The specific skill that was in reference to was the ability to function under high g force.
Submariners, like all sailors are usually specialists. None of them are trained to perform all of the tasks aboard their vessel. Test pilots, on the other hand, have to have a working knowledge of everything aboard their craft., even with crews of 2 (Gemini) or 3 (Apollo).
They didn’t come into the program with any working knowledge of a Mercury capsule. I may not be recalling this correctly, but wasn’t the choice of test pilots established well beforehand, maybe by the Air Force before NASA was established? I think part of the reasoning was that test pilots were used to risking their lives while flying planes solo.
I think they’d also be more likely to endure the weird physical demands of the astronaut selection process than submariners. Basically, test pilots are out of their minds and willing to be tortured for questionable reasons while submariners are used to team efforts and good sense to avoid dying under the ocean. If that wasn’t considered it should have been. I’d suggest they should have just used Marines once they decided monkey’s lives shouldn’t be wasted.
Wasn’t that the big theme of The Right Stuff?
The stuff felt needed was that stereotyped machismo eagerness, the drive, to go past their own limits and risk their lives in pursuit of being the one to push the envelope of what is possible farther out than it ever had been before.
Everything else was a distant second.
OP here. Thanks to everyone who’s commented. The answers y’all gave do sound logical.
Submariners do sound like they’d be better candidates for a multi-person mission that didn’t involve piloting a craft. Like the ISS, which is where the two astronauts chosen so far from submarines have served. Although Stephen Bowen, the astronaut I quoted in the OP, commanded a crew-rotation mission, using a SpaceX Crew Dragon craft, last September.
Institutional inertia, maybe? My guess, speaking ex cathedra from the seat of my pants, is that the Air Force has Army-style ranks because it developed out of the Army Air Corps. And the Air Force has in turn given birth to the Space Force. But it does seem more logical for a space-faring force to have naval ranks.
Hey, that’s why I always root for Navy over Army…
Well, they did use one:
Only in science fiction. At this stage of technological development, there are no “space battleships”. Crewed spacecraft are small and piloted by one person at a time, not a “bridge crew”. And frankly, Space Force is mostly about acquiring, launching, and managing military satellites.
Space Force descends from the Air Force primarily because the Air Force succeeded in the 1950s and 1960s in making space operations part of its mission domain. Most (initially, all) the major units of Space Force are rebadged Air Force units.
And the prevalence of Air Force-style test pilots (of any service) in the initial astronaut corps is an outcome of the same phenomenon.
At one point, it was a serious question whether there would even be a civilian space agency, or if the Air Force would just do it all.
Gene Roddenberry use naval ranks for Star Trek because he was cribbing from Horatio Hornblower novels.
Captain Buck Rogers took his orders from Colonel Fleming and General MacGregor.
On a more serious note, NASA seems to use “commander” in contexts where sailors and airline pilots would use “captain”. I don’t think there are any iron-clad Traditions yet.
What do they do in the Space Force?
Nm, seen the answer above.
I don’t think the titles are all that important, anyway. The Kenyan navy uses army ranks. Most east Asian countries use the same titles for all services, perhaps with an adjective to distinguish whether it is army lieutenant or a navy lieutenant or an air force lieutenant.
Would anyone have cared if the Enterprise had Colonel Kirk, Major Spock, Captain Uhura, and Lieutenant Chekov?
The Israeli military, being a single unified service, uses the same ranks throughout, whether you’re serving on ground, on a ship, or in a plane.
The recent Battlestar Galactica (and maybe the original - can’t remember) mixed army and navy ranks freely. Best as I can tell, the Colonial Fleet officer ranks went Admiral - Commander - Colonel - Major - Captain - Lieutenant - Junior Lieutenant - Ensign.
As a former submariner and a person who has taken flying lessons, I would say that military jet pilots are far better suited to “piloting” a cramped space capsule than anyone who is only experienced working in a fleet or nuclear submarine. Being on board a sub was like being in a small, noisy and hot apartment with the windows blacked out. Sitting in a Cessna 152 was much more confining. Go with a real pilot as the astronaut who is flying the mission.
I have to agree here. I’ve never flown a plane, but I was a submarine sonarman and I’m in sonar engineering now. As you well know… most of the time submarining involves being slow and deliberate and carefully considering everything you’re preparing to do.
This isn’t a luxury pilots always have, and–especially in the early days of spaceflight–not a luxury astronauts have.
The early flights were engineering test flights, so it’s not surprising wiser heads prevailed and they selected engineering test pilots. They didn’t ask for volunteers for the Mercury 7 per se, the NASA bigwigs cherry picked about 500 military records and screened them for characteristics they thought might be suitable for the space environment, which as a matter of fact had a bit of “here, there be dragons” aspect to it. The suitable candidates selected were then given hush hush secret orders to report to Washington, where the NASA bigwigs made their pitch and asked for volunteers.
Medical doctors weren’t too sure if humans would be able to eat or drink in the weightless environment. It sounds silly now, but there was some question about longer duration effects too, on the heart, ability to sleep, all sorts of mundane things. It turns out humans are much more adaptable than thought but they didn’t know that then.
Military test pilots had some advantages, for one they already had extensive medical history accumulated, voluminously documented in triplicate. They were also vetted in terms of background checks and loyalty tests and top secret clearances and things like that. Early space flight was pretty dangerous, as is experimental aviation, there was a lot of controversy whether humans were necessary or desirable. As it turns out, there is no substitute really for the human brain, at least on occasion
Plus, test pilots are selected and trained to stay calm and solve problems “on the fly”. Definitely a skill that came in handy a few times during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo eras. They’re also trained and experienced in what amounts to conducting experiments while flying.
Test pilots made a lot of sense when as @Common_Tater says, “wiser eads prevailed”.
Recently, I got curious as to whether any Space Force members had actually been to space. It turns out that three of them have. I was mildly surprised.
I suspect that space combat falls firmly within their purview, although there isn’t any yet.
Realistically, the way the Space Force grew out of the Air Force is pretty much the way they all do, with the obvious exception of Armies and Navies. The early pilots were part of the Army, and after WWII it was recognized that aerial warfare was sufficiently distinct from the ground warfare that armies engage in for it to be its own service. The Marine Corps spun out of the Navy after WWII as well, but for less clear reasons. Having the Space Force split out of the USAF was just a natural outgrowth of that.
I predict that in the next 15-20 years, we’ll see some sort of Cyber Force (hopefully with a better name) that will specialize in information/online warfare for the same reasons. Whether or not it’ll be a uniformed military service or not remains to be seen.
The U.S. Marine Corps most definitely did not “spin out of the Navy” after WWII. Founded on 10 November 1775, it was founded right around the same time as the Continental Navy (founded on 13 October 1775 and which the U.S. Navy claims as as its date of founding).
One bit of possible confusion is that the USMC (headed by a four-star Marine general) and the U.S. Navy (headed by a four-star admiral), are both in the Department of the Navy (headed by the civilian Secretary of the Navy). That is still the case today.
It was probably easier to train a test pilot/astronaut to be a poet, than train a poet to be a test pilot/astronaut. One of the major failings of NASA.
Then we could have been spared with the endless “Wow!” and “That’s really Fantastic/Amazing/Magnificent” eleventy gazillion times. Alas.
A structure repeated in the Department of the Air Force, under which both the US Air Force and US Space Force reside.