Get in line (Image: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features)
Tight budgets, spacecraft failures and an uncertain
future can't keep some dreamers grounded. Would-be US astronauts seem
as keen as ever to make it into space.
Despite retiring its shuttle last year, NASA still sends astronauts to the International Space Station: right now, it uses the Russian Soyuz capsule, though in future it may use commercial spacecraft.
The agency reports that 6372 people applied to join its astronaut corps
in response to the latest call. That's twice as many as usual and the
highest number since 1978 – three years before the first flight of the
shuttle Columbia.
"Being an astronaut still touches a broad chord in our society," says Scott Pace at George Washington University's Space Policy Institute in Washington DC.
Cosmonaut contest
Mock
astronauts are in demand too: a research team led by Jean Hunter of
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, is seeking volunteers for a
four-month-long simulated Mars trip in Hawaii similar to the Mars500 mission that ended in November but shorter.
"I
think people who want to be astronauts want to be astronauts whether or
not there is any clear path to space, just because the idea is so
exciting and the adventure is so compelling," says Hunter.
Russia's federal space agency Roscosmos is also hiring, despite a rash of failed missions in 2011 that include the Phobos-Grunt probe, which failed to make it out of Earth's orbit and a Soyuz rocket that crashed in August.
According
to a media report of a radio interview that took place on 2 February,
Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin said the agency will be seeking a new crop of cosmonauts to fly a crewed mission to the moon by 2020. Apparently, the agency is opening the competition to every Russian citizen with a technical or medical background.
http://www.newscientist.com
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