The title says it all …
Within the past week, six women went into space for, well, they were in space for around four minutes in a flight that took eleven minutes, lift-off to touchdown.
For this remarkable feat of flying in a small space capsule on automatic control – there were no controls inside the cockpit, except for a button to turn on the two-way radio, and of course, their seat belt classes – they were hailed as America’s latest astronauts.
These women – the fiancé of the billionaire who owned this space capsule, and who apparently financed this flight, along with a rock star worth millions, a CBS newsreader, and a couple of people nobody’s heard of but who clean up nicely. I’m sure you’re as impressed as I was to learn that.
I was a bit put off by their self-applied honorific, “astronaut,” earned for having taken an eleven-minute ride on a rocket using sixty-year-old technology.
I was ten when Alan B. Shepard Jr. became the first American in space, taking his first fifteen-minute sub-orbital flight in a Mercury capsule that had never carried anyone into space before.
To earn that right, Shepard had not only served in the U.S. Navy, including combat in World War II, before becoming a Naval aviator and fighter pilot in 1947, and a test pilot in 1950.
There he flew the Navy’s latest jet fighters, testing them for carrier suitability.
For more than a decade he test-flew some of the hottest Naval fighter jets and most dangerous X-planes in the world, before eventually becoming the first American to rocket into space.
Shepard was named to NASA’s astronaut program on Feb. 2, 1959, where he was intensely trained for two years, the minimum requirement to become the first of the seven Mercury astronauts to go into space, on May 5, 1961.
His tiny Mercury, Freedom 7, had a myriad of instruments and controls, giving him the ability to fly the capsule if radio connection with Mission Control was lost.
Fellow Mercury Astronaut Gordon Cooper had such a total instrument failure -– he literally had to fly his spacecraft back to a safe landing manually, with no help from Ground Control.
Not only did he land closer to the recovery ship than any of the more automated Mercury flights – proving those were real instruments providing him real control of his tiny spaceship – but his success ensured that all future American spacecraft would have total onboard control, and that all astronaut pilots would know how to fly a spaceship.
Not exactly what the six women onboard “New Shepard” – a classic example of stolen valor writ large – were able to do.
They had no instruments.
Yet they dare to call themselves astronauts and compare their joyride – classic “space tourism” – to the death-defying flight of Alan B. Shepard, Jr. in 1961.
As noted, astronaut Shepard trained for two years for that flight. His fellow astronauts were trained for even longer, since it took another two years to launch all the Mercury spaceships.
Shepard stayed with the astronaut program and – at age 47 – became the oldest man to land on the moon. He did this after further years of training for that mission, becoming the most extensively-trained astronaut prior to the Shuttle era.
So, are the six women – by virtue of being passengers on a drone spacecraft – really astronauts? I guess this would apply to the others, including William “Captain Kirk” Shatner, who’ve flown to the edge of space on a Blue Origin “New Shepard” space capsule.
Shatner, a man known for living larger than life – has better sense than to claim for himself the title of astronaut.
Even as the actor in control of the spaceship USS Enterprise, NCC-1701 through three seasons on T.V. and seven Star Trek movies, Shatner knew that it took more than a passenger ride to make him an astronaut.
But there’s a more important – to me, anyway – comparison on whether or not they should be awarded the honorific of “astronaut.” For if they are astronauts, then I ought to be a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, complete with silver wings on my chest.
Here’s why.
In 1969, there was a fairly unpopular war going on over in Southeast Asia, and the decision to enter the military, wait for the draft, or head for Canada was on the minds of every teenage boy entering college that fall.
I was one of those boys.
Enrollment in ROTC – the Reserve Officer Training Corps – had become voluntary at the University of Georgia for the first time since 1940.
To entice students into service, the Air Force ROTC offered each of us a ride in the back seat of an honest-to-God USAF jet fighter.
They didn’t say which one, but I took them at their word and enrolled.
Two months later, I was up before the crack of dawn, on my way to Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina, with a vanload of other volunteers.
The Air Force, it seemed, was intent on honoring their offer.
When I got there, I found that the jet fighter they had prepped for us was a two-seat version of the F-80 Shooting Star, America’s first operational jet fighter. It saw extensive combat in the Korean War, 1950-1953, The two-seat trainer version, the T-33 “T-Bird,” which had two nose machine guns and could carry underwing rockets, also saw combat in Korea.
This was the real thing, a jet fighter. The only question in my mind – would I be a passenger, or would I actually get to fly this incredibly fast jet aircraft? Even in its trainer version, it was substantially faster than any aircraft America flew in World War II, just five years before Korea.
The six women who made a short hop into space underwent – they claim – two days of training for their “mission.”
To that I call “bull.” All they learned how to do was buckle their seat belt.
There are no controls in New Shepard, and nothing useful for them to do on their 11-minute joyride.
However, when I got to Shaw, my fellow ROTC members and I got four hours of intensive training, under the watchful eye of a take-no-prisoners career USAF Sergeant.
First, we were shown how to put on and “use” the flight suit that all Air Force jet fighter pilots must wear. We were also trained to use the jet’s ejection seats. These had controls there we had to activate – in order and on time – if we were to depart from the aircraft, in flight, should it decide to stop flying.
The New Shepard “crew” have no such gear. If something happened, they’d ride it to their deaths. Just like airline passengers should their plane go down.
Finally, we were shown a mock-up of the instrument panel and flight controls. First, the most important instruments – airspeed, attitude (how our wings were pointed), altitude, climb-dive vertical speed indicator, turn-and-bank indicator and heading indicator (compass) – that define the airplane’s status in the air.
We needed to know this in case something happened to our pilot.
Hey, it could happen.
Finally, we were shown the controls we would be allowed – and required – to use: the throttle, the control “joystick,” and the rudder pedals. In this way, and guided by the instruments we’d been shown, we would fly the plane. And if we screwed up, we’d been shown how to eject from the plane.
Did that make us jet fighter pilots? Did the “astronauts” have anything like that in their skyrocketing living room? Not really.
When it was my turn, I went up for thirty minutes – three times as long as did the “astronauts.” The pilot up front took the plane off. Once we were at cruising altitude, around 10,000 feet, he began some violent maneuvers, “to allow me to see what the plane could do.” Realistically, he was trying to get the “new kid” to puke in my oxygen mask. Hazing was alive and well in 1969.
After confirming that I’d been awake during my instructions and knew what the controls were for, he told me to take command of the aircraft. For about ten minutes, I then flew this jet fighter aircraft. I used the joystick to climb and dive, and the stick and rudder pedals to help to smoothly change directions, left or right. I used the throttle to make us go faster, or slower.
Being barely eighteen, I only used the throttle to go faster. A lot faster.
In level flight, the jet fighter would burn through the skies at 560 mph. In a dive at full speed, I pushed it past 600 mph.
Hot damn, Skippy – that’s “turnin’ and burnin …”
For all its speed, agility and performance, this was a 25-year-old, first-generation jet fighter design. To show me what a real jet fighter could do, he pointed to an F4 Phantom II about takeoff. “He’s got clearance for a ‘war emergency takeoff’ – what a combat pilot would do if a Soviet BEAR bomber was spotted heading for DC.” As soon as I saw the pilot kick in the afterburner – a tech term for putting the pedal to the metal – I told my pilot. At that time, we were at 10,000 feet, cruising at 350 knots, about 400 mph. If he put the engine on idle and pulled the nose up, we had the momentum to coast up to 11,500 feet in about ten seconds.
When I saw the afterburner flame, my guy firewalled the throttle while pulling the stick back, hard. Instantly, we were climbing for the angels, balls to the wall. In the next ten seconds, that Phantom scorched past us like we were standing still, even though we’d increased our speed to at least 450 knots, around 520 mph.
Now that’s fast.
Having actually flown a two-seat jet fighter that had seen combat, and having seen what modern jets could do, did that make me a jet fighter pilot, worthy of the Air Force’s silver wings?
No, I don’t think so, either.
So, do those six women deserve the same honorific – astronaut – as our first American in space, and the fifth human who flew to the moon? For an 11-minute ride?
I don’t think so.
Failing the eye test that would have allowed him to continue flying jet fighters, Ned Barnett vowed instead to write about combat aircraft, and combat pilots. Among his 40 published books are an SF novel about a futuristic fighter pilot who saved the post-apocalyptic Earth from invasion. He’s published ten historical novels about those often under-trained American pilots who flew obsolete aircraft against Imperial Japan during the first year of WW-II, stopping them from invading Australia and forcing us to abandon Hawaii. These books are being professionally edited and will be republished – not just on Kindle, but in print as well – starting later in 2025.
When not writing about hairy-chested historical or futuristic war heroes, Ned works with writers, offering ghostwriting, developmental editing, publishing and the essential marketing, promotion and sales of his client’s books. When it comes to book marketing, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Dr. Samuel Johnson once wrote, and he’s right. To reach Ned: nedbarnett51@gmail.com or 702-561-1167.
Image: Picryl, via Wikimedia Commons // public domain
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