How crew rotation works In real life?

[Pawelk198604]

I just wonder if certain astronaut have good cooperation, chemistry you can say, does is possible to send them with people their like, i see that it works in Apollo era.  

[YNM]

Most astronaut don't even fly twice... Probably not Gemini but it's closer.

[HebaruSan]

You could try looking for repeat pairings in these tables:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Shuttle_crews

[mikegarrison]

Crew Rotation.

Edited September 7, 2017 by mikegarrison

[KSK]

1 hour ago, YNM said:

Most astronaut don't even fly twice... Probably not Gemini but it's closer.

I'm not sure that was true even in the early days. Schirra flew on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo if I remember rightly and a good number of the Gemini astronauts went on to fly on Apollo missions. I'm not sure what the Soviet rotations looked like or look like. As for the Shuttle era - well take a look at @HebaruSan's table. No shortage of repeat flights there, especially for the pilots.

Regarding crew chemistry and selecting for that - I've read that the ethos for Gemini and Apollo was that any astronaut could fly with any other astronaut and standardised training would take care of the rest. Crews didn't have to like each other, provided they could tolerate each other enough to get the job done. And there was plenty of incentive for that given that not getting the job done tended to mean that you never got a chance at another flight.

How true that ethos was in practice I don't know, although given the amount of competition and number of high-achieving egos in the early astronaut corps, consistently picking crews that actively liked each other (as opposed to respecting the other's abilities) would have been rather challenging.

So you got the occasional team that really gelled - Conrad, Gordon and Bean on Apollo 12, is the one that always leaps to mind for me but you also got some really disparate personalities cooped up in the same capsule. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were a pretty good example of that.  

These days, 'good chemistry' and the ability to get on with your crew is much more a part of being an astronaut, or so I've read. Which doesn't surprise me at all, given that ISS missions are the only flights going and they last for months at a time.

Edited September 7, 2017 by KSK

[YNM]

46 minutes ago, KSK said:

I'm not sure that was true even in the early days. Schirra flew on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo if I remember rightly and a good number of the Gemini astronauts went on to fly on Apollo missions. I'm not sure what the Soviet rotations looked like or look like. As for the Shuttle era - well take a look at @HebaruSan's table. No shortage of repeat flights there, especially for the pilots.

Which means they're the small part. The larger part (like payload sp, science sp. etc) would fly less times.

Also, what I meant on "not" is that they tend to fly twice instead. Early spaceflight involve short missions which means they can fly more often. Even soviet's space stations involve short stays only until Mir (which is how they rake up impressive # of flights I think !). Current spaceflight involve keeping a massive speedy hunk of metal in working order for long times which mean they rake up a lot of "airtime" in one go. Sending someone to be posted there twice is more risky.

Edited September 7, 2017 by YNM

[MaxwellsDemon]

In the Soviet/Russian program, they tended to try to keep crews together, too-- even sometimes bumping an entire crew if one member was unready for flight for some reason (e.g., sick).  That's what happened with Soyuz 11, in a notable instance-- the three cosmonauts that flew to Salyut were the backup team.   It wasn't a written-in-stone rule, though, just an intention.

[Pawelk198604]

On 7.09.2017 at 10:12 AM, KSK said:

I'm not sure that was true even in the early days. Schirra flew on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo if I remember rightly and a good number of the Gemini astronauts went on to fly on Apollo missions. I'm not sure what the Soviet rotations looked like or look like. As for the Shuttle era - well take a look at @HebaruSan's table. No shortage of repeat flights there, especially for the pilots.

Regarding crew chemistry and selecting for that - I've read that the ethos for Gemini and Apollo was that any astronaut could fly with any other astronaut and standardised training would take care of the rest. Crews didn't have to like each other, provided they could tolerate each other enough to get the job done. And there was plenty of incentive for that given that not getting the job done tended to mean that you never got a chance at another flight.

How true that ethos was in practice I don't know, although given the amount of competition and number of high-achieving egos in the early astronaut corps, consistently picking crews that actively liked each other (as opposed to respecting the other's abilities) would have been rather challenging.

So you got the occasional team that really gelled - Conrad, Gordon and Bean on Apollo 12, is the one that always leaps to mind for me but you also got some really disparate personalities cooped up in the same capsule. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were a pretty good example of that.  

These days, 'good chemistry' and the ability to get on with your crew is much more a part of being an astronaut, or so I've read. Which doesn't surprise me at all, given that ISS missions are the only flights going and they last for months at a time.

That i mean, i heard that Alan Bean and Charles "Pete" Conrad was good buddies and Pete Conrad want  Alan Bean on his crew  

[DDE]

On ‎07‎.‎09‎.‎2017 at 7:15 PM, MaxwellsDemon said:

In the Soviet/Russian program, they tended to try to keep crews together, too-- even sometimes bumping an entire crew if one member was unready for flight for some reason (e.g., sick).  That's what happened with Soyuz 11, in a notable instance-- the three cosmonauts that flew to Salyut were the backup team.   It wasn't a written-in-stone rule, though, just an intention.

That's probably because each of those could come from a different cosmonaut corps - the Soviet Union sometimes had three-five different units with technically separate training (military pilots, Academy of Science, Korolev's engineers, the admittedly often-token female program, and the abortive Academy of Science science journalist corps).

Edited September 9, 2017 by DDE