Honestly, I think the best delimiter of whether you are an astronaut is if you pay or get paid to go into space and whether that's your profession.

ABATTBQ11 said:

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Honestly, I think the best delimiter of whether you are an astronaut is if you pay or get paid to go into space and whether that's your profession.

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Meh, it's a silly debate I think we all could agree, but I just hope in 50-100 years 'we' have many millions more astronauts, and interplanetary colonies/trade etc.

I don't really care what 'those' women did for attention any more than I do some random tiktoker but do hope 'space tourism' expands to at least low earth orbit private space stations quickly as many plan to do. Morons paying money to hop past the Karman line doesn't really matter in the big picture.

ABATTBQ11 said:

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Honestly, I think the best delimiter of whether you are an astronaut is if you pay or get paid to go into space and whether that's your profession.

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I don't think that is it. Many pilots pay to fly a plane but no one questions they are pilots. I think the definition comes down to control. If you are involved materially in controlling the flight, you are an astronaut. If you aren't, you are a passenger just like flying commercial airplanes doesn't make one a pilot but controlling the plane does.

Kansas Kid said:

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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Honestly, I think the best delimiter of whether you are an astronaut is if you pay or get paid to go into space and whether that's your profession.

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I don't think that is it. Many pilots pay to fly a plane but no one questions they are pilots. I think the definition comes down to control. If you are involved materially in controlling the flight, you are an astronaut. If you aren't, you are a passenger just like flying commercial airplanes doesn't make one a pilot but controlling the plane does.

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So a mission specialist on the shuttle wouldn't have been an astronaut?

ABATTBQ11 said:

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Kansas Kid said:

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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Honestly, I think the best delimiter of whether you are an astronaut is if you pay or get paid to go into space and whether that's your profession.

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I don't think that is it. Many pilots pay to fly a plane but no one questions they are pilots. I think the definition comes down to control. If you are involved materially in controlling the flight, you are an astronaut. If you aren't, you are a passenger just like flying commercial airplanes doesn't make one a pilot but controlling the plane does.

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So a mission specialist on the shuttle wouldn't have been an astronaut?

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I personally would expand it to "If you have a role to play that is integral to completing the mission you are an astronaut". If you are simply along for the ride and the mission will be completed with or without any action by you, you are a tourist along for the ride. If the mission is to go to space and perform experiments, then the ones performing the experiments are integral to the mission success. But if your "mission" is to go to the edge of space for fun and to experience a little zero-g without riding the vomit comet, I just don't see it the same way.

Kansas Kid said:

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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Honestly, I think the best delimiter of whether you are an astronaut is if you pay or get paid to go into space and whether that's your profession.

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I don't think that is it. Many pilots pay to fly a plane but no one questions they are pilots. I think the definition comes down to control. If you are involved materially in controlling the flight, you are an astronaut. If you aren't, you are a passenger just like flying commercial airplanes doesn't make one a pilot but controlling the plane does.

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I was going to write something like this as well. If you pass the karman line and you are an active member of the crew, you're an astronaut.

Ai is going to mean there isn't much active piloting of spacecraft tho. Responses to emergencies etc, sure.

If you use a space toilet in zero G then you're an astronaut.

I can't imagine having to go through that to take a dump

Decay said:

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If you use a space toilet in zero G then you're an astronaut.

I can't imagine having to go through that to take a dump

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AtticusMatlock said:

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First Minotaur IV launch since 2020. The solid rocket motors are from decommissioned Peacekeeper ICBMs.

A cloak and dagger launch of a Minotaur IV rocket at 12:33pm PDT from Vandenberg Space Force Base - on the way to orbit with a classified NRO payload.

No webcast, but this camera from @ALERTCalifornia shows the telltale solid rocket motor exhaust plume. pic.twitter.com/ckvD8wckyx

— Stephen Clark (@StephenClark1) April 16, 2025

Looks like payload was the classified NROL-174 mission for the NRO.

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Ha, just got back from Vandy today, I meant to go watch the launch and just happened to walk out of the building just as it was going into the clouds, the plume was pretty pronounced though. It was a lot quieter than the falcons and deltas that launched on a routine basis when I was living out there a couple years ago.

Never really get to see that plume on the MMIII FTE shots since they're always at night.

Texas lawmakers call on Trump to relocate NASA headquarters to Houston

A coalition of Texas lawmakers is calling on President Donald Trump to relocate NASA's headquarters to Houston when the office lease in Washington D.C. expires in 2028.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. Brian Babin (R- Woodville) are leading the charge to make Houston the new landing spot for NASA headquarters. Several other Texas representatives signed onto the letter Wednesday urging Trump to make this shift.

"This seismic disconnect between NASA's headquarters and its missions has opened the door to bureaucratic micromanagement and an erosion of centers' interdependence," the lawmakers wrote in the letter.

"For NASA to return to its core mission of excellence in exploration, its headquarters should be located at a place where NASA's most critical missions are and where transformational leadership from the ground up can be provided," the letter reads.

The lawmakers cite a lower cost of living, a strong commercial space environment and lower government regulations as incentives for the relocation.

I'm all for this (and if this need another thread, I absolutely don't want this derailed), and if this is the restart of talks to move other agencies closer to their work and away from DC, I'm absolutely all for it!

txags92 said:

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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Kansas Kid said:

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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Honestly, I think the best delimiter of whether you are an astronaut is if you pay or get paid to go into space and whether that's your profession.

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I don't think that is it. Many pilots pay to fly a plane but no one questions they are pilots. I think the definition comes down to control. If you are involved materially in controlling the flight, you are an astronaut. If you aren't, you are a passenger just like flying commercial airplanes doesn't make one a pilot but controlling the plane does.

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So a mission specialist on the shuttle wouldn't have been an astronaut?

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I personally would expand it to "If you have a role to play that is integral to completing the mission you are an astronaut". If you are simply along for the ride and the mission will be completed with or without any action by you, you are a tourist along for the ride. If the mission is to go to space and perform experiments, then the ones performing the experiments are integral to the mission success. But if your "mission" is to go to the edge of space for fun and to experience a little zero-g without riding the vomit comet, I just don't see it the same way.

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I like this addition to my definition.

Not to belabor the what qualifies someone to be an astronaut but here are the criteria for earning an astronaut badge in the armed services.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_astronaut_badges

Kenneth_2003 said:

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I'm all for this (and if this need another thread, I absolutely don't want this derailed), and if this is the restart of talks to move other agencies closer to their work and away from DC, I'm absolutely all for it!

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This definitely qualifies as space news so I think it belongs in this thread. There's a big question mark about where Nasa is headed going forward and it impacts what direction the US takes in space over the next couple of decades.

Either NASA continues to be a bloated bureaucracy, which is worthless, or we Make Nasa Great Again, and they are at least a worthy partner with SpaceX going to the moon and mars.

Interesting.

The James Webb Space Telescope detected dimethyl sulfide in its atmosphere (on Earth that comes from marine microorganisms).

K2-18b is potentially habitable super-Earth about 2.6 times the size of our planet. It is located 124 light-years from the Solar System. pic.twitter.com/IrhLfpojra

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 17, 2025

Kansas Kid said:

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txags92 said:

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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Kansas Kid said:

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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Honestly, I think the best delimiter of whether you are an astronaut is if you pay or get paid to go into space and whether that's your profession.

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I don't think that is it. Many pilots pay to fly a plane but no one questions they are pilots. I think the definition comes down to control. If you are involved materially in controlling the flight, you are an astronaut. If you aren't, you are a passenger just like flying commercial airplanes doesn't make one a pilot but controlling the plane does.

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So a mission specialist on the shuttle wouldn't have been an astronaut?

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I personally would expand it to "If you have a role to play that is integral to completing the mission you are an astronaut". If you are simply along for the ride and the mission will be completed with or without any action by you, you are a tourist along for the ride. If the mission is to go to space and perform experiments, then the ones performing the experiments are integral to the mission success. But if your "mission" is to go to the edge of space for fun and to experience a little zero-g without riding the vomit comet, I just don't see it the same way.

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I like this addition to my definition.

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I would restrict Astronaut to NASA civil servants. Russian and Chinese space travelers aren't astronauts, they're cosmonauts and taikonauts. Let SpaceX and Blue Origin come up with their own names.

Bezonauts? Blue Orignauts?

Well that's Russia and China

X-Men and Amazons

The Indians are working on the Gaganyaan mission to send some folks up, apparently they will be "Vyomanauts." Their timelines always slip a lot, but the hope is to do it in the next few years.

Some moderately amusing linguistic history:

Quote:

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American writer Neil R. Jones is credited with the earliest known use of the term "astronaut" in its contemporary sense, as seen in his 1930 short story "The Death's Head Meteor". However, the term itself had surfaced earlier; for instance, Percy Greg employed it in 1880 in his book Across the Zodiac, where "astronaut" referred to a spacecraft. J.H. Rosny an, in his 1925 work Les Navigateurs de l'infini, used the term "Astronautique" (astronautics). It's possible that the term drew inspiration from "aeronaut", an older word denoting an air traveler first coined in 1784 for balloonists. The non-fiction realm saw an early instance of "astronaut" in Eric Frank Russell's poem "The Astronaut", published in the November 1934 Bulletin of the British Interplanetary Society.

By convention, an astronaut employed by the Russian Federal Space Agency (or its predecessor, the Soviet space program) is called a cosmonaut in English texts. The word is an Anglicization of the Russian term "kosmonavt". "Cosmos" in Russian means space, and "nautes" (borrowed from Greek) means sailor, so "cosmonaut" translates to "space sailor" or "cosmic traveller".

In April 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin from the Soviet Union became the first human to travel in space. His vehicle Vostok 1 circled Earth at a speed of 27,400 kmph with the flight lasting 108 minutes. Vostok's re-entry was controlled by a computer.

The very next month, Alan Shepard, on May 5, 1961, became the first American astronaut and the second man in space, when he piloted the Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7 on a 490-km, 15-minute suborbital flight.

China entered the human space program with the launch of its first crewed mission, Shenzhou-5, on October 15, 2003. This mission carried Yang Liwei, a Chinese taikonaut, into space, making him the first Chinese person to travel into space. In Manadarin Chinese, "Taikong" means space and "Naut" as in Greek for sailor. This term is usually used in the West to refer to a Chinese space traveller. However, the official Chinese name for space travellers from the country is "Vuhangyuan", meaning "travellers of the Universe".

It is in line with this tradition that space travellers emerging from India's indigenous human space program will be called "vyomanauts". In Sanskrit, "Vyoma" means space; "Naut" as in Greek for sailor. The term has reportedly been coined by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

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Can we call those who catch a ride space travelers? Leave the astronaut designation to those that actually work/fly the craft?

will25u said:

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Interesting.

The James Webb Space Telescope detected dimethyl sulfide in its atmosphere (on Earth that comes from marine microorganisms).

K2-18b is potentially habitable super-Earth about 2.6 times the size of our planet. It is located 124 light-years from the Solar System. pic.twitter.com/IrhLfpojra

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 17, 2025

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Good video by JMG discussing it.

AgBQ-00 said:

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Can we call those who catch a ride space travelers? Leave the astronaut designation to those that actually work/fly the craft?

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Astro... NOTS

Candance must really be attention starved:

Candace Owens calls out Matt Walsh

“You must come to terms with the fact that NASA and ‘space’ missions have always been this fake and gay and you need do learn the history of NASA and the Apollo program which were occult and satanic.

It was literally meant to be an Antichrist… pic.twitter.com/8DmcTPoGxI

— ▄︻デʀօɮօȶ քօʟɨֆɦɛʀ═══━一 (@RobotPolisher) April 17, 2025

I mean, I get if you are cynical of NASA being completely benign. Hubble just so happened to spawn a dozen Keyhole satellites that looked just like it. Heck, I even think part of the reason the space race was so wholly-embraced by the US and USSR was to pump money and interest into ICBM R&D.

But... sheesh. There's still room to be skeptical without being an idiot. The occult? What?

Damn.... she's a loon. Let's not derail this thread with that.

lb3 said:

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Kansas Kid said:

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txags92 said:

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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Kansas Kid said:

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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Honestly, I think the best delimiter of whether you are an astronaut is if you pay or get paid to go into space and whether that's your profession.

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I don't think that is it. Many pilots pay to fly a plane but no one questions they are pilots. I think the definition comes down to control. If you are involved materially in controlling the flight, you are an astronaut. If you aren't, you are a passenger just like flying commercial airplanes doesn't make one a pilot but controlling the plane does.

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So a mission specialist on the shuttle wouldn't have been an astronaut?

---

I personally would expand it to "If you have a role to play that is integral to completing the mission you are an astronaut". If you are simply along for the ride and the mission will be completed with or without any action by you, you are a tourist along for the ride. If the mission is to go to space and perform experiments, then the ones performing the experiments are integral to the mission success. But if your "mission" is to go to the edge of space for fun and to experience a little zero-g without riding the vomit comet, I just don't see it the same way.

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I like this addition to my definition.

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I would restrict Astronaut to NASA civil servants. Russian and Chinese space travelers aren't astronauts, they're cosmonauts and taikonauts. Let SpaceX and Blue Origin come up with their own names.

Bezonauts? Blue Orignauts?

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All things considered, including riding in a giant **** shaped rocket, might as well call them bimbonauts.

How about "hitchhikers" and make them carry a white towel.

I still believe that Hubble was actually…largely a leftover KH-11 of some iteration which was donated to Nasa, not that it spawned a new generation of spy sats.

In fact, they've gotten at least a couple other 2.4 meter hand-me-downs over the years. Nasa being nasa, naturally they remain terrestrially based.

I guess it's moot nowadays, as NRO has gone to small 'proliferated architecture' satellites instead of huge expensive ones, so commonality with new space exploration/optical telescopes will probably be marginal moving forward.

Anyway, new video; 350 second specific impulse on Raptor 3.

The Sun said:

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will25u said:

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Interesting.

The James Webb Space Telescope detected dimethyl sulfide in its atmosphere (on Earth that comes from marine microorganisms).

K2-18b is potentially habitable super-Earth about 2.6 times the size of our planet. It is located 124 light-years from the Solar System. pic.twitter.com/IrhLfpojra

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 17, 2025

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Good video by JMG discussing it.

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This guy is pretty good, and I was waiting for him to weigh in on this story to see what to think about it since he's an astrophysicist who also does a lot of work in biology. He's critical about the study's wording and self-referencing. And also points out that what they found could be a statistical anomaly.

Charlie Duke gifted Randy Rogers a custom Apollo-themed guitar with flown space hardware integrated into it. Watch to the end for the mural on the back.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIxBu2kyGMT/

Thank you for posting this! Love it!

That is freaking awesome

Public service notice: if you have titanium body parts, you might want to steer clear of Starship booster catches.