Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!rice!titan!phil From: phil@titan.rice.edu (William LeFebvre) Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle Subject: Re: Unmanned shuttle capability? Summary: oops Message-ID: <2170@kalliope.rice.edu> Date: 19 Nov 88 16:30:03 GMT References: <350@igor.Rational.COM> <2160@kalliope.rice.edu> Sender: usenet@rice.edu Reply-To: phil@Rice.edu (William LeFebvre) Organization: Rice University, Houston Lines: 21 In article <2160@kalliope.rice.edu> I wrote: >In article <350@igor.Rational.COM> dsb@Rational.COM (David S. Bakin) writes: >... >>Can the US Shuttle be totally machine controlled from launch to landing? > >No. And altering it to do so (or altering it to be completely remote >controlled from the ground) would require extensive modifications. And it >probably ain't worth it. Well, I was wrong there. Although it is true that it cannot do a totally machine controlled landing, it can *almost* do one. There are a few switches in the flight deck that can only be thrown by a humanoid. So it turns out that modifying it to do an automatic landing would not be very hard. It also turns out that the pilot does not need to do all that much (just throw a few switches), but he ends up doing a fair amount of it himself anyway. I guess the pilots want to feel useful. William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University