“I can safely tell you that it ain’t the same as trying to work in a zero g environment with no cues around you to let you know why your body is doing things that don’t make sense.”
How do you get that experience? You go through training. These gals went through that training.
You’ll note that their training was acknowledged but it apparently didn’t do much for them. They still made basic mistakes.
Training is followed by IOE, otherwise known as Initial Operation Experience. It’s true of all professions. If you want to be a mechanic on space vehicles, you have to have IOE and more experience before you are let loose on the important things. The problem with AAA’s - Affirmative Action Astronauts - is that they don’t have that.
This was demonstrated as I said on Gemini. Grissom barely made it back into the capsule alive, out of breath, overdue, tired and running out of O2. He didn’t understand the dynamics of simple operations in zero g like operating any tool requiring torque. And Grissom was a test pilot just like our erstwhile AAA’s. Aldrin by contrast wrote his dissertation at MIT on orbital mechanics of rendezvous and was well aware of the issues.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/12652
His mission (Gemini 12) was characterized by no mistakes, no drama, wide margins on time and O2 use.
And the training since then replicates and expands on Aldrin’s success. But it’s just training. You have to have experience, and that experience is different from what a decent airplane operator (”pilot”) does, or experiences. More like a fusion of a mechanic and an astrodynamics engineer. Which is why they’re called Mission Specialists, not Pilots.