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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: 5, Insightful) by PinkyGigglebrain on Saturday July 04 2020, @05:17AM
until someone dies as a result of the automation failing because the programmers not accounting for something that could have been fixed by flipping the right switch or worse, the control system failing due to a power surge or other hardware failure.
What would have happened to Apollo 12 after it was hit by lightning if Astronaut Alan Bean had not been able to flip SCE to AUX [wikipedia.org]?
The crew of Apollo 13 probably would have died if not for their ability to manually control every part of the electrical systems of the craft.
Some automation is fine, but when it gets right down to it on a space craft you want to have a backup that allows complete manual control over the craft.
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