With my bad vision, severely inhibited lung capacity, chronic lack of serotonin and crippling existential fear of both space as a concept and as a reality, it’s fairly clear that I’m constitutionally unsuited to becoming an astronaut, no matter how captivating the idea may have seemed to me as a child.
Which is why I’ve been trying to become an astronaut. Sort of. At 26, I’ve begrudgingly come to accept that not only can I no longer be described as a “precocious talent”, but that my hopes of achieving things in new fields are slim to none. Could I feasibly become an Olympic athlete? No, because I sit in front of a computer for 14 hours a day, moving only to go to the toilet and occasionally stand at the fridge eating guacamole from the tub. Am I ever going to become Prime Minister? Also no, because I’ve written 55,000 tweets outlining every regrettable decision I have ever made in exquisite detail. Time to face the facts: I’m useless and my dreams are dead.
But, in some areas, I may not be totally over the hill. Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was the same age as me when she became the first woman to fly in space – so could there be hope for me yet?
“Space is now open for everyone,” says film director Mazdak Nassir who, alongside physicist Kalle Vähä-Jaakkola, has developed an app that has a simple purpose: to get someone into space. The app, Space Nation Navigator, not only has the express aim of making space travel a possibility for normal people, but is also giving those normal people a genuine opportunity to visit space.
To this end, Space Nation Navigator encourages the development of skills needed to thrive in the beautiful, deadly abyss: from games and quizzes to fitness exercises designed to measure and grow players’ physical and cognitive skills. After three 12-week cycles of missions and challenges, the 100 highest-scoring players will be chosen to take part in a real life astronaut training camp – 12 of whom will then go on to participate in a fuller, intensive ten week course. The ultimate champion will be given an all expenses paid trip into space, courtesy of Nasa.
If you had long given up on your childhood dreams of space travel, this is reassuring. You’re unlikely to pass Nasa’s requirements for astronaut training, for example; though they have changed significantly since the 1950s, when astronauts had to be shorter than 5’11 in order to fit into the Mercury spacecraft, there are still fairly rigorous conditions.
Applicants need a bachelor’s degree in engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science or mathematics, at least three years of related professional experience or one thousand hours of pilot-in-command time on jet aircraft, and the ability to pass an extensive physical – criteria that most of us will never be able to hit.
Space Nation’s requirements are obviously a little less stringent – but that’s not to say that the challenges aren’t demanding, nor that just anyone will score highly on them. In fact, it turns out, you have to be pretty clued up on survival skills and science to even attempt to get on the leaderboard. For those of us who live happily cosseted lives in cities, that doesn’t always come easily.
First up: fitness. As the first fitness mission statement tells me, astronauts exercise two hours a day in order to combat the effects of microgravity – quite a way off the ten minutes of jogging I unenthusiastically force myself into every three weeks.
I start with warm-up yoga. Intended to very gently introduce you to the programme, I find it nearly impossible. The core strength and clarity of mind provided by yoga helps with spacewalks, the app tells me, and I subsequently imagine myself floating off into space like George Clooney in Gravity, cursing myself for my failure to do the requisite number of downward facing dogs as I impotently hurtle towards the sun.
Later, the app uses GPS to measure walks and runs, and provides me with the kind of strength training you might see on a workout YouTube channel – all connected to the kinds of activities that someone might have to perform on a spacecraft. By the end of my few weeks using the app, I am demonstrably stronger. Probably not quite strong enough to go into space, I admit – but it’s a start.
There are survival and habitability quizzes, too, designed to see how savvy and resourceful you are. What’s the very first thing you should do if you get lost on a mission? What do you need to include in a survival kit? What do you eat if you have diarrhea in the wilderness? If your version of foraging for survival involves visiting Pret during a particularly busy lunchtime rush, you’re probably unlikely to fare well here, as most of the questions are complex, requiring a strong existing knowledge of how to endure extreme or dangerous situations.
Unsurprisingly, there are also quizzes related to space itself (though you probably already knew that a basic understanding of gravity, energy, atmosphere and astronomy was going to figure, at some point, in a trip to the stars), Russian language quizzes, and tests on your understanding of human psychology. There’s a lot to learn here – who knew, for example, that the protocol for dealing with a crew member gone rogue or violent was to tie them up with duct tape?
To complete the set are small interactive games, again based on the kinds of tasks you’d face on board a ship. One asks you to guide a small paper plane across a room, which the app says is a way to understand the fundamentals of aerodynamics without having to undertake 1,000 hours of jet piloting; another puts you in control of a small but precise vacuum, similar to the kind used to keep a spacecraft clean; yet another asks you to safely land a spacecraft, using an understanding of thrust to successfully judge your touchdown.
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After a few days of using Space Nation Navigator, I realise that actually winning the top prize isn’t really the point of the app at all. Nassir says that the team “obviously wants to get people excited about the scientific advancement” we’re currently seeing in this area, and both founders are clearly genuinely thrilled by the idea that the average person could feasibly find themselves on their way into orbit. But there’s something particularly optimistic about the whole thing that goes beyond a basic love of physics.
Nassir cites his childhood in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war as part of the inspiration for the app. “While the adults were looking up into the sky trying to spot the bombers and the bombs coming in, I would look up to the sky dreaming of a better place,” he says. “And up there, beyond the incoming bombers, I could see such a place: space”.
It’s easy to see, in quotes like this, exactly why so many people dreamed of space as a child, and why so many people refuse to give up that dream as they get older.
After all, the human urge to conquer space is, at its heart, a lot like the also very human desire to achieve our most ridiculous dreams: not impossible, not quite, but nearly. Going into space is very obviously not an unachievable goal for the human race as a whole – we’ve already done it, to begin with, and efforts in this area are only ramping up for private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. If you’re not Elon Musk or one of the world’s top jet pilots, however, becoming a passenger on a rocket does still remain tantalisingly out of reach.
But it’s that sliver of hope – the laughable unattainability of something so absurd and complex – that gives dreams their sheen. And it’s that hope that gives us the sheer bloody-mindedness to not give up on the things we secretly and desperately continue to long for – no matter how lost our cause, and no matter how unlikely we really, honestly are to ever become astronauts.
This article is part of our WIRED on Transport series where we explore the challenges and solutions in transport, such as the future of borders after Brexit, the new race to make supersonic travel work and the hover train that never was.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
