Exploring the Real Space: An Astronaut's Life and Career

If you’ve read past the title, you’ve probably consumed a lot of books and movies about space.

Flying in space isn’t just for science fiction characters. It’s a real job. Real people can apply for it, and real people—like you—can get hired to do it.

What's It Like If You Get Hired?

If you get hired, it’s hands down the coolest job on or off the planet. Training for a career as an astronaut includes a variety of simulators, high-performance jet aircraft, and underwater mockups of the International Space Station. The cherry on top is actually blasting off to orbit around Earth or starting in a few years, with Exploration Mission-2, heading to the moon.

When you’re not in space, you’ll spend your time working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. You’ll commute to work every day like a lot of other Houstonians, but unlike in a typical office job, you won’t find yourself in a boring routine. You might be giving a speech at an elementary school to get kids fired up about science, you might fly a sleek little jet to Kennedy Space Center, or you might be 40 feet underwater in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, meticulously testing every task on a spacewalk.

The Downside of Being an Astronaut

The downside is that it’s really hard to get in the door. In our last selection in 2013, we had more than 6000 serious applicants. We hired eight of them, giving you just one-in-a-thousand odds.

But there are ways to manage even a situation as tough as that. One is to apply every single time NASA makes a selection. I started sending in applications and updating them regularly in 1991. I did that seven times in all. I got an interview, an exciting milestone since it means you’ve made the short list in 1994. I interviewed three times before finally getting hired in 1998. I like to joke that I didn’t so much impress the Astronaut Selection Board as I wore them down.

Managing Your Morale and Expectations

Aspiring astronauts have a tougher job than just managing the odds. It’s managing their own morale and expectations. I’d like to offer some advice on this grueling task.

During my long tenure as an astronaut applicant, I met some folks who dedicated their whole lives to becoming astronauts. They learned to fly not because they love airplanes but because they heard that the Astronaut Selection Board likes pilots. They learned to scuba dive not because they love the sea but because they heard that the board likes scuba divers. I observed those folks doing these things and then not getting selected, and then becoming very bitter and disappointed people.

I didn’t want to follow their example, and I recommend that you don’t either. Instead, just do what you love doing. That’s what I tried to do. I’ve loved space since I was a little kid. So I earned degrees in physics and astronomy and worked as a planetary scientist. I started exploring the woods behind my house as soon as I was old enough to leave the yard. So when I lived in Seattle, I learned to climb mountains, and when I lived in Hawaii, I learned to scuba dive.

I was drawing pictures of airplanes and spaceships in first grade, so when I had the chance to earn a pilot’s license, take elective courses in aerospace engineering as a graduate student and a postdoctoral researcher, or take a job as an engineer working on spacecraft optical instruments at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I jumped on it, and I had a blast.

Now, all of those things were also good for applying to be an astronaut, so I went ahead and included them on my applications. But because I was doing what I loved, I would have been perfectly happy where I was—even if I hadn’t been picked as an astronaut. That’s the likeliest outcome!