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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.
Which approach, do you think, is the best way to go forward ??
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday July 04 2020, @01:05AM (3 children)
Read the book "Digital Apollo", which goes into this in great detail. It was recognised even half a century ago, with the relatively primitive control systems available at the time, that spacecraft control was beyond the capabilities of humans. The Soviets put this into practice and automated as much as possible. The US, who had to deal with macho test pilots who were used to running the show, tried to provide the illusion of pilot/astronaut control while automating as much as they could behind the scenes, in a battle that stretched for years.
Humans are necessary for handling exception conditions, but everyday control needs to be handled by capable automated systems.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday July 04 2020, @06:40AM (2 children)
Good luck handling one of those exception conditions when there's no option for it on the touch screen.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 04 2020, @02:48PM (1 child)
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @04:41PM
"Set SCE to Aux"