>The ISS is a special case. That requires a pilot who can take manual control should the docking system go wrong. Yes, but the criteria for being that pilot ha

>The ISS is a special case. That requires a pilot who can take manual control should the docking system go wrong. Yes, but the criteria for being that pilot has changed. Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur were Crew-2's commander and pilot. NASA hired both as mission specialists; neither would ever have been hired as shuttle pilots, as they don't have high-performance jet pilot experience (100% a requirement since NASA Astronaut Group 2) and neither went to test pilot school (not always a requirement, but pretty close to being so). I don't see any mention of fixed-wing flight experience in Kimbrough's NASA biography, something many mission specialists do have on their own. SpaceX has enough confidence in its systems to have people like Kimbrough and McArthur piloting spacecraft, which is a testament to their training and SpaceX's fly-by-wire systems. But the piloting they do is very simplified to what shuttle and previous NASA spacecraft required.