Is this a new emerging identity group that will need suport legistation?
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Nice article and interesting questions. I do believe, however, that astronaut Sunita Williams is on our right side of the picture in this article, not in the middle of the group.
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The name is misleading anyway: present day astronauts are not ‘navigating among the stars’. We are not nearly there. For that name to apply, humans would have to reach alpha Centauri first.
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The astronauts were pioneers. They were first Americans to go into orbit, travel to the moon,land on it.During the early years of manned spaceflight, the astronauts, engineers, designers gained vast amounts of knowledge, which they all put back into the space program to make it safer. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo programs all used rockets. But when NASA introduced the Shuttle to LEO operations. The mission changed, Shuttle took off like a rocket , landed like an airliner. The two shuttle accidents changed everyone minds and a lot of time,money was invested spaceflight safer.
If the Astronauts were the pioneers of their time, then so was The Wright brothers. They laid the foundations for the private, civilian and military air operations of today. Today,anyone can fly in an aircraft. Space is becoming commercialised in the same way, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic have space craft. The Early Astronauts had the right stuff, today’s astronauts still have that right stuff, but they also have the experience of history behind them and NASA has learnt a lot over time.
Anyone paying to go into space in a commercial rockets or a space plane are passengers, there is a risk of failure in the same way an airliner can come down.. But these passengers are not astronauts as they won’t be the first. NASA is going back to the moon and they’re going to build a Lunar Gateway (https://zlios.com/logistics/lunar-gateway-transportation-operations/). These crews will be modern day astronauts and pioneers
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Well, there is difference between people who work in the space and people who travel in the space. A new name could be created for space tourists for distinguishing the purposes of being in space. It is like if I am passenger in a flight, a flight attendant or pilot.
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I think the employer is irrelevant. However there is a difference between someone who is can fly the ship and/or is furthering human understanding of life off earth and a would be space tourist.
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