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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @02:11PM (1 child)
automation is great ... until it isn't.
not sure this is relevant but netflix is super easy to use. i assume lots is automated.
i use netflix via "rub-off-the-number" from a card i paid cash to get.
this works really easy: go netflix domain, find "redeem code" and enter the number (add some captcha) and you're in ... or not.
now i don't know (blackbox) the back-end of netflix and how it does the code redeeming thing but when it didn't work for me ("sorry, try again later") all manner of nasty thoughts went thru my mind; afterall it worked before and everything else, including youtube and torrents were working fine on my computer.
ready to give up and accept the cash as gone "down the drain of non working prepaid cards" i did one final test: i connected to neighbours wifi and tried one last time to have the code number go thru. lo and behold, it worked.
the difference in the network setup was that in mine, all dns lookups went thru dnsmasq which asked tor (torrc:dnsport) whilst my neighbour had the cloudflare or google dns servers configured.
i think it kindda shows how automation can make things intended by automation to be very simple BE very simple but if you try to do something via the automated system for which it is not automated then expect "a red light and an apology "s
i'm sorry dave" like.
in conclusion (?) maybe, automation is good but do not skimp on precise and informatif error messages just because the system is "simple to use"?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday July 04 2020, @02:36PM
There is a long history of using robotic probes in space exploration.
The difference is that they can now make decisions based on available data instead of waiting for instructions, which can save a lot of time under bandwidth constraints and light speed communication delays.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-259 [nasa.gov]
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-mars-2020-rover-completes-its-first-drive [nasa.gov]
https://www.machinedesign.com/mechanical-motion-systems/article/21836761/helicopter-exploration-coming-to-mars-in-2020 [machinedesign.com]
If you look at the Pluto flyby, you can see that some of the photos taken were blanks or off-center, because the pre-programmed routine didn't perfectly match the sizes and locations of Pluto and its satellites. Could a degree of autonomy have helped to get more useful data? I'm not sure, but you only get one chance with a flyby.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]