The word astronaut – probably one of the most mysterious and desired professions of all times – tells a fascinating story.
The etymology of the word is quite obvious. The term derives from the Greek words astron (star) and nautes (sailor). But the real story of the word takes its roots from the Greek mythology and the Argonauts who accompanied Jason in his quest to find the Golden Fleece.
The word argonaut, in the meaning of someone sailing through the air (the Greek for air is aero) first appeared in France in 1748 and referred to a person who travels the air in a balloon. In 1782, the British Royal Navy borrowed the term and named a ship after it. Ironically the first HMS Argonaut was captured by the French in the West Indies. The HMS Argonaut cruisers line was renewed in the 1870s and continued to sail the oceans until 1995.
And here we finally arrive at the word astronaut as it is used today. It was the British writer Percy Greg – credited as an originator of the sword and planet sub-genre of science fiction – who coined the word in 1880. Inspired by the stories of the mythical Argonauts and Royal Navy ships, he named a spaceship in his novel Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record the Astronaut. In the book, the Astronaut flies to Mars with a real astronaut on board. Another interesting facts is that the book contains what was probably the first alien language in any work of fiction. So it also provides the first the first translation from and into an alien language.
Eventually, by the late 1920s, the word astronaut evolved from being the name of a specific spaceship to referring to the people who travel in spaceships. The earliest reference to this use of the term astronaut can be found in a 1929 British scientific journal, in which the author states that the “first obstacle encountered by the would-be astronaut is terrestrial gravitation.”
At the dawn of the space age, in 1959, NASA set up a selection committee to come up with a term for US human space-flight travellers. According to Dr. Gamble, the term astronaut was chosen on 1 December 1958, after a long brainstorming session at Langley Research Center.
Ironically, the first human to fly into outer space was not an American, but a Russian – and they had decided on calling their space travellers cosmonauts while nearly half a century later the Chinese coined their taikonaut.
