The role of the astronaut is in flux

There's a delicious irony in the fact that we broke Apollo 13's record not with a desperate rescue mission, but as a routine flyby. Apollo 13 was the mission that nearly killed three men and became a testament to human ingenuity under catastrophic pressure. Artemis II just... went farther, like it was nothing. That's progress, sure, but it's also a shift in what these journeys mean. Apollo was about proving we could; Artemis is about proving we can do it as a matter of course. But the deeper story here—the one this book review grapples with—is that the astronaut is becoming an obsolete category. When SpaceX flies private citizens to orbit, when Axiom plans commercial stations, when Blue Origin sells suborbital joyrides, the line between "astronaut" and "passenger" blurs into meaninglessness. The book being reviewed apparently argues that we need a new vocabulary, a new mythology, for people who aren't government-selected superhumans but rather civilians with the right amount of money or the right kind of science experiment. This matters because our cultural imagination is still stuck in the 1960s. We picture astronauts as test pilots with the right stuff, but the reality of Artemis II—a diverse crew, a mix of NASA veterans and international partners—already shattered that. The next decade will see teachers, artists, and maybe even journalists in orbit. The question becomes: do we treat them as pioneers or as tourists? The answer will shape how we build the space economy and who gets to participate in it. The review, available at https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/18/1141614/book-review-astronaut-role-in-flux/, seems to argue that this identity crisis is actually an opportunity. If we can let go of the heroic archetype, we might make space genuinely accessible—not just physically, but psychologically. The astronaut of the future might be anyone who looks up and decides to go. And that's a future worth getting excited about.