What does «cosmonauta» mean in Spanish?
- Pilot or passenger of a spacecraft. A person who drives a spacecraft, is part of its crew, or is trained and prepared to do so; often used to designate people who participated in Soviet spaceflight. Cosmonaut vs. astronaut In 1959, when the United States and the Soviet Union were planning but had not yet launched humans into space, NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan and his deputy administrator, Dr. Hugh Dryden, discussed whether spacecraft crew members should be called astronauts or cosmonauts. Dryden preferred "cosmonaut," because the flights would occur in the cosmos (near space), while the prefix "astro" suggested flight to the stars. Most members of NASA's Space Task Force preferred "astronaut," which survived through common usage as the preferred American term. When the Soviet Union launched the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin in 1961, they chose "cosmonaut."