Is it fitness and transferable skills? Seems like it would be most advantageous to be some sort of scientist. With the likes of SpaceX making it all more automated, will the demographic of astronauts change?
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In some ways you have to be especially clever. Physical fitness, a certain mentality, hand-eye coordination and those things. At the same time, you have to be damn fool enough to be shot up into space.
Kid of an AirForce fighter pilot here. My dad’s F-100 school roommate, [Ron Grabe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_J._Grabe) was an astronaut.
Several factors.
1. The risk seeking personality of a fighter pilot or test pilot means they know their lives are on the line every day.
2. Fighter Pilots can pull up to 8 or 9 G’s every flight. That’s 8 or 9 times the force of gravity on Earth. They are trained to keep their minds alert, to prevent the urge to pass out, and to keep their bodies agile and responsive.
So yeah, transferable skills.
Fitness is one of the requirement. But being able to stay calm in stressfull mental and physical conditions and make the right split second decisions as well as reading up and understanding the engineering behind all their systems so that they are able to make these decisions are very important skills. However the demographic of astronauts have already changed a lot. Even during the Gemini program NASA lowered their requirements for being astronauts allowing non-test pilots to join the progam. At first they were still all ex-Air Force pilots but it allowed them to get more people with engineering and aerodynamics degrees which helped diversify their skillsets. And as long as one of the pilots were a test pilot they still had the same split second decision making skills on board. During Apollo there were more focus on scientific background among astronauts, partly because there were three astronauts per launch. They even had a geologist land on the Moon. For the Space Shuttle there was further reduction in the fraction of pilots as the shuttle had only two pilots and five passengers. So there were astronauts flying on the Space Shuttle who had little to no pilot training at all. A similar change have happened with the Soyuz as it have one pilot and two passengers. And with the more automated routine flights to ISS the requirements for taking the Soyuz pilot course have become pretty low. So the automation that SpaceX and Boeing brings along is more of an evolution from previous practices then a revolution. And the fraction of astronauts with civilian academic background rather then military aviation background have been in increasing for a long time.
Scientists are definitely the person you want to be in an orbital station doing the scientific things.
But you need someone to drive and stay calm while being tossed outside the planet by a 20g force and I know no scientist that has 10-20 years of experience being tossed around at extreme g loads. For sure not one that can guarantee to not pass out during a critical phase.
But yeah, if you can get a clever pilot to get a PhD, then you have the perfect candidate. You don’t need him to be a genius, just to be able to not invalidate the experiments he’s running in space. Then someone on earth can calmly study the results while seated in a friendlier office, with gravity and decent food.
It goes back to the founding of NASA. It was decided that all astronauts would be military test pilots. The Air Force decided they wanted the astronauts to be from them (can’t let the Navy, or worse, the Marines control the astronaut core). They gave extra training to their candidates (even sent them to charm school) so they were selected more than the other services. Civilians were not allowed to be astronauts until the space shuttle.
I do not think that is true anymore. By fighter jet pilot I will assume you mean any military branch not just the air force, the first US astronaut John Glenn was a fighter pilot for the US Marin Cops
In NASA Astronaut Group 22 which was selected in 2017 out of the 12 five are formed, military pilots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Group_22
Four of them are fighter pilots and one helicopter pilot. All of them have at least bachelor’s degrees in relevant files. Only two of the five were from the air force.
The reason you have a lot of fighter pilots and especially test plots is they are people that are calm in stressful life-threatening situations that can include high G loads. The Dragon capsule might be automated but if something goes wrong what might be needed is human interaction.
It is not just during flight, if there is a fire on the ISS the same applies.
This is the historical reason primary test pilots were chosen as astronauts. It might not be as relevant today but to say it is irrelevant is not correct.
All NASA astronauts are trained to fly jet aircraft like fighter jet pilots. They use the same T-38 as the US air force. This is done because the skill you need to master to handle an aircraft with stress, g-forces, and potential consequences of mistake is one of the best analogies we have down here on earth to anything that goes wrong in space. So all NASA astronauts get training to fly higher light jet aircraft, they do not get training for combat operations like military pilots would have
It is not uncommon to see images of astronauts in front of this jest with flight gear regardless of background. If you look at the astronaut in the group I linked to three of the ones with no military pilot background have that as their image on Wikipedia.
There are a lot of transferable skills, the most important one being able to keep calm and problem solve on the fly in extreme stress situations while moving at speeds that would instantly turn you into a fine red paste outside with gravity significantly outside of normal expected operations in a flying machine with more technology shoved into it than a bay area tech billionaires house.
Plus, the people who become astronauts tend to be the people who joined the air force and then also went on to become scientists.
About 2/3 of US astronauts were military and among most are from the Air Force, Navy or Marines because that are the US branches that have jet pilots. The US army just has helicopters and no jets, but helicopter pilots from the army or the coast guard have become astronauts too.
There is no need for an astronaut to have a pilot license, but it certainly is a plus if somebody already trained you to be part of a professional crew of a flying vehicle.
A significant number of American commercial pilots are ex military for the same reason.
It also helps that for a lot of the NASA astronaut program a significant percentage of the able bodied males in the right age range had some military experience due some war or another.
That being said about a 100 or so civilians with no prior military service have been NASA astronauts too.
The people on ISS don’t design the experiments, they just run them. They are equivalent of lab assistants, not professors. Earth-side prepares all the protocols so they don’t waste time.
However, the stress resistance, engineering knowledge to keep ISS alive, incredible discipline to keep up with the requirements of living without gravity, used to cramped and overtly social living conditions – all of these are readily present in fighter pilots.
Pilots need to be smart to get through their training, too. If you pick the best of them, you get very smart, very disciplined people who are willing to risk their lives and stay calm under immense pressure.
This used to be true but it’s not anymore. In the early days of spaceflight, when everything was experimental and highly risky, you wanted jet test pilots as astronauts because they had the training, skills, physical fitness, and mental composure to handle just about any situation thrown at them calmly. In other words, handling experimental aircraft made them very qualified to deal with all the unknowns of spaceflight. Not all test pilot astronauts were in the Air Force though, just as many were in the Navy, Marines, or the Army.
Nowadays, some astronauts still come from the military for this reason, but since space flight has matured, it’s no longer necessary for all astronauts to have test pilot experience, and now, many astronauts are scientists or engineers with no military or flight experience before their selection to become astronauts.
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