Makes sense in case the pilot(s) of the spacecraft gets sick or dies. They use a T-38 which is also a trainer for the Air Force.
- That article is 9 years old.
- There is no way ANY Mission Specialist with however many hours in a T-38 is going to land a Shuttle.
- We don’t use shuttles anymore.
- the Russians don’t fly their own craft either. Which is the only way anyone is getting into space in the near future.
My ‘lottery dream’ plane is a T-38.
anything in the article no longer true ? I think it’s well known shuttles were retired in 2011.
BTW NASA is planning to put US Astronauts into space on a Spacex rocket next month. I guess that’s the near future. And they are going back to ocean splashdowns.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/01/world/nasa-spacex-crew-dragon-launch-scn/index.html
I assume NASA thinks all astronauts being pilots is a good idea .
These are the current requirements to be a NASA astronaut:
So, no, you don’t need to be a pilot to join the program. Whether they encourage you to fly after that I don’t know, but you don’t need to be one to start.
Didn’t NASA used to require astronauts to be pilots in the Apollo days? I vaguely remember an article about Sally Ride in Time magazine that claimed the reason there were no female astronauts until the 80s was that NASA only took astronauts from the fighter pilot program (and of course back then there were no female fighters in the Air Force).
At first they pretty much only wanted test pilots and engineers and of course only men and they wanted at least a BA/BS degree. It is thought Chuck Yeager was not picked since he had no degree.
They train anyone who is not already a pilot with the T 38. If you look at recent astronaut pictures many are standing in front of a T-38 For example:
Group 1: active duty military test pilots. No women could apply, de facto since there were no active duty female test pilot. It also eliminated people like Neil Armstrong.
Group 2: Test pilot experience. Practically a bar since there were hardly any.
Group 3: Requirements for test pilot dropped. Only fighter experience required. There were a handful of women who met the requirements, and a handful of them applied. None made it
Group 4. Scientist astronauts. Obviously many women qualified. A few applied. However the physical requirements were daunting, since they had to be fit enough to be taught to fly fighters as part of their training.
Group 5: Same requirements as Group 3. More women applied and for the first time a couple got to the initial interview stage.
Group 6: Group 6. Second group of scientist.
Group 7. Military test pilots transferred to NASA after the military manned program was cancelled.
Group 8: First group with women. Divided into pilots and mission specialists. Women were all in the later.
How seriously NASA considered women before Group 8 is debatable. Michael Collins who was the Astronaut Office rep for some of the selections recalled being relieved that no women were selected. Which suggests that women’s applications were not pro forma, they did get consideration. However; he did say that he was shocked no black candidates were accepted, so how much open to all it actually was is debatable.
Certainly pre Shuttle Slayton, Webb, Kraft and Shepard dominated selection and they would have resisted pressure to select a woman;since that was not exactly germane to going to the moon, they rejected many things for that reason. Still; the presence of errrr non technical concerns cannot be understated.
Your link partially explains it:
“Just as they would during a shuttle launch and landing, the astronaut in the front seat of the T-38 handles the flying and the mission specialist in the back seat passes on important information, talks to the control towers and takes care of aspects of navigation.”
There are three types of astronauts. First there are the two types of permanent, career astronauts: Pilot Astronauts and Mission Specialists. Pilot astronauts spend 15 hours a month piloting the T-38 to maintain currency and proficiency. Mission Specialists are non-pilots who spend 4 hours per month in the back seat of the T-38. They don’t fly it. The third type of astronaut is a Payload Specialist. They are not career astronauts, and only fly one or two missions. They are experts in their particular field of study who receive only the minimum required training to operate in space and as part of the team.
Payload specialists were discontinued after the Colombia disaster.
One of my grad school professors was an astronaut. He was working at Lockheed at the time, and on the team making a solar-physics experiment. At some point, his boss told the team “Bad news-- It looks like one of you is going to have to go up with it”. He didn’t consider that to be bad news.
A few astronauts never went to space , one of them quit because he could not fly the T-38 only with instruments.
Who is that? The list of astronauts doesn’t specifically call anyone out for that reason. It does call out 4 who died in T-38 crashes.
Here’s an article about the flight training of one of the scientist / astronauts who eventually went to the moon. This was in the Apollo days when they all had to be pilots. They took this guy, a geologist, and sent him through the Air Force training program. Zero to hero!
This is the guy who could not fly the T-38 on instruments
Friend of mine FIL was going to be on an Apollo mission but his mission was cut . I think Apollo 18 Partly due to budget and also people lost interest
This guy was in the same group as Llewellyn:
He quit within a year. I remember him being quoted at the time as saying “flying’s not my cup of tea.” I remember thinking (at age 10), “What is your problem?!?”
A bit of a zombie reply, but the news is recent to me:
I just learned that one of my colleagues at Purdue is apparently going to go up on a suborbital flight, funded by NASA, with Virgin Galactic–after they’ve had 13 successful flights. Apparently they’re currently at 4. So it might be a while. But he’ll get to run his microgravity experiment (as brief as it is) himself.
I don’t know if he’s a pilot–and it’s not clear if he’ll technically be considered an astronaut. However, there are astronaut portraits all over the building (Armstrong Hall) including two recent ones who flew with Virgin Galactic…
One could argue that you are an astronaut if and only if you’ve been awarded a United States Astronaut Badge.
30 people have the Commercial Astronaut badge at the moment. But due to the likely massive increase in the number of people that qualify, I have the feeling that the criteria may tighten–possibly to the point where only orbital flight matters, which would exclude Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.
Filling a seat on some flight is no qualification. They have to certify that you have the Right Stuff.