For anybody paying attention to the news in 2021, the month of July will go down in history as the month when the affectionately termed “New Space Race” officially started to fanfare, and wall to wall media coverage. And for as much as this moment has been widely regarded as a cause celebre by news anchors, former astronauts, CEO tech bros, and NASA itself, I’m sure many who had their normal Saturday and Tuesday media coverage disrupted to watch Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos get giddy over their respective several-minute space flights, all felt as if they had just been part and parcel in some grand exercise in doing what we normally do best: stroking another rich dude’s ego.
And keep in mind that this isn’t a strike against Richard Branson the man: he strikes me as a nice guy…. As far as Jeff Bezos? Ehhhh, he’s still a fucking douchebag.
But regardless of what my personal feelings are on the men, however, it doesn’t change the fact that the sheer spectacle of their achievements—while impressive, allow for third parties and the media to ascribe titles to these men that encroach on the tried-and-true expertise of real, trained, professionals.
Namely, the thing that I’ve hated about this whole process—aside from the fact that it all just seems to be another exercise in aggrandizing the rich—is that people are actually calling them astronauts now.
Now who knows? Maybe I’m just a fucking hater: Maybe its all salt, and maybe it all doesn’t really matter in the end. But it just seems to me that calling both Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson Astronauts feels misplaced. When I think of an astronaut, I think of someone who has actively been trained to operate spacecraft, as well as spend extended periods of time in space. It is no different than calling someone who has been actively trained to fly airplanes a pilot, or someone who knows how to operate boats a sailor.
Generally, these titles matter because they function as a point of distinction between those who are avowedly experts in specialized operations from those who fulfill other jobs, are passengers, or occupy another role as straight-up fucking tourists. Generally, earning these titles is the product of years—if not decades—of dedication, experience, and hard work in their fields, and that is how we have typically done things as a society.
But what we DON’T do as a society is tell someone who has taken an airplane from New York to Raleigh—or anywhere else for that matter—that they are all of a sudden pilots because they spent some time riding in an airplane. All the same, we don’t tell people that they are sailors if they are merely passengers that are served by the crew.
And that’s why I don’t like calling Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Astronauts—because functionally, they are just some fucking guys who rode for 3 minutes in a spacecraft. They didn’t perform any critical functions, or had any critical duties during the launch process and landing of each respective craft. And even for the amount of hoopla about Branson + crew having to conduct some critical duties on the Space craft during its flight cycle, I don’t know if we were watching the same video, but he pretty much just sat back in his Oakleys, did a countdown, and let his expert pilots do the whole damn thing. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos had a craft that was entirely controlled by A.I. with no expert pilots if things went wrong—a ballsy move in its own right, but one that renders Bezos as nothing more than passenger in what is really just a glorified fucking space elevator.
And who knows? I could be absolutely wrong about this… Hell, these are my opinions much more than these are the facts. After all, Webster’s dictionary defines an astronaut as “a person engaged in or trained for spaceflight,” and to that end, maybe, just maybeeee, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos are astronauts.
But let’s put on our conspiracy hats on for a second, and say that both men are rich enough to pay webster’s dictionary to redefine the word if they really had to. And even if they didn’t, I don’t care: I’m still not calling them fucking astronauts.
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