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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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.
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