👨‍🚀Pay & Market

Through a national or commercial selection, entered from another career. NASA requires a STEM master's degree (or a medical degree, test-pilot school, or doctoral work) plus professional experience or 1,000 hours piloting jets; ESA, JAXA, Canada and China run comparable competitions. Survivors of medical, psychological and interview rounds then complete roughly two years of basic training before becoming eligible for a flight assignment.

Far less than the fame suggests. NASA astronauts are civil servants: the 2024 selection quoted $152,258 a year, inside a general band of roughly $105k–190k. ESA's 2022 class started around €6,000–7,000 a month; Roscosmos published cosmonaut salaries in 2019 equal to only about $25,000–30,000 a year before flight bonuses. Military astronauts stay on their service's officer pay.

About two years of basic training covers spacecraft systems, spacewalking in a giant pool, robotics, jet flying, wilderness survival and the Russian language. Graduation only makes you eligible: a specific mission then adds 18–30 months of dedicated training across Houston, Star City, Cologne and Tsukuba. Counting the prior degrees and career, most astronauts fly 15–20 years after leaving school.

Not anymore. The first generation was drawn almost entirely from military test pilots — NASA's 1959 Mercury selection screened only them. Since the Shuttle era created mission specialists in 1978, roughly half of most astronaut classes have been civilian engineers, scientists and physicians. Pilots still fill command seats, but ESA's 2022 class included an astrophysicist, a neuroscientist-pilot and a medical doctor.

Less superhuman than people assume. Modern limits mostly ensure you fit the suits and seats — Soyuz-era seats accepted heights of roughly 150–190 cm — with vision correctable to 20/20 (NASA has accepted laser eye surgery since 2007), controlled blood pressure and no disqualifying conditions on a long-duration flight physical. ESA went further in 2022, selecting parastronaut John McFall, a leg amputee.

Vanishingly few. Roughly 700 people have reached space since 1961, and the active professional corps is far smaller: NASA lists around 40–50 active astronauts, ESA fewer than a dozen career astronauts, with comparably small groups in Russia, China, Japan and Canada. For comparison, a single large hospital employs more surgeons than there are trained astronauts alive.