The Most Famous
ASTRONAUTS from South Africa
This page contains a list of the greatest South African Astronauts. The pantheon dataset contains 524 Astronauts, 1 of which were born in South Africa. This makes South Africa the birth place of the 43rd most number of Astronauts behind Slovakia and Kyrgyzstan.
Top 1
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary South African Astronauts of all time. This list of famous South African Astronauts is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Mike Melvill (1940 - )
With an HPI of 40.64, Mike Melvill is the most famous South African Astronaut. His biography has been translated into 15 different languages on wikipedia.
Michael Winston Melvill (born November 30, 1940, in Johannesburg, South Africa) is a world-record-breaking pilot and one of the test pilots for SpaceShipOne, the experimental spaceplane developed by Scaled Composites. Melvill piloted SpaceShipOne on its first flight past the edge of space, flight 15P on June 21, 2004, thus becoming the first commercial astronaut, and the 435th person to go into space. He was also the pilot on SpaceShipOne's flight 16P, the first competitive flight in the Ansari X Prize competition.
Pantheon has 1 people classified as astronauts born between 1940 and 1940. Of these 1, 1 (100.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living astronauts include Mike Melvill. As of April 2022, 1 new astronauts have been added to Pantheon including Mike Melvill.
