An astronaut or cosmonaut is a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command, pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft. While generally reserved for professional space travelers, the term is sometimes applied to anyone who travels into space, including scientists, politicians, journalists, and tourists.
In film[]
- 20 Million Miles to Earth: Colonel Robert Calder was an astronaut and the leader of the first manned space flight to the planet Venus. Aboard the interplanetary space vessel the XY-21, Colonel Calder and a crew of seventeen astronauts and scientists made the twenty-million mile journey and collected mineral samples to bring back to Earth. One of the samples was a viscous fluid, which contained a Venusian life form in an embryonic state. It was Calder's hope that by studying the life form, scientists might be able to determine a way to make life on Venus possible for people from Earth. Thirteen months later, the XY-21 made its return voyage back to Earth, but its course was diverted after it was struck by a passing meteor. Rather than returning to the United States, the ship crash-landed in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Sicily. A passing fisherman and a young boy named Pepe found the XY-21 and helped the survivors make it back to shore. Calder was one of the luckier passengers returning from the voyage as many members of the expedition suffered severe radiation sickness due to exposure from the meteor.
- Alien: The space jockey is an interplanetary traveler of extraterrestrial origin. Almost nothing is known about his species or where the jockey originally hailed from. It has been theorized that the jockey is a bio-mech, likely part of a military operation responsible for transporting a weapon carrier craft to the planetoid known as Acheron at some point in the distant past. The cargo bay of his carrier contained a nursery, which included a bed of thousands of Xenomorph eggs. At some point in time, the jockey activated a distress beacon on his ship, sending it out across the Zeta II Reticuli System and neighboring systems. The true nature of the beacon is itself a mystery. He may have sent it as a warning of the dangerous species aboard his ship, or he may have been attempting to lure unwary space travelers to his location so that they could be used as bio-gestation chambers for the Xenomorphs. Whatever his intent, the pilot found himself a victim of the very creatures that he was transporting.
- Species II: In the 1998 movie Species II, a manned space mission to Mars, in which an astronaut named Patrick Ross is infected with alien DNA and brings it back to Earth, where it eventually takes host in a woman's body, giving birth to an alien creature of the same race as Sil.