16 How Do I Become an Astronaut?
Astronauts are very special people. They have a good education, they’re strong like athletes, and they go through years of training before they fly in space. In the early days of space exploration, all astronauts were military test pilots. That’s because no one knew what it would be like to leave the Earth, and the rockets taking them there had never been flown before. Test pilots train to fly new types of aircraft and are used to putting themselves into dangerous situations. So they were considered the best people to become astronauts.
But now, more than sixty years later, almost anyone can become an astronaut… if they possess the right qualities.
STEP ONE: GET AN EDUCATION
No high school dropouts have made it to space. An education in science, engineering, medical, or technical subjects will prepare you with the knowledge needed to fly in space. Astronauts have to know about the technology of rockets and space stations because if something breaks in space, it has to be fixed in space. You can’t call a plumber to repair a space toilet. Becoming a medical doctor makes you an excellent astronaut candidate because doctors are needed to treat anyone who gets injured or sick during a mission.
Then there is the science you will be doing once you leave the Earth. There are all sorts of things being measured in experiments in space—the health effects of spaceflight on the human body, how plants grow without the effect of gravity, or the chemistry of combustion and how things burn in weightlessness. Some of those experiments, such as environmental studies of the Earth, look down at the planet from high above, while others use instruments to look out to the edge of the universe. People from many different science backgrounds are needed to accomplish it all.
Finally, now that astronauts from many different countries fly to space together, you will likely have to learn another language.
STEP TWO: BE PHYSICALLY FIT
No one who is overweight or out of shape has crawled into a spaceship and blasted off the Earth. Spaceflight is hard on the body, so you have to be strong to survive it. During launch, you feel three times your weight from the acceleration of the rocket. Then, as soon as the engines shut down, you are thrown into instant weightlessness, which gives you a sense of falling that can turn your stomach. If you remain in space for many months, your body becomes weaker because your muscles don’t have to work as hard when you don’t weigh anything. And after all that, you have to handle the gravity of Earth after you return. All of this takes strength and stamina. You don’t have to be an Olympic athlete, but you do have to be very fit and exercise often.
STEP THREE: BE A TEAM PLAYER
No one flies in space alone. It takes a team of people to fly in space and another even larger team on the ground to keep them safely up there. If you are the type of person who prefers to do everything yourself or who doesn’t like to work with others, you won’t be chosen to become an astronaut. Space is a very dangerous place, so astronauts need to look out for one another. If a task becomes too difficult or something goes wrong, you have to be able to ask for assistance and know that your crewmates will be there to help.
If you’re one of the lucky few who is chosen to become an astronaut, you’ll eventually end up training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and the Yuri A. Gagarin Research & Test Cosmonaut Training Center in Moscow, Russia. All astronauts go to these centers to learn how to fly spacecraft, do space walks, and operate the equipment on the International Space Station. The experience at those centers is as close to actually flying in space as you can possibly get.
It takes at least two years of basic training to become an astronaut. A lot of that involves time in classrooms, where you learn about the science of spaceflight, orbits, how to rendezvous with other spacecraft such as the International Space Station, and the details of reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Then it takes several more years of training while you wait to be assigned to a mission. During that time you will learn how to do space walks in a giant swimming pool and help with missions already in space by becoming the “CAPCOM,” or capsule communicator, who speaks directly with the astronauts in orbit.
In one building in Houston, there’s a full-size replica of the International Space Station, where you can step inside the different modules, see how the equipment is laid out, and practice all the activities you’ll be doing in space. You’ll be taken up in jet aircraft to experience the forces that are felt during rocket launches, and you’ll work with teams of other astronauts, cosmonauts, and ground engineers to make it all happen.
When a rocket blasts off, your body is squeezed by the sudden acceleration, the same way you are pushed into the seat of a car when it accelerates quickly at a green light. But rockets take off much faster than cars, going from zero to the speed of sound in about a minute and up to thirty thousand kilometers per hour in only eight minutes, so the force you feel on liftoff is a lot more than what you’d experience in a car.
SPACE PLACES 
Here are some centers where you can get a taste of what it is like to become an astronaut.
SPACE CAMP
Located in Huntsville, Alabama, and home of the first American rocket scientists, this camp has full-size simulators of the space shuttle and space station. After you climb in, you can feel what it’s like into launch into space, walk on the moon, and work in zero gravity—or even operate a console in mission control during a mission.
CAMP KENNEDY SPACE CENTER
This camp is located at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where real rockets launch into space. Besides all the activities of other space camps, you will have a chance to meet an astronaut, tour the genuine NASA launch facilities, and, if you time your visit right, maybe see a rocket launch for real.
COSMODOME
This space center in Laval, Quebec, holds artifacts from the Canadian space program as well as spaceflight simulators and a space camp.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER
Real astronauts go to Houston to learn how to fly in space. It is also mission control for the International Space Station. You can take a tour of the buildings where astronauts train, see a real moon rocket, and fly simulators at the visitor center.
One device used to train for the stresses of launch is a centrifuge, a long swing arm with a capsule on the end. The seat inside the capsule has a four-point harness, like those in a fighter jet, that goes over your shoulders and across your thighs to keep you in tight. When the door is closed, you can’t see out, so when the arm begins to smoothly swing around, you don’t really feel like you are moving. What you do feel is your body pressing down into the seat as though you are gaining weight. As the speed increases, so too does the force on your body until you feel three times heavier than you would in a normal chair. That is the force astronauts feel during a launch into space. When a Russian Soyuz capsule returns to Earth and hits the atmosphere, the force, known as g-force, can go up to six or seven. Even at just three gs, the body feels heavy and you have to work harder to lift your arms over your head in order to flip switches. That is one reason astronauts exercise a lot. They need to be strong just to get off the Earth.
Everyone who flies in space must get used to the fact that their body, and everything else around them, has no weight. You can fly through the air like Superman or Supergirl with a simple push off a wall. And you can fly in any direction because up and down no longer exist, and anything you hold out in front of you will stay there when you let it go. Nothing falls to the floor. If you need to pass something to someone else, simply float it across the room.
It takes a little time to get used to floating all the time. First-time fliers tend to bump into other people and bounce off walls because they push too hard and have trouble controlling themselves. But they soon learn to do everything in slow motion and move using mostly their fingertips. No one wears shoes because no one walks. Everyone flies!
One way to experience weightlessness on Earth is in a swimming pool. If you are really good at holding your breath, you can go to the deep end of a pool. Take a deep, deep breath, then slowly let the air out of your lungs until your body begins to sink. Hold your breath at that point and try to suspend yourself in the middle of the water so you are halfway between the bottom and the surface.
When you’re floating still like that, neither sinking nor rising, you’re what is called neutrally buoyant. You’re experiencing what it is like to have nothing touching you anywhere on your body. That is what weightlessness feels like. It’s like leaping off a diving board, then, just before you hit the water, the pool disappears and you just keep on falling and falling. It sounds scary, but for astronauts, it is a lot of fun.
At the end of the day, astronauts still have to go to sleep, just like the rest of us. But how can you lie on a bed if you don’t weigh anything?
Simple. You hang yourself on the wall.
Sleeping quarters on the space station are about the size of a small closet. There is a laptop mounted on one wall so you can check messages from Earth, a small window to look out, and a sleeping bag attached to the opposite wall. You crawl into the bag and then you can either tuck your arms inside or stick them through holes in the side of the bag and let them float free in front of you. Some astronauts have slept floating in the middle of the space with their legs crossed and arms folded. Whatever the position, everyone finds sleeping in space extremely comfortable because there is no pressure on any part of their body from the bed, pillow, or covers.
Astronauts make spaceflight look easy, but some say that after returning to Earth, getting used to gravity again is just as confusing as going up in the first place. After living in a world where your body weighs nothing, the return of gravity feels cruel. Everything is heavy, your head feels like a bowling ball on top of your neck, and your arms feel like logs. One cosmonaut who spent more than a year in space said that even his eyelids felt heavy when he opened them. Some astronauts have trouble balancing when they get back—the organs in the body that tell us where up and down are get turned off in space, which makes it tricky to walk on Earth when you get back, especially when you’re going around corners.
If all of this training to become an astronaut is not for you, there are thousands of other jobs that keep those astronauts up in space: engineers who build the spaceships and launchpads; technicians who work on space suits; doctors who monitor the health of astronauts; scientists who design experiments for space; and robotics people who work on the Canadarm and other systems.
While you’re waiting to become an astronaut, try spotting their spacecraft from down here on the ground. The space station is so big it can be easily identified in the night sky. It looks like a very bright star or an airplane moving smoothly across the sky, except it doesn’t have any blinking lights on it. You can see it from every major city in North America. You just have to know when it’s passing over your city and where to look in the sky. There are a number of web pages that will tell you when the International Space Station is passing over your city or town. As you watch the station fly overhead, think about the fact that there are people living inside it. If you dream hard and work hard, perhaps one day you will be one of them.