What Will Future NASA Astronauts be "Flying"?

Navy Limits Nominations to Space Program, NY Times

“For what may be the first time since the inception of the American space program, the Navy is restricting nominations to the astronaut corps. The move comes nearly 50 years after Alan B. Shepard, a naval aviator, became the first American in space. The cutback, Navy officials say, comes as the service tries to retain the expertise it needs to fulfill its wartime obligations while experiencing an overall decline in its numbers.”

Editor’s note: This is, of course, rather shortsighted from a national space exploration perspective – to say nothing of walking away from a proud naval aviator/astronaut tradition. Yet the Navy is using these pilots for what they are trained for – now.

With the large number of astronauts already on the NASA payroll, the dwindling number of seats aboard shuttle missions, and the delay of the first Orion launches into 2016 (at the earliest) – spacecraft which are not “flown” like a shuttle, and the earliest lunar landings in the post-2020 period, why is it that NASA is going to be needing to recruit large numbers of new “aviator” astronauts in the first place?