Question: My friend wants to be an astronaut so what do you think she should do about like tests and all that ??;)

Clara Nellist answered on 20 Mar 2014:

I think it’s fantastic that your friend want to be an astronaut!! There are two main routes to take to become an astronaut: these are as a pilot or as a mission specialist, which is a fancy way of saying a scientist.

For the mission specialist route, the best courses to focus on are obviously maths and the sciences. Your friend will need to aim to study a science at university and perhaps go all the way to doing a PhD (the highest academic achievement you can get at a university), so working hard on these subjects would be my main advice.

Also, learning a language would be very useful! While the second most common language used is Russian, it’s unlikely that your friend will already be learning this. However, learning French would show that she is able to learn a new language, and it would also be useful for working at ESA (the European Space Agency) where French is their second language (English is their first 🙂 ).

Your friend will also need to try to keep healthy, as astronauts need to be physically fit to go into space. Swimming is a great exercise to do because astronauts train in HUGE swimming pools to learn what it will be like to work in a low gravity environment. Also, if your friend ever gets the chance to learn to scuba dive, she should! Because this is how they train astronauts underwater and showing that she can already do it, and is happy underwater, would be a great advantage. Plus, it’s loads of fun!! You don’t even have to go somewhere exotic to do it, many big pools have scuba diving courses in the UK.