Yesterday was the Last Day to Apply to Go to the Moon

April 1, 2020 – No April Fools on this topic either. If you missed the deadline which was a minute before midnight, then you will not be in the running to be an astronaut for the Artemis Program, America’s return to the Moon almost a half-century after the end of the Apollo Program. When you consider what’s going on down here on Earth, getting off-planet for a while would have made some sense.

Only Americans can apply to the Artemis Program.

Requirements include a master’s degree in a science, technology, or engineering field, or two-years in a Ph.D. program, or a medical degree, or the completion of an internationally recognized test-pilot program (for the latter you would have to have a bachelor’s degree in the same fields mentioned above for master’s candidates). In addition, you need 1,000 hours of flying a jet or two years of related professional experience. And the application process requires an online assessment taking two hours to complete.

After training, you may never actually get into space, but if you do then you could end up on the International Space Station, or on a mission to the Moon, or even a trip to Mars and hopefully back.

So although all you aspiring astronauts have missed the deadline, I thought it would be fun to think of 10 good reasons to become one.

1. You can’t beat the view.
2. You won’t have a weight problem when you are up in space, on the Moon, or even on Mars.
3. You get to play with technology that is literally out of this world.
4. If you get to the Moon, real estate is really cheap, only the ride there is expensive. Get to Mars and you have a whole planet to claim except for potential alien microbes with which you will have to cohabit.
5. You get to drink water that comes from your recycled urine.
6. You’ll get taller when you are in microgravity for an extended period of time.
7. You’ll be able to kick that nasty smoking habit once and for all. Hard to light up in a confined space with a bunch of other astronauts glaring at you.
8. When you return to Earth you will have actually aged slightly less than if you had stayed planet-bound.
9. If you are stuck on the Moon or Mars for a prolonged period you probably will get a deferral date for filing your taxes.
10. You could miss having to vote for the incompetents currently running the country who think to go to the Moon and Mars and the billions spent on these endeavours, is better than to have kept a task force on pandemic planning active and funded.