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A commercial astronaut is a person trained to command, pilot, or serve as a crew member of a privately funded spacecraft. This is distinct from an otherwise non-government astronaut, for example Charlie Walker, who flies while representing a non-government corporation but with funding or training or both coming from government sources.

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Sirisha Bandla is an Indian-American aeronautical engineer and commercial astronaut. She's the Vice President of Government Affairs and Research Operations for Virgin Galactic. She flew on the Virgin Galactic Unity 22 mission which made her the second India-born woman to go to space.

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William Brian Binnie is a former United States Navy officer and one of the test pilots for SpaceShipOne, the experimental spaceplane developed by Scaled Composites and flown from 2003–2004.

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Virgin Galactic Unity 22 was a sub-orbital spaceflight of the SpaceShipTwo-class VSS Unity which launched on 11 July 2021. The crew consisted of pilots David Mackay and Michael Masucci as well as passengers Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett, Beth Moses, and Richard Branson.

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Michael Winston Melvill 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.

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Beth Moses is Chief Astronaut Instructor and Interiors Program Manager for Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo program, and is a commercial astronaut. She was the first woman to make a spaceflight on a commercially launched vehicle, the VSS Unity VF-01 flight of 22 February 2019. She was also part of the six-member crew that flew the first fully-crewed test flight to space on July 11, 2021, aboard VSS Unity.

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Mark P. "Forger" Stucky is an American test pilot and commercial astronaut. In these roles, he is an employee of Virgin Galactic, a private spaceflight company which is developing sub-orbital space tourism flights.

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Frederick Wilford Sturckow is an engineer, retired United States Marine Corps officer, former NASA astronaut, and commercial spacecraft pilot. Sturckow is a veteran of four Space Shuttle missions. He flew on STS-88 and STS-105 as a pilot and STS-117 and STS-128 as a commander. All four missions docked with the International Space Station, making Sturckow one of two people to visit the station four times. Sturckow later was assigned to the Johnson Space Center as a CAPCOM. He left NASA in 2013 to become a pilot for Virgin Galactic.