Only professionally trained astronauts can go to orbit
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtReaching Earth orbit takes years of professional astronaut training and the backing of a national space agency. The handful of 'space tourists' who went before all flew to a space station alongside career cosmonauts; a crew of ordinary civilians orbiting on their own is not something that happens.
NowFrom 15–18 September 2021, SpaceX's Inspiration4 mission put four private citizens, none of them professional astronauts, into orbit for three days aboard a Crew Dragon, with no career astronaut on board. It was the first all-civilian orbital spaceflight.
What actually happened
Earlier private fliers had always been accompanied by professionals and docked at a space station. Inspiration4 was different: the crew flew free, circling Earth on their own for three days after about five months of training, a fraction of the years a career astronaut logs.
The honest framing: this was still an expensive, chartered flight enabled by a billionaire, not a bus ticket, and 'civilian' does not mean 'untrained.' But the specific barrier taught for sixty years, that orbit is the exclusive domain of state-trained astronauts, came down, and private orbital crews followed.
Newsletter
Get new weekly revisions
Sources
Who was taught this
Still standard through 2021, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2021 learned the earlier version.