Virgin Galactic hiring fulltime astronauts
careers.virgin.com
careers.virgin.com
"Must be a US citizen – compliant with ITAR (22 CFR §120.15)"
I was always sad about NASA's "US Citizens Only" policy for astronauts. I had hoped that commercial spaceflight would change this, but apparently not.
(Not that I meet many of the other requirements for the job, mind you. I'm guessing most of the recruits will be former NASA astronauts, at least at first... there's enough of 'em around, and they'd be good for publicity.)
The obvious next step is to make a Branson-sized fortune so I can start a space tourism business in my own damn country and fly my own damn spaceship.
Because they've never dealt with a private spacecraft like this before, they haven't developed a specific set of regulations for a private spacecraft. This also means they have to be very careful about who can take pictures of the interior, etc.
On a more startupery/hackerish note have folks been brainstorming what sort of business opportunities there are going to be in a world with space tourists? Clearly souvenir barf bags (joking) but more seriously, perhaps one-off altitude tracking devices, an iPhone app that tells you when you are "in space" or not "in space", an eligible singles who can afford to spend the afternoon visiting space kind of thing.
People will eventually be spending more time in orbit, are there applications there? Zero-g 'flicks' when holding your iPad to make it to do things like move to the next page.
It is REALLY hard to become an astronaut -- so I sent this to him as it might be a great alternative.
ETA: Technically ITAR shouldn't cover stuff like that, but in practice, the attorneys at my spouse's employers felt very strongly that it forbade disclosure.
Kepler was a foreign national. I think the cat's out of the bag on that one.
I had the opportunity to tour Scaled Composites about a year ago. None of their astronauts were former NASA astronauts. All of them were former test pilots, mostly (but not exclusively) military. However, they were also in the process of growing their own: with the exception of the former test pilots, most of the engineers working on the design were young. Many of these young engineers were also private pilots, and some of them were just as proficient at flying the SpaceShip 2 simulator as were the astronauts. They also have the advantage of being very familiar with the system. I'd be willing to bet that some of them will cross over to Virgin Galactic as operational flights get closer.
How did you arrange the Scaled tour? Would love to do that at some point.
There's a huge difference between being able to operate the systems on a complex aircraft (or spacecraft, in this case), and knowing the systems well enough to be able to handle emergencies effectively. The former just requires you to have a basic understanding of which controls do what, the latter requires you to have a deep understanding of the guts (both hardware and software) behind the panel so that you can troubleshoot effectively. To give one example, I would imagine that the details of space navigation systems are also off-limits (you could use such knowledge to build an ICBM guidance system), so you could teach people the basics of using the nav system on a space ship, but they would probably need security clearances before you could teach them how the nav system works under the hood. Going back to the propulsion system example, you could give anybody a basic explanation of how it works, but security clearances would probably be required for the level of understanding a pilot would need in case of emergencies.
The main concern driving these restrictions is proliferation. Just letting someone operate it is not a significant proliferation risk--you just have to vett the individual well enough to be sure he won't try to land it in Mexico.
Similarly, using it as a suicide weapon is also a minor concern because similar thorough vetting will weed out anyone inclined to deliberately crash it into a major population center.
Proliferation is much tougher to control, because once a foreign national returns to his home country, we have no recourse if he decides to start sharing what he learned. It's easy to screen out people who would do extreme things like steal a space ship or use it as a suicide weapon, much harder to be sure that someone will keep unenforceable promises not to tell secrets.
The tour was arranged for a group of students, myself among them. Some of my classmates were foreign nationals and they weren't allowed to come.
- Spaceflight - Commercial flight operations - Flight instruction
Spaceflight? Not too many people have that that are American.