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posted by martyb on Friday July 03 2020, @10:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the CPE-1704-TKS dept.

Software is making it easier than ever to travel through space, but autonomous technologies could backfire if every glitch and error isn’t removed.

When SpaceX’s Crew Dragon took NASA astronauts to the ISS near the end of May, the launch brought back a familiar sight. For the first time since the space shuttle was retired, American rockets were launching from American soil to take Americans into space.

Inside the vehicle, however, things couldn’t have looked more different. Gone was the sprawling dashboard of lights and switches and knobs that once dominated the space shuttle’s interior. All of it was replaced with a futuristic console of multiple large touch screens that cycle through a variety of displays. Behind those screens, the vehicle is run by software that’s designed to get into space and navigate to the space station completely autonomously.

[...] But over-relying on software and autonomous systems in spaceflight creates new opportunities for problems to arise. That’s especially a concern for many of the space industry’s new contenders, who aren’t necessarily used to the kind of aggressive and comprehensive testing needed to weed out problems in software and are still trying to strike a good balance between automation and manual control.

Nowadays, a few errors in over one million lines of code could spell the difference between mission success and mission failure. We saw that late last year, when Boeing’s Starliner capsule (the other vehicle NASA is counting on to send American astronauts into space) failed to make it to the ISS because of a glitch in its internal timer.

[...] There’s no consensus on how much further the human role in spaceflight will—or should—shrink. Uitenbroek thinks trying to develop software that can account for every possible contingency is simply impractical, especially when you have deadlines to make.

Chang Díaz disagrees, saying the world is shifting “to a point where eventually the human is going to be taken out of the equation.”

Which approach wins out may depend on the level of success achieved by the different parties sending people into space. NASA has no intention of taking humans out of the equation, but if commercial companies find they have an easier time minimising the human pilot’s role and letting the AI take charge, than[sic] touch screens and pilot-less flight to the ISS are only a taste of what’s to come.

MIT Technology Review

Which approach, do you think, is the best way to go forward ??


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Snotnose on Friday July 03 2020, @11:25PM

    by Snotnose (1623) on Friday July 03 2020, @11:25PM (#1015910)

    I'm the kind of guy that still likes to turn the knob when I change the volume. I can't tell you how many times I wanted the volume at exactly 7 1/8th of a turn, but the system locked me down to only being able to go to 7 or 7.5. -grin-

    I'm that same kinda guy. Except my 15 year old car has decided the steering wheel volume control now changes radio stations/cd tracks, the change stations/tracks does nothing, my sunroof sorta works, and I'm about the sell the car even though the mechanical s are great.

    Computers are great for maybe 10 years, after that stuff just breaks down. You can't really compare the lifetime of an electrolytic capacitor vs a crankshaft/camshaft/piston,piston rod/etc.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
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