A 23 year-old seems to have written their own wikipedia article about going to every spacecamp and wanting to be an astronaut when they grow up.

It would be extremely funny if he tried to actually launch a Mars mission and just after clearing the atmosphere his ship gets shotgunned by a cloud of his stupid little satellites.

This is basically it. Astrobiology is actually a course in a fair few places, a friend of mine has a degree in it, and you're right, it's relatively new and varied, but it's basically planetary science, biochem and environmental sciences. No it is not drawing theoretical aliens.

yeah, there seems to be a lot of strange moves in undergraduate program development with creating "grabby" program titles that sound cool and have some curious career tracking baked in, because we all know the most important part of a program title is being able to rapidly and cleanly articulate what your career will look like to your parents and what sort of salary it will command.

The average Astrobiologist in the US makes $143,786.

I have a degree in astrophysics, so here’s my perspective.

Whether, and how much, a field is speculative has little scientific or practical bearing on whether it is worth studying. I’ll throw out the obvious reason first: you don’t know what you don’t know. Much of science lies in pushing boundaries even when there is no specific discovery in mind.

Astronomy as a whole has always been challenged for relevance to “real” studies here on Earth. Many people think that astronomy is a waste of money.

Was it pointless to send multiple spacecraft, including COBE, WMAP, and Planck, just to figure out how uniform is the cosmic microwave background radiation? Or to devote similar efforts to researching the flatness of the Universe? To image black holes and measure gravitational waves? These things are about as speculative as astrobiology, but they sound more “serious.”

I believe all of these things are important to study because the laws of physics are, as far as we can tell, the same everywhere in the universe. Therefore space is simply another laboratory in which we study the Earth; an invaluable one, actually, because there is far more exotic physics happening around galactic nuclei (for example) than we can ever come close to simulating in a laboratory on Earth.

Astrobiology is not merely looking at spectra. The spectra are only an indirect measurement. The difficulty lies in understanding the non-biological processes which could produce a signature that otherwise appears biological in origin. Until you’re holding a little green alien, you can’t really prove that a measurement is definitely life, but with solid science you can be pretty damn sure that there is no other explanation.

I saw one space chemist describe their job as discovering everything that isn't alien life. We have a recent, huge, and growing pile of exoplanet data which is going to show different chemical signatures. There's practical scientific value in finding the interesting candidates and for narrowing down what could make those compounds under wildly different conditions that an Earth-centric chemist isn't specially trained in. I think that apart from the microgravity effects on earth biology studies, there's value in understanding how those different conditions would or wouldn't allow for an atmospheric signature to be biological. If it's something benign we didn't rule out, that's a 10+ year space mission or telescope time wasted when we could have been replicating those chemical conditions in labs here.

You're being overly optimistic, pretty sure HR jobs have needed a post-grad certificate + work experience for a while now. One of the reasons there were so many recruiters for a while is people viewed working as a recruiter as a way to get an entry level job in HR.