Intended to scout in advance of aircraft carrier groups using long-range radar, the Sailfish class were designed for a high surface speed.

However, they achieved a speed only a few knots higher than converted World War II radar picket submarines.

Salmon conducted her shakedown cruise between 19 February and 10 May 1957, ranging from Newport, Rhode Island, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Salmon conducted local operations in southern California waters, as a unit of Submarine Division 33 (SubDiv 33), until she began her first western Pacific deployment on 23 September.

For the remainder of the year she participated in fleet training exercises and special operations, with port calls at Yokosuka, Japan; Hong Kong; Manila and Subic Bay, Philippines; and Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

Giving up a large radome from her superstructure, she gained instrumented Regulus missileguidance capability and improved, longer range sonar.

Salmon departed San Diego, California, on 17 July and sailed to Pearl Harbor where her crew received Regulus missile guidance training, then proceeded to Japan and joined Seventh Fleet on 21 August.

She subsequently operated with antisubmarine warfare (ASW) hunter-killer groups in fleet exercises and often engaged in free-play battle problems with individual surface units.

She joined Submarine Flotilla (SubFlot) 7 of the Seventh Fleet on 14 September and conducted operations in Japanese and southwest Pacific waters until returning to San Diego on 20 April 1966.

On 1 June, she was redesignated an auxiliary research submarine and given hull classification symbol AGSS-573 for her role as mother sub and underway submerged launching and recovery platform for the experimental mini-subs.

However, delays in the program resulted in her return to San Diego for local operations, following preliminary trials at Puget Sound.

From there, she visited Buckner Bay, Okinawa; Bangkok, Thailand; Sasebo, Yokosuka, and Kobe, Japan; and Hong Kong.

In April, she rescued survivors from the Japanese coastal freighter Koei Maru Number 2 which sank about 30 nautical miles (56 km) south of the entrance to Tokyo Bay.