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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?


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  • (Score: 1) by Thanar on Wednesday March 06 2019, @06:27PM

    by Thanar (5860) on Wednesday March 06 2019, @06:27PM (#810799)

    "Spacers"