Photo: NASA

More Kids Want to Be YouTubers than Astronauts Because Obviously

The highest-paid astronaut last year brought home around $120,000 — or 187 times less than the highest-paid YouTuber

Chris Stokel-Walker
FFWD
Published in
4 min readJul 17, 2019

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At some point every kid wants to be an astronaut. Living life in the cosmos, eating astronaut ice cream, seeing the blue-and-green marble of the world as it languidly orbits beneath your space capsule…

Except not any more, according to new data.

A survey, timed to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings, shows that in the United Kingdom and United States, far more children want to be a YouTuber than they do an astronaut.

Around three in 10 children said they wanted to be a YouTuber when they grew up in those two countries, compared to one in 10 who dreamed of the stars.

Image: The Harris Poll/LEGO

In China, the positions are switched. Fifty-six percent of children there said they wanted to be an astronaut when they grew up, while 18% said they wanted to be a vlogger (YouTube is officially banned in China, though canny use of virtual private networks — VPNs — mean that the site hovers near the…

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Chris Stokel-Walker
FFWD
Editor for

UK-based freelancer for The Guardian, The Economist, BuzzFeed News, the BBC and more. Tell me your story, or get me to write for you: stokel@gmail.com