Future Astronauts Face Changing Career Landscape

Scripps Howard Foundation Wire - With all of NASA's recent unmanned launches, kids are looking to new space events for inspiration.

 

"What inspired me was the Apollo program … now we have a whole new generation of young people saying SpaceShipOne," Steve Isakowitz, president of Virgin Galactic, said.

 

SpaceShipOne is the vessel Virgin Galactic launched in June 2004 for the first private corporation space flight. In May the company successfully tested SpaceShipTwo in a trial run of what it will be doing when it carries six passengers to space next year.

 

If these flights go well, there could soon be an industry for commercial space flight pilots, giving kids a new career option for getting into space.

Pilots of these flights may face less competition and more lax standards than at NASA. The federal space agency's standards include having a bachelor's degree, at least 1,000 pilot hours and passing a NASA space physical (which requires a height between 5-feet-2-inches and 6-feet-3-inches).

 

The pilots of SpaceShipOne came from a variety of aerospace backgrounds. One was a test pilot, another was a Navy pilot and the others were engineers.

 

Access to space being controlled solely by a government entity like NASA is no longer realistic.

 

"We now have a space community that is not led from the top. It is lead from the bottom," Alex Saltman, of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said.

 

As more and more unmanned crafts head into space, the interest in aeronautics is also going up.

 

"I was at MIT and they had talked about their aeroastro department. They were saying two years ago they had seen a pretty significant dip in students that were choosing to major in that particular department," Isakowitz said. "Since that time it's gone up like 75 percent, I think."