Astronauts spend more time training than in space. Their time is spent in simulators and other training arenas, preparing for upcoming missions. The amount of time in space depends on the mission and the availability of launch vehicles. Astronauts also spend time preparing for future missions, including spacewalks and landing the spacecraft. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle, the wait time for a mission may be even longer.
Not surprisingly, astronauts undergo rigorous and lengthy training to do their job. They join the Astronaut Corps, usually as pilots or mission specialists, but then what? When do they go to space? How much time do they spend in space?
The truth is, an astronaut’s time is spent on far more training and preparing to go to space than is actually spent in space. An astronaut’s time is spent largely in the simulator and other training arenas, if any are planned for the upcoming mission.
Before the United States retired the Space Shuttle, those vehicles were the only means the United States had to launch humans into space, so an astronaut’s time in space depended on how often the Shuttle was launched and the missions that he had to perform. Is it docked with the International Space Station or was it primarily a science mission? All of these factors helped decide which astronauts should fly which missions.
When the United States resumes normal manned spaceflight, astronaut pilots, for example, will likely go on a mission or two to train as co-pilots before being made a spacecraft pilot. Pilots are also selected based on how much flying experience they have had, whether they have been test pilots and how much time they have already spent in space.
An astronaut’s time is spent between missions preparing for the next one. They work in large immersion tanks that mimic weightless conditions in order to learn how to perform spacewalks. Spacewalks were often used for repair missions on the International Space Station, the Hubble Telescope, or the Space Shuttle itself.
During the Shuttle years, a pilot astronaut’s time was spent in intensive training involving the flight of modified commercial aircraft that mimicked the flight characteristics of the Shuttle. The orbiter approached the runway at a steep angle and at over 300 miles per hour (483 kilometers per hour), so the pilots needed to learn how to land an orbiter whose characteristics are so different even from a jet fighter. reaction.
Due to the limited number of Shuttle missions, much of an astronaut’s time was spent on the ground. Some NASA analysts have estimated that the average waiting time between qualification and the first space mission was 105 months. With the Space Shuttle program now retired, it will stretch into a much longer wait this time, unless NASA decides to downsize the Astronaut Corps and not train more candidates until the agency has a program of more regular mission in place.
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