Why are most astronauts fighter jet pilots in the Air Force?

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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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Lots of good replies but to add, space craft are very similar to aircraft in the sense that they have complicated systems working with other complicated systems that have a myriad of checklists all in a flight environment that’s potentially deadly, and that’s just the take off and landing. Military pilots deal with this every day. They’ve spent years learning about systems and contingencies. If you ever watch a full start up of even a simple military aircraft like an F16 it’s one checklist after another to ascertain things are simply working. If you want a taste of that, download DCS world, get the two week trial of the AV8B harrier and just attempt to do the by the book startup with random failures on.

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