List of astronauts by year of selection

Until recently, astronauts were sponsored and trained exclusively by governments, either by the military or by civilian space agencies.

Vasyutin concealed a medical condition from doctors that resulted in his falling ill during the Soyuz T-14/ Salyut 7 EO-4 flight causing the premature termination of the mission 4 months early.

A. Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center is a single detachment of the Russian Space Agency astronauts, which in 2015 consisted of 38 people.

Among them include Starchaser Industries directors Steve Bennett (United Kingdom) and Matt Shewbridge;[73] former NASA astronauts John Bennett Herrington (Pioneer Rocketplane), Richard Searfoss and pilot Dick Rutan (XCOR Aerospace); Canadian engineer Brian Feeney (da Vinci Project); and veteran Wally Funk from Mercury 13 (Interorbital Systems).

Several million dollars have been allocated for detailed spectroscopic analysis of high-altitude noctilucent cloud formations on suborbital flights using rapidly reusable, task-and-deploy spaceplanes.

In 2012, the United States Rocket Academy announced that the program was expanding to include a broader range of participants, renaming the initiative Citizens in Space.

For its first phase, Citizens in Space selected and trained ten citizen astronaut candidates to fly as payload operators, including four astronaut candidates already in training (Maureen Adams, Steve Heck, Michael Johnson, and Edward Wright).

[93] Unverified rumors claimed that Mars One was a scam designed to take as much money as possible from donors, including those participating as contestants.

[94][95] In February 2019, it was reported that Mars One had declared bankruptcy in a Swiss court on January 15, 2019, and was permanently dissolved as a company.

Flight candidates included husband and wife travel duo Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum, who participated in the Biosphere 2 experiment.

The company works in collaboration with NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston to provide spaceflight training.