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A comment on Blue Moon. Parent comment

Re:Blue Moon by grey-area on Friday May 10, 2019 @11:30AM (#19878684)
To take a real world example, Falcon 9 is completely autonomous during flight - the controllers on the ground can trigger an abort, and perhaps change the flight plan from a range of preselected options, but they're not going to attempt to take over the rocket and switch it to manual mode or something. They observe, they don't intervene during a normal flight, and if something does go wrong, they're not going to be able to save the situation. There is no pilot.
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Re:Blue Moon by nradov on Friday May 10, 2019 @12:05PM (#19879082)
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster. Unmanned boosters have always been automated.

Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree of manual control. This new generation of private manned capsules will be no different.

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Re:Blue Moon by grey-area on Friday May 10, 2019 @04:51PM (#19882116)
Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree

This is untrue for Soyuz or Dragon 2 - any capsule design is not pilotable. It will also be untrue for the upcoming starship for example. It might have crew but I struggle to think why it would have a pilot.

Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster.

Which just so happens to land itself.

The point I'm trying to make is that machines can land themselves perfectly well nowadays, and control software and its interaction with hardware is now too complex for puny humans to understand or interact with, so they're better off just letting it do its thing and land or crash - a human interaction during landing is not going to save the machine - things have moved on from the mooon landings.

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Re:Blue Moon by nradov on Friday May 10, 2019 @09:48PM (#19883979)
The latest Soyuz capsules still have an extensive set of manual displays and controls for the cosmonauts to use when necessary. The point is not to hand fly the spacecraft during re-entry, but rather to deal with system failures or unexpected situations which the autopilot can't handle.
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