Subscribe in a reader | Subscribe by Email As our first astronaut was announced, together with the news that the second one will be sent as well "if the public wants us to" nonsense, there was some news on the status of our Dr Sheikh. It seems that NASA listed him as a "space flight participant" or in other words equating him with those USD20 million paying space tourists.
This forced DPM Minister JJ to say that Russia listed him as Cosmonaut, and we malaysians should not worry about what NASA says (after all, US and Russia are not exactly bosom buddies, right?)
Unfortunately, as shown in the Russian Space Agency site, Dr Sheikh is listed as flight participant as well!
Let's see what Wikipedia says:
An astronaut or cosmonaut (Russian: коÑмонаÌвт IPA: [kÉ™smʌˈnaft]) is a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command, pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft. [1] While generally reserved for professional space travelers, the term is sometimes applied to anyone who travels into space, including scientists, politicians, journalists, and tourists.
Until 2003, astronauts were sponsored and trained exclusively by governments, either by the military or by civilian space agencies. However, with the first sub-orbital flight of the privately-funded SpaceShipOne in 2004, a new category of astronaut was created—the commercial astronaut. With the rise of space tourism, NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency agreed to use the term "spaceflight participant" to distinguish those space travelers from astronauts on missions coordinated by those two agencies.
so, we are successfully launching our very own commercial astronaut/cosmonaut! congratulations 🙂
