Worthy of note is that NASA called self-funded fliers who bought access to the International Space Station — such as Dennis Tito — "spaceflight participants."

What do you think they should be called?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @11:31AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @11:31AM (#810662)

    as far as the european poor of the middle ages were concerned, supporting explorers such as Columbus was a good thing. I think that objectively there are more descendants of Europeans alive today because of access to other continents back then. And I agree, investors into those expeditions got plenty of riches back for their trouble.

    obviously it's questionable if european exploration was a good thing for humanity as a whole, but as far as the analogy with space exploration goes I think rich people funding fanciful explorers is a good thing. if it's a choice between "everybody dies when Earth dies" and "only the rich people survive when Earth dies" I think the second option is slightly better.
    at least they'll probably hoard all of the internet in a suitcase filled with flash drives, so they will have all of our hate-mail to read in their New Earth or wherever.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:21PM (#810886)

    if it's a choice between "everybody dies when Earth dies" and "only the rich people survive when Earth dies" I think the second option is slightly better.

    No, it's infinitely worse for the average person. It means the rich fucks won't have any motivation to try and avoid catastrophic courses of actions, much like current climate change. The very richest fucks know they will likely survive, whatever comes, perhaps be it in a nuclear bunker never seeing the sun light again. Very ironic because it's these very people that are killing the Earth and 99% of its population.

    I think "we're in it together" would sound much better. But I bet the psychopaths disagree.

  • (Score: 2) by dry on Thursday March 07 2019, @02:06AM

    by dry (223) on Thursday March 07 2019, @02:06AM (#810974) Journal

    The European poor weren't the ones financing Columbus, it was one rich Queen who was stupid enough to believe Columbus, who lucked out and found a continent as he totally under estimated the size of the Earth.
    Wasn't too long before he became desperate enough to pay back investors that he was chopping off hands of the non-productive natives to motivate them.