The 10 best astronauts

1 | Major Tom in David Bowie’s Space Oddity

Forget Armstrong and Aldrin – over the years, it’s Bowie’s Major Tom who’s become the presiding deity symbol of the thrills and chills of the manned space programme, going into orbit at the height of moon-mania in 1969 – a few days before Apollo 11 landed on the moon and a year after the release of the film 2001 (rendering the song’s title both a homage to Kubrick and a nifty copyright side-step). Three years on, the crew of Apollo 13 narrowly escaped the Major’s deep-space drift fate, while two years ago, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield offered the ultimate zero-gravity karaoke tribute by performing the song on the International Space Station. Given this weight of role-model expectation, it’s little wonder that the Major was later outed as a junkie in Ashes To Ashes.

2 | Ripley in Alien

She’s had an eventful afterlife – surrogate mother and righteous avenger in Aliens, skinhead commando in Alien 3, mutant clone in Alien: Resurrection – but Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley first appeared as a warrant officer among the crew of the Nostromo in the original old-dark-house-in-space thriller, and her chutzpah when faced with more-than-trifling adversity (detonating stomachs, disembowelled androids, wandering felines, oh, and the murderous designs of slithering, slavering, biomechanical killing machines) has led to her being anointed the fifth-coolest hero in pop culture by Entertainment Weekly.

3 | Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Among the really big questions this film continues to throw up (could walking upside down really slowly in Velcro-soled shoes really have seemed the height of futuristic vision, even in 1969? is that really Leonard Rossiter playing a Russian in a grey suit? Why didn’t they just turn HAL off and turn him on again?), the biggest, of course, is: just what kind of space-drug must Dr David Bowman have taken in order to disappear down the kaleidoscopic worm-hole, spend an eternity in a neoclassical bedroom, and be reborn as a star-child with the secrets of the universe at his fingertips? And could Voyager or whoever bring a little of it back, just for strictly controlled laboratory research purposes of course?

4 | Nikolai Cherukin’s cosmonauts poster

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What was every Young Soviet Pioneer’s dream in 1964? Clambering into some rusty old crock fashioned from aluminium, twine and cavity wall insulation and blasting off into deep space, of course. Charukin’s poster, which can be seen in the Science Museum’s current Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age exhibition, shows a pair of adorable socialist-realist moptops carrying a stylised Vostok launcher above the legend: “Happy New Year, Kids!” It was created just after Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. She revealed at the museum opening that not only was her spacecraft programmed to ascend but not descend, but she was also sent into orbit with toothpaste but no toothbrush.

5 | Robert Rauschenberg’s Retroactive

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“We choose to go the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” declared President John F Kennedy in a speech at Rice Stadium, Texas, in 1962. A year later he was dead, and Rauschenberg, the primary collagist of the US, reassembled the silkscreen he’d been working on to create an elegiac image of Kennedy surrounded by, among other things, an astronaut floating serenely from a parachute, perhaps standing in, as the critic Andrew Graham-Dixon argued, for “an angel attending at the Lord’s ascension”.

6 | Buzz Lightyear

He’s the purple and lime-green embodiment of old-school Apollo rectitude – a mash-up of Buzz Aldrin, Ed Kemmer from the hoary old sci-fi show Space Patrol, and GI Joe – and his “To infinity and beyond!” catchphrase is a nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s title card “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite”. So it’s only fitting that Buzz became the longest-serving toy in space in 2008 after six months on the International Space Station where he presided at dinner with its denizens and was seen gazing soulfully through a window into that very same infinite. All of which presumably helped him over the existential crisis he suffered in the original Toy Story, when he found out that not only was he was a toy, but he’d been made in Taiwan.

7 | Laika, Belka and Strelka memorabilia in the collection of Martin Parr

The story of the Soviet space dogs remains heartrendingly poignant – Laika (“Barker” or, as the US media dubbed her, “Muttnik”), the first Earth-born creature in space, who died around five hours into her flight in 1957; and Belka (“Squirrel”) and Strelka (“Arrow”) who in 1960 at least made it back. Nikita Khrushchev presented JFK’s daughter Caroline with one of the latter’s offspring, inevitably referred to as a “pupnik”. What better way to commemorate their heroic exploits and sacrifice than by immortalising them in commemorative vintage desk clocks, cigarette cases, biscuit tins and barometers, as amassed by the photographer Martin Parr and currently on show as part of Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist As Collector at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich?

8 | Dr Ryan Stone in Gravity

How much more-than-mild peril can one spunky biomedical engineer take? Plenty, as Sandra Bullock dodges flying space junk, wrestles with knotty parachute tethers, regrets her inability to speak Eskimo-Aleut, feels the G-force of explosive decompression, and splashes down into the primeval mud. Not so much a space opera as a space pile-up, Gravity is not just a study of Murphy’s Law in extremis, but also, according to Father Robert Barron in the Catholic Register, a parable of how “technology... can’t save us”; he goes on to invoke the triumph of God over applied science as emblazoned in the form of “the Ganges in the sun … the statue of Buddah,” if not the star of Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous.

9 | Barbarella

She wasn’t an astronaut per se, but she was the “Queen of the Galaxy”, and, indelibly incarnated by Jane Fonda, she presided over a could-it-be-more-late-60s fandango that seemed at once to have been badly re-transcribed from some putative Swedish porn original. If the cast list is suggestive enough in itself – Ugo Tognazzi as Mark Hand, Anita Pallenberg as the Black Queen of Sogo, David Hemmings as Dildano – then Barbarella’s entanglements with the likes of the “Exaltation Transference Pills” and pleasure-overloading “Excessive Machine” are the products of an unholy alliance between Wilhelm Reich and Frankie Howerd. Milo O’Shea’s Durand Durand inspired a Brummie quintet who had their own take on Planet Earth, but, perhaps more appropriately, the film’s “liquid essence of evil” - Mathmos – took its name from a lava lamp company.

10 | Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce

He’s remained stubbornly Earthbound, but Pierce may be pop music’s ultimate sojourner through outer-via-inner space. There’s his work with Spacemen 3, his penchant for calling himself J. Spaceman, and even, at one point, a plan to play a gig in the Large Hadron Collider (“but by the time we got our act together it was full of metal objects moving around”). But the apogee of his touching-the-void tendencies must be the title track of Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space – an ethereal, whispery lament that conjures up a stoned space-walk and makes the best use of that Mission Control “peep” sound (known as “quindar key”) outside the old Apollo newsreels.