NASA's own deputy chief wanted American space travellers called cosmonauts
In 1959, before anyone had flown to space, NASA's deputy administrator Hugh Dryden argued for cosmonaut: crews would travel through the cosmos, not to the stars, which is what astro implies. Most of his colleagues preferred astronaut, and it stuck. Two years later the Soviet Union adopted the very word Dryden had wanted.
Astronaut joins the Greek words for star and sailor, and probably echoes aeronaut, a term first applied to balloonists in 1784. It turned up in Percy Greg's 1880 novel Across the Zodiac, where it named a spacecraft rather than a person. Its modern meaning first appears in Neil R. Jones's 1930 short story The Death's Head Meteor. The Soviet word kosmonavt is credited to the rocketry pioneer Mikhail Tikhonravov, and Yuri Gagarin became the first cosmonaut in 1961.
Other countries coined their own. Chinese official media use hangtianyuan, roughly celestial navigator, while English-language news outlets popularised taikonaut after Yang Liwei's Shenzhou 5 flight in 2003; the word had surfaced in online newsgroups in 1998. French flyers are sometimes spationauts, and Malaysia's participants were angkasawan. India's plans for crewed Gaganyaan flights prompted suggestions such as vyomanaut, from a Sanskrit word for sky. Finnish media even dubbed the Finnish-American NASA astronaut Timothy Kopra a sisunautti, after the national quality of grit. In German, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian the word simply means space traveller.
Deciding who counts is surprisingly messy. The international air sports federation recognises only flights above the Kármán line at 100 kilometres, but American astronaut wings go to anyone above 80 kilometres. X-15 pilot Joseph Walker crossed the higher line twice, making him the first person to reach space two times. Mercury veteran Wally Schirra insisted that only people actually piloting a spacecraft deserved the title, likening mission specialists to a bomber's navigator. With paying customers aboard, NASA and Russia's agency adopted the label spaceflight participant for tourists.
By May 2026, 781 people from 55 countries had passed 100 kilometres. Only 28 had gone beyond low Earth orbit, and Jim Lovell, John Young and Eugene Cernan did it twice. Oleg Kononenko has logged over 1,100 days in space, and Peggy Whitson holds the women's record at 695 days. In 2022 ESA selected John McFall, an amputee, as its first parastronaut, a label he himself rejects.
Source: Astronaut
