BitLife has released several major updates since the game was first released on iOS in 2018, and since then, Android and iOS players alike now enjoy a myriad of ways to enjoy the super-popular life simulator that wasn’t even close to being available around four to five years ago. One of these major updates introduced weekly challenges for greatly enhanced replayability, and the most recent one allowed players to embark on space travel careers as astronauts. You probably see where we’re going here — this week’s BitLife challenge is all about space travel.
The Cosmic Explorer Challenge is the first BItLife challenge to incorporate the new features introduced through the Astronaut Update, and while there are several popular films that Candywriter could have used as a basis for this week’s challenge, it looks like they opted to take the classic route and go for the general astronaut theme.
That means you’ll have to accomplish several typical astronaut milestones (or future astronaut milestones, considering we’ve yet to send humans to Mars) to get the prize, and while there is some grinding involved, this shouldn’t be too difficult or time-consuming a challenge. Still, you can always check this BitLife mini-strategy guide if you’re trying to speed-run the Cosmic Explorer Challenge and complete it in as little time as possible.
Becoming An Astronaut — What Do You Have to Do First?
When creating a character for the Cosmic Explorer Challenge, you can choose any gender or any nationality/hometown you wish, with Special Talents optional — the key here is to keep re-rolling until you get a character with decent Looks and above-average Smarts. To become an astronaut, you need to have a college degree, and having a scholarship to Space Academy could be a real money-saver — unless your parents are willing or able to pay for your studies. And becoming a Famous Astronaut might require being easy on the eyes, so having a solid rating in the Looks department could help.
As usual, it pays to stay away from trouble in school and study harder if needed to ensure a scholarship, and joining a fraternity or sorority can help you potentially skip the guessing game that is the job interview. We would also strongly suggest choosing a course that’s relevant to becoming an astronaut, such as Mathematics or Physics — we haven’t seen yet whether those who take not-too-relevant courses can get into Space Academy, but regardless of which college course you choose, you should get a Pilot’s License before even thinking of applying to Space Academy.
All in all, 40 hours of Flight School will set you back by about $6,000 to $7,000, so you might need to work a “regular” job for a year or two. And the pilot’s license test may require some Googling, as you’ll need to correctly identify the gauge or signal depicted in the picture — as we’ve noted in previous guides, this isn’t as common or as easy as a driver’s license test.
Once you’ve got your Pilot’s License, you can apply to Space Academy, upon which you’ll have to ace the Technical Training (general science and space travel knowledge questions, mostly easy but some hard), the Fitness Training (train each area once per year), and the Flight Training (mini-game where you have to avoid space objects). For the latter, BitLife has made things easier, as you can now watch an ad video to automatically complete the mini-game without actually playing.
Get passing marks at Space Academy and you can then apply to become an astronaut at NASA, or whichever is your country/region’s space agency.
Becoming a Famous Astronaut Requires Performing Well in Your Missions and Studies
Not everybody can become an astronaut in the BitLife universe, much less a famous one. As we mentioned above, having good, or at least presentable looks could help, but the main things here would be having a mostly full Performance bar, as seen in your Mission Debrief, and getting good peer reviews or better when publishing studies. That will help you become one of your space agency’s top astronauts, and as is the case with the likes of the Kelly twins (or Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, to go much farther back), performing well at your job, especially during high-profile missions, could make you a celebrity.
We’ll be discussing research studies in greater depth a little later on, but your Performance during a mission will depend on the answers you choose during the random pop-up scenarios. For example, you shouldn’t simply sit there if you’re having trouble with your ascent or descent — investigate the situation closer, reboot the system, or do the most logical thing to sort things out instead of panicking or leaving things to chance.
If your agency’s head or one of your fellow astronauts asks you to conduct a certain type of research, do it without question. But on the other hand, if another crew member is fooling around on social media during a mission, let them be or join in the fun — the game seems to reward astronauts who want to build engagement with their followers!
Good Performance Also Leads to Faster Promotion and More Requirements Completed
The types of missions you can go on as an astronaut will depend on your rank, and as your rank increases, so does your clearance level — this affects the type of missions you can go on. Initially, you will only be allowed to go on repair or spacewalk missions, but once promoted to Captain, you can start deploying probes — deploy two of these and you will be able to check one of the requirements in the Cosmic Explorer Challenge. Don’t fret if you aren’t able to discover anything with the probes, as all that matters is that you’re able to deploy them.
Moving up to Major gives you access to Lunar Missions, and this is where you can start picking up space artifacts. Collect two of these and that’s another requirement checked. And once you rank up to General, you will be cleared to go on Martian Missions, and all you need is one of these to fulfill yet another task in the Cosmic Explorer Challenge.
Of course, you need to make sure you’re doing the right thing or the best thing possible in each mission scenario, and you need to guard against your Reputation dipping below 60 percent — or higher thresholds for the more intensive missions. We noticed that the penalties for making wrong decisions in space lead to a bigger hit on Popularity than the increase you can get for doing things properly, so if you end up choosing the wrong option in the scenarios, you might want to quit BitLife, restart the game, and redo the mission from the top.
Be Patient With Your Studies and Research
Winning a Noble Prize — that is not a typo, that’s what the Nobel Prize is called in the BitLife universe — might be the most difficult part of the Cosmic Explorer Challenge, and that’s because of the randomness associated with submitting research papers. There are a couple of ways you can get to write a paper, and the first would be if you discovered something while using the Scan function to search for “cosmic anomalies.” The second would be if you found a moon rock, asteroid fragment, or any other artifact during your space missions.
There is a bit of a method to the madness here. When it comes to cosmic signals, you don’t want to write publications about inconsequential sun spots or anything too generic-sounding, and if it turns out you didn’t hear anything after all while recording, you should delete that recording and keep searching with the Scan option.
If there’s something that sounds like a potential sign of past or present alien life, you will want to publish something about that. And when dealing with artifacts from your missions, it’s best to avoid reporting on mundane items like moon rocks. Publish stuff about the unusual items and you’ll have a better chance of getting good peer reviews or better.
That aside, this is a very random process, and you may need to publish several papers before you get one that gets the best possible peer review or close to it. Such publications will be eligible for the Noble Prize, and since that isn’t a slam dunk either, you may need to do your fair share of quitting and restarting BitLife — both to avoid getting a bad peer review and to redo the Noble Prize award ceremony so that you end up winning the award.
Win that Noble Prize and assuming you’ve completed all the other requirements, you should be good for the Cosmic Explorer Challenge, and all set to redeem a new accessory from one of the four prize chests.