Astronaut Astronaut 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. Although generally reserved for professional space travelers, the terms are sometimes applied to anyone who travels into space, including scientists, politicians, journalists, and tourists. Until 2002, astronauts were sponsored and trained exclusively by governments, either by the military or by civilian space agencies. With the suborbital flight of the privately funded SpaceShipOne in 2004, a new category of astronaut was created: the commercial astronaut. The criteria for what constitutes human spaceflight vary. The Fédération
Chinese as a foreign language further. In a Biblical vein similar to Kircher's, he tried to demonstrate that Chinese was the Primitive or Adamic language. In his "An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language" (1669), he suggested that Chinese was the language spoken before the confusion of tongues. Inspired by these ideas, Leibniz and Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a "characteristica universalis" modelled on Chinese. Thus wrote Bacon: Leibniz placed high hopes on the Chinese characters: The serious study of the language in the West began with missionaries coming to China during the