Mission specialist? does the are any rank among them

[Pawelk198604]

I watched once preparation to space shuttle launch

when mission control made a com check

The ware asking, Commander, Pilot, MS1 MS2 and so on

So MS1 i assume mission specialist is senior over mission specialist 2? Right?

[smjjames]

I doubt it's strict like a military ranking and not all astro/cosmo/taiko/whatevernauts have military backgrounds. Plus there can be more than one mission specialist, whether it's the same part of the mission or different parts.

[Pawelk198604]

I doubt it's strict like a military ranking and not all astro/cosmo/taiko/whatevernauts have military backgrounds. Plus there can be more than one mission specialist, whether it's the same part of the mission or different parts.

all astronauts are military background, there was no civilian astronauts?

[lajoswinkler]

I might be wrong but today, most of them are civilians.

[Nibb31]

No, there was no ranking between Mission Specialists. The numbers are assigned to the seat positions in the flight deck, not ranking.

Originally, NASA astronauts were all top-level test pilots with huge egos, so when it came to giving callsigns to the seats on Gemini, they refused to have a "pilot" and "co-pilot" position, because the term "co-pilot" is typically used for rookie pilots. So NASA had to go with the Commander (CDR) and Pilot (PLT) callsigns.

When Apollo arrived, they needed a new callsign for the third crew member, who had to be a pilot. NASA wanted to use Commander, Senior Pilot, and Pilot. Again, the Astronaut refused, which is why they used Commander (CDR), CM Pilot (CMP), and LM Pilot (LMP), even though many of the Apollo missions didn't carry a LM.

On Skylab, the LM Pilot callsign was replaced by the term Science Pilot (SPT). And on ASTP, the third astronaut was Docking Module Pilot (DMP) although there was no "piloting" involved in the docking module.

With the STS program, NASA kept the the Commander (CDR) and Pilot (PLT) call signs, but because you couldn't reasonably have 6 or 7 "pilots", all the other crew members became either Mission Specialists (MS1-5) or Payload Specialists (PS1-2). Mission specialists were typically NASA astronauts, whereas Payload Specialists were non-NASA crew members (civilians, foreign nationals, scientists, industry employees, etc...). The Payload Specialist position was eliminated after Columbia.

Edited July 14, 2015 by Nibb31