The One Career Worth Having

The astronaut is the only job title that still works in that primal, uncomplicated way. Doctor? Respectable, probably, but it reads like someone else’s ambition and the work involves bodily fluids you didn’t choose. Fireman? Classically handsome, but you’re competing against fifty years of ironic calendars. The astronaut bypasses all of that. Something about having literally left the planet registers at a frequency that doesn’t require downstream processing. The word alone does the work.

Pop culture understood this long before the rest of us bothered to think it through. Who gets Liv Tyler in Armageddon? Not the drillers, not the military guys—the man going into space, riding a rocket into a world-ending rock. The entire Mass Effect franchise runs on the premise that a man with a starship and the nerve to cross the galaxy can sleep with any life form he encounters, including the blue alien women with tentacles for hair who are somehow still inexplicably hot. There’s a David LaChapelle photograph where Naomi Campbell—at the absolute zenith of her impossible beauty—poses with a man in a full NASA spacesuit, and the hierarchy of that image couldn’t be clearer if he’d labeled it. Even Toy Story plays with the thing: Buzz Lightyear arrives and Woody suddenly has a very real problem. (The cowboy wins eventually, but it takes three films and what can only be described as a psychological crisis.)

The fantasy isn’t purely about sex, though it’s obviously partly about sex. It’s about a man who did something so cosmically rare and difficult that it proves a different category of person exists. He left the atmosphere. He floated in silence somewhere above all of it—the traffic, the debt, the apartment, the email, all of it—and looked down at the whole blue marble from outside it and found it small. Whatever else he is, he did that. You can’t unfact that.