How much time of astronaut is actually spent in space?

It is no surprise that astronauts undergo strict and lengthy training to do their work. They join the Astronaut Corps, usually as pilots or missions specialists, but what about? When do they go to space? How much time does they spend in space?

The truth is that the time of astronaut spends much more training and preparing to go into space than they really spend in space. Astronaut's time is largely spent in the simulator and in other training sessions if they are designed for the upcoming mission.

Before the US retired the shuttle, these vehicles were the only means that the US had started people in space, so the astronaut's time depended on the launch of the shuttle and what was embedded to do. Was it anchored with an international space station or was it above all a scientific mission? All these factors helped decide which astronauts were proposed to fly on which missions.

When the US restores a regular space flight with a crew, astronapingThe pilots are likely to go to one or two missions to train as co -founders before they are named by a spacecraft pilot. Pilots are also selected depending on how many flights they had, whether they were test pilots and how much time they had already spent in space.

Astronaut's time is spent among the missions prepared for others. They work in large diving tanks that mimic weightless conditions to learn to perform cosmic feet. Spacewalks were often used to repair missions at an international space station, a Hubble telescope or on the shuttle itself.

Over the years of the shuttle, a pilot astronaut was spent in intensive training, including a flying modified retail aircraft that imitated the flying shuttle characteristics. Orbiter approached the runway at a steep angle and at more than 300 miles per hour (483 kilometers per hour), so pilots needed to learn how to land orbiter, whose properties are so different from the fighter nozzles.

Due to the limited number of shuttles, a lot of astronaut's time was spent on Earth. Some NASA analysts estimate that the average waiting time between qualifications and the first space mission was 105 months. Since the Space Shuttle program, which has now retired, is stretched into a much longer wait if NASA does not decide the Corps of the Astronaut Corps and does not train more candidates until the agency has a regular mission schedule.