What must be the best college course for pilot?

What is the best course of study to become a NASA Mission Specialist?

• I'm in high-school now going into my senior year next year and then college obviously. I want to become a NASA Mission specialist. Not a Pilot or Engineer. I want to be the one going into space conducting experiments or other tasks. I'm not entirely sure what I want to study. But I know the application requires 3 years of professional experience and a bachelors degree blah blah blah. As of now I plan on getting either a bachelors or masters in Physics. Then probibly teach for the remainder of my experience required and on past it. Would this be the ideal route to take if my ultimate goal would be to become a mission specialist? Or is there another course of study/job that would be a better option for me to be selected. Basicly, what should I do to give me the best chance of being selected?

• Answer:

  What courses of action you need to take is dependant on what you are wanting to work on. If you don't know what to become an expert in, right off the start, you will not go very far into space. For example, say you are interested in how to manufacture semiconductors for the electronics industry in a microgravity environment a viable commercial endeavor. What sort of things would you need to know about that subject before even getting into space? How you would write up a proposal and submit it so that it would be worthy of selecting and sending a mission specialist up with the required equipment to try it out? Once you get past that hurdle, you then need to make the cut for crew selection - physical and mental evaluations, height and weight requirements, that sot of thing. And finally, will there be a means to get you and your equipment into space? The space station will be going away by around 2020, the U.S. currently has no man rated heavy lift rockets (maybe by 2020), Russia is barely keeping their systems working and the private sector has hardly even gotten off the ground (literally).