Easy Run for Would-be Astronauts

The original trainee astronauts famously had the right stuff but, more than four decades later, standards may be slipping.

Malaysia is to test the physical fitness of hundreds of its citizens who applied to be the country's first astronaut by asking them to run two miles in a less than gruelling 20 minutes.

Mazlan Othman, the director general of the country's National Space Agency, said the run was intended to screen 854 candidates, shortlisted from the 11,275 who applied in 2003. The first batch will run this Saturday.

Medical and psychological tests will then be conducted to whittle down the list to five to 10 people. They will go to Russia in January for the final test to pick two future astronauts, one of whom will go into space in 2007 as part of a six- to eight-day mission.

Dr Othman said about three-quarters of the shortlisted candidates were graduates and only a dozen were pilots. A fifth were civil servants, almost all were under 40, and 146 were women.

Apart from being "superbly fit, physically and psychologically", Malaysia's first astronaut must "not be an elitist but someone that can relate to the people".