A former friend of mine liked Star Trek too much, to say nothing of Babylon 5 and other science fiction shows.
Whilst he did not mention this to me, he did confide in a mutual friend that one of his dreams was to go into space.
I don’t think it would have happened, even if he somehow acquired the money for a space tourism ticket, as losing sufficient weight as to no longer be morbidly obese was not another of his dreams. Even as a mere passenger, a person needs to be sufficiently healthy to make the medical clearance, and someone with an BMI of about 55 is not going to get cleared, let alone to fit through the capsule hatch.
Besides, with that sort of morbid obesity, it would be unlikely that a spacecraft could lift him off the ground unless the rocket was a Saturn V.
I was thinking about his astronaut fantasy this week when I heard the news about an all female crew starring Katy Perry and Jeff Bezos’s current fiancé doing a spaceflight on an Amazon Blue Origin. They were being described as astronauts.
This did cause me some pondering. All of them were passengers on an automated rocket which had no real mission purpose other than publicity and space tourism. None had done any training for the mission, as far as I can see, beyond what is needed to be a passenger in a rocket ship doing a suborbital flight slightly above the Karman Line.
Even in the early days of space flight, when missions were almost entirely controlled from the ground, when we would send some very brave men (and some women) into space on top of some very primitive rockets (converted ICBMs initially), there was a scientific purpose for such missions, and a sense of discovery. The astronauts were all initially elite pilots, and then, later, when mission specialists were included, engineers and scientists at the top of their profession.
They were indeed worthy of the title Astronaut (or Cosmonaut, or Taikonaut). They were members of a crew setting out on a voyage of discovery, either piloting the ship or otherwise contributing to the mission.
Even though John Glenn was sent up for a second mission in his old age, with the justification that he would be tested for the effects of space on the elderly, rather than just the first space tourist, he was already an astronaut, being the third American in space.
But what was the mission parameter for Katy Perry and her ‘crew’?
Apparently, the market price for a ticket on a Blue Origin flight is $28 million. It is merely space tourism, not discovery – an expensive and more dangerous form of amusement park ride.
Calling Katy Perry and other passengers on a space tourism flight actual ‘astronauts’ is, in my mind, stretching the definition past breaking point. They are merely space tourists.
Lost For Words! 