Astronaut

People who pass NASA screening are officially called astronaut candidates. A candidate must complete a one-year training and evaluation period to be designated as an astronaut and be eligible for flight-related jobs. During this year of training, classroom work covers topics such as spacecraft design, aeronautics, orbital mechanics, space medicine, meteorology, oceanography, and astronomy. Candidates begin to learn about the space shuttle through self-study workbooks, computer-based training aids, and presentations by experienced astronauts, designers, and flight engineers. Candidates also go through basic water survival, land survival, and high-altitude training. Candidates are expected to use their own time to stay physically fit and meet flight time requirements.

After the candidate year, a new astronaut’s first assignments are supporting jobs for shuttle flights. An astronaut may help design the experiments or cargo that the space shuttle will carry. Other common jobs include helping prepare the launch site, testing software, and establishing procedures for the mission. Astronauts perform these support jobs until they are assigned to a specific flight, and they return to support positions upon their return.

Training for a particular mission is designed to take astronauts from basic understanding of concepts into detailed knowledge of the specifics of the mission. For example, astronauts may build on their candidate training about orbital mechanics to set the exact geometry and velocity of the orbit the space shuttle will follow on the mission. Depending on the assigned role and prior flight experience, training may last as short as nine months, or as long as 24 months for complex scientific flights with many experiments.

Most flight training occurs either in simulators or with the real flight hardware. Different simulators fill various training needs. NASA’s Shuttle Mission Simulators (SMS) can faithfully simulate nearly every element of a flight (but not weightlessness or the real view out the window). Teams of instructors program computers with scripts of events that test the knowledge of both the shuttle crew and the ground control team, to teach them to work together effectively. On Spacelab flights, these scenarios also include the international science teams, who are immersed in the scenario along with Mission Control and the crew through networked simulation computers. Intensive SMS sessions fill most of a crew’s time in the last few months before flight, turning the individual skills and knowledge that have been built in other trainers and simulators into team skills.

Shuttle pilot astronauts practice the final 9,000 m (30,000 ft) of approach and landing in a specially modified jet called the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA). Computers, special wing flaps, and engines operating in reverse thrust make this sleek jet plummet toward Earth like a space shuttle, and one side of the cockpit has real shuttle displays and controls. Astronauts study procedures and hone skills for EVAs, or spacewalks, in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, an immense swimming pool in which full-sized mock-ups of the shuttle or other flight hardware are submerged. Astronauts practice boarding the space shuttle and emergency procedures for leaving the shuttle in detailed mock-ups of the shuttle crew cabin. Mission specialists verify checklists and practice operations with the robotic arm in the Manipulator Development Facility. Virtual reality tools are gaining use in astronaut training for very complex jobs such as Hubble Space Telescope repair missions.

Some of the training simulators model the experiments, satellites, and other equipment that make up the mission’s cargo, but mission specialists go to the laboratory or facility preparing the equipment to gain detailed understanding of how it is built and how it will operate. The longer flights and complex scientific experiments that are increasingly common can have many possible unpredictable results or events, so training for these missions must include detailed understanding of the equipment and the objectives of the mission or experiment. This way, astronauts will be able to make sound judgments based on the situation.