From what I remember a donation to the hospital made you enter the pool from which a winner for a seat on the flight was drawn. The planned spaceflight is called "Inspiration 4" and has a Wikipedia entry already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspiration4
Ah, that flight. It is a purchased flight. My understanding is that while they can throw the word "commander" and "pilot" around, that this will be a purely automated/ground-controlled exercise.
Indeed, even though that has not been that different on the crew rotation flights to ISS. Doug Hurley (iirc - might have been Bob Behnken instead?) got to fly Crew Dragon manually during the first crewed mission "Demo 2" but the spacecraft is meant to bring people where they should be all by itself (and with help from ground control).
The ISS is a special case. That requires a pilot who can take manual control should the docking system go wrong. A stuck jet on approach could shatter the station and so you need someone who can take over and make very fast avoidance decisions. The recent incident with a docked module was a huge reminder of those dangers.
>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.
