I got very close to becoming a European Space Agency astronaut, but the final lesson was a bittersweet one
In February 2021, the European Space Agency (Esa) announced it would be recruiting a new astronaut class, the first since 2008. It encouraged applicants from a broader spectrum of gender, physical ability, age and ethnicity, so I fired off an application and joined a WhatsApp group of like-minded hopefuls. There were 23,000 applicants in total, and some obvious criteria. To get on to the longlist you had to have a couple of degrees in science, preferably in different disciplines, with at least one at master’s level or above. As for the other qualities that might make a good astronaut, we didn’t know precisely what they were looking for, but we could guess: they seem to like people who are outdoorsy, a bit sporty, good in teams and able to put up with quite a lot of discomfort.
Above all, they seemed to prefer people who had what they called “operational experience”, which meant pursuits where you made real decisions with some skin in the game, preferably your own. I made both the longlist of 17,000 applicants, and the smaller group of close to 1,500 who went on to the next stage in Hamburg, Germany. We did classroom tests and video games: maths and physics quizzes, some psychometric screening and a bunch of fiendishly difficult pilot aptitude tests. My childhood bashing away on an Atari 2600 hadn’t gone to waste. And the competitors in the room were no slouches: intrepid oceanographers, particle physicists, military test pilots and Antarctic explorers, to list but a few.
