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Building a new spacecraft means knowing when to innovate and when to stick to flight-proven methods, and for Crew Dragon, SpaceX decided to ditch the buttons and dials and go to the full touchscreen. Astronauts who will fly it later this month have also had to ditch years of training and muscle memory, but it’s not all bad, they say.
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the two astronauts who will soon launch to the International Space Station aboard a Dragon capsule, will be the first to fly the spacecraft.
“It is probably a dream for every test pilot school student to have the opportunity to fly in an entirely new spacecraft, and I am fortunate to have that opportunity with my good friend here,” Behnken said in a press interview broadcast by The NASA. .
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Of course, they are more than adequately prepared: Not only have they spent countless hours in simulators, but they collaborated with SpaceX from the earliest days.
“It was in the order of at least 5 or 6 years ago that we went to SpaceX and evaluated a lot of different control mechanisms,” said Hurley. “They looked at all the ways to fly the vehicle, and they finally decided on a touch screen interface.”
“Of course, you know, growing as a driver my entire career, having a certain way of controlling the vehicle, this is certainly different,” he continued. “But we think about it with a very open mind, and we work with them to define the way you interact with it, the way your touches really registered on the screen, to be able to fly cleanly and not make mistakes when touching it, no potentially putting an incorrect entry. “
Compare the photo at the top of the story with the following shot from the physical simulator where astronauts learn to pilot the Russian Soyuz capsule:
There is not much legroom on either side, to be honest.
And of course, even modern aircraft are still a mess of physical controls, certainly familiar to the pilot, but undeniably dated in design.
Behnke noted that these spaceships are made with a very specific purpose in mind: to go and dock with the ISS. No one will go to Mars in one of these things, and that affects the way they are designed and piloted.
“The task of flying is very unique: approaching the space station and flying in close proximity, then slowly coming into contact, is perhaps a little different than what you would see flying a space shuttle or an airplane,” Behnke said with a characteristic euphemism ( the difference is night and day). “When we evaluate the touchscreen interface, we really focus on the task at hand and try to get good performance for that specific task.”
A prototype of the Crew Dragon has already been released to the ISS and returned, after being piloted autonomously and remotely.
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“It was challenging for us and for them at first to solve those different design issues, but we got to a point where the vehicle, from the point of view of manual flight with the touchscreen, flies very well,” said Hurley.
“The difference is that you have to be very deliberate when you’re making an inning, relative to what you would do with a stick,” he continued. “Because you know, when you’re flying an airplane, for example, if I push the stick forward, it will fall. In fact, I have to make a concerted effort to do it with the touch screen, if that makes sense.”
“I don’t think I go too far to say that the correct answer for all flights is not to switch to a touch screen, necessarily,” said Behnke. “But for the task at hand and to keep ourselves safe flying close to the ISS, the touchscreen will provide us with that capability.”
Hurley noted that an important advantage is that the controls and readings are all in the same place: “You are seeing the docking target, for example, right in the same place where you are looking to fly the vehicle. So it is a way a little bit different from doing it, but the overall design has worked very well. “
However, you can only learn so much in a simulator, and this first manned flight is still a great test, the feedback of which will inform the next iteration of the capsule. After all, it’s easier to push a software update than to rewire the 20 different button pots into a system that goes back decades.
“Specifically, as part of this test flight, designed sometime in the preflight phase, as well as closer to the space station, so that we can test the vehicle’s actual manual flight capability,” Hurley explained. “Just to see and verify that it handles the way we expect, and the way the simulator shows it to fly. It is a prudent part of our flight test like anything else, in case it happens that a future crew needs to take control manually and fly the spaceship. So we’re just doing our part, to test all the different capabilities of the Crew Dragon. “
We are sure to hear more about the version of Crew Dragon that will fly later this month if everything goes according to plan. In the meantime, I have asked SpaceX and NASA for more information on the control scheme and its development.
