Once upon a time, all you really needed to become an astronaut was an oversized dollop of what the author Tom Wolfe immortalised in his 1979 book about America's space pioneers as The Right Stuff.
These days, exactly 54 years this Sunday since the Russian fighter pilot Yuri Gagarin risked his life to become the first human being to venture into space, it seems that all you need is a bank balance of the right size.
That, at least, is one interpretation of the news that when the 54-year-old British singer Sarah Brightman blasts off from Earth in a Russian Soyuz spaceship on September 1, bound for the International Space Station, she will have paid a rumoured US$50 million (Dh183.6m) for her trip of a lifetime.
The classical-crossover singer, known for her roles in the stage musicals Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, will be the eighth wealthy space tourist to visit the space station since 2001 (the first was the American billionaire Dennis Tito).
This will, perhaps, be the ultimate ego trip: she plans to treat the space station as a 435- kilometre high, 27,600kmph stage, from which she will serenade the little people on Earth with a song written for the occasion by her ex-husband, Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Meanwhile, despite the catastrophic loss of the VSS Enterprise in a test flight in October last year, Richard Branson's company Virgin Galactic is pressing ahead with plans to take paying passengers on suborbital, 30-minute trips to the edge of space, including a few minutes of weightlessness, for the relatively bargain-basement price of $250,000 a head.
Whether the likes of Angelina Jolie, Tom Hanks, Ashton Kutcher and the other rich and famous who had already bought tickets have quietly asked for their money back since the death of one of Branson’s test pilots remains to be seen.
Either way, it’s hard to see Branson’s “community of 700 future astronauts” as representative of what the billionaire likes to call the “democratisation of space”. Rather, with various other plans in the pipeline for orbiting hotels and the like, it would seem that space is in the throes of becoming merely a playground for the wealthy, no more accessible to the masses than Branson’s Necker Island holiday retreat.
Yet pay grades aside, Brightman, Kutcher and the rest may have more in common with the pioneers of space flight than might at first seem apparent.
The era of space travel was a product of the post-war technological and ideological brinkmanship between the United States and the USSR, the superpowers that emerged from the Second World War as implacable enemies.
Both countries – aided by their share of captured Nazi V-2 rocket scientists keen to avoid the noose at Nuremberg for war crimes – had spent the years since the defeat of Germany working to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of raining down nuclear destruction on each other’s citizens.
The game changed in October 1957, when the USSR put the unmanned satellite Sputnik 1 into orbit around the Earth, taunting Americans with its "beep, beep" radio signal. Its pride and international prestige damaged, the US badly needed heroes to carry the Cold War fight into the new arena of space.
Unsurprisingly, when the newly formed Nasa went looking for its first seven trainee astronauts in April 1959, it sourced them from the nation’s elite military test pilots, men of a breed who knew all about pushing themselves and their machines to the limit – and, frequently, beyond – for the greater good.
As Wolfe put it in The Right Stuff, the creation of astronauts and a manned space programme saw the revival of "one of the ancient superstitions of warfare … single combat", and for a while the Mercury Seven were treated as America's champions, modern Davids ready to confront the Soviet Union's Goliaths.
The scenes of adulation that greeted Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper and Deke Slayton wherever they went – before they had so much as pulled on a spacesuit – were unprecedented.
It took Nasa a while to catch up with the Soviets, which it did emphatically on July 20, 1969, by fulfilling President Kennedy’s order to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade.
The Mercury Seven, and those who followed them into the Apollo programme, would be called upon to lay their lives on the line. But the irony about the Mercury programme especially, which ran from 1959 to 1963 and – finally – achieved the goal of manned orbital flight, was that the most skilled pilots in the world had been chosen for a job in which they would be required to do no flying whatsoever.
Strapped into their cramped capsules, six of the seven were hurled into space one after the other, little more than helpless passengers in automated capsules that went up and came down like cannonballs, more or less as planned, with the last three of the flights pausing up there for orbits of the Earth.
Unable to steer or otherwise affect the preordained passage of their craft, these first astronauts were, as those pilots who had failed to make the cut liked to say, little more than “Spam in a can” – space tourists, taking snapshots of the view, chatting to the folks back home and doing their best not to foul things up by blowing the emergency evacuation hatch too soon.
Strictly speaking, the first astronauts, from Gagarin onwards, weren’t even pioneers. On February 20, 1947, they were all beaten into space by a few fruit flies, launched by the Americans from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on board a captured German V-2 rocket.
Where the flies had boldly gone, a menagerie of other animals followed – frogs, mice, rats, rabbits, dogs and monkeys enduring weightlessness and, frequently, untimely deaths so that scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain could gauge the effects of space radiation and zero gravity on living things before judging it safe to send a human being in their place. Since then, almost 600 people have gone aloft, of whom a dozen, all Americans, have landed on the Moon.
Though lunar exploration ended in 1972, with the growth of the commercial payload business and the construction over the years of a series of orbiting space stations, the job of the professional astronaut has grown ever more complex, and the training and piloting demands placed on them ever more taxing.
Today, before the training even begins, those applying to become astronauts must be educated to a very high standard, preferably with doctorates or master’s degrees in subjects such as engineering, mathematics or science.
Applicants to Nasa, for example, need a minimum of three years of “related, progressively responsible, professional experience” or, for military applicants, at least 1,000 hours spent in command of jet aircraft.
If an applicant does get through the interviews and physical tests – for starters, they’ll need blood pressure better than 140/90 while sitting, and to be between 158 and 190 centimetres tall – they will then face two years of basic training.
Even then, it’s likely to be many years before they are selected to fly to the International Space Station – currently the only show in town for real astronauts.
All of which makes it seem even less fair that the likes of Brightman can breeze aboard with nothing more than cash in her hand and a song in her heart.
But in reality, becoming an astronaut takes something else – something that links fare-paying space tourists with the wage-earning, envelope-pushing fighter jocks of yore.
After all, space travel remains an unpredictable adventure, as the 14 lives lost on board the shuttles Challenger and Columbia in 1986 and 2003 attest.
It’s easy to bemoan the loss of the golden age of space travel, diminished first by the lucrative but dull business of flinging commercial satellites into the heavens for the benefit of TV and telecoms firms; and latterly by the rise of space tourism; and even easier to mock Sarah Brightman for her expensive ego trip.
But pause for a moment and imagine oneself strapped into a spacecraft, and it's clear that the real price of admission to the fraternity of the astronaut remains a large dollop of The Right Stuff.
weekend@thenational.ae