Fucking hey yes. Beautiful…
Thought I was going crazy with all the “of course I still love you.”
I love living near enough to see the launches from my yard. Beautiful!
The other droneship is named “Just Read the Instructions” which may be a bit too on point for a first mission.
I managed to dock that on my first try, but it also showed one of the things that frustrates me about digital interfaces. As I got close to docking, my yaw and pitch (relative to the station) were not exactly zero. So I’d be rotating a little bit to the right, but if I clicked the ‘left’ button just one time, I was rotating a little bit to the left. There didn’t seem to be any way to dial the granularity down to the level of precision that I needed. I had to alternate ‘left’-‘right’ (and ‘up’-‘down’) in order to hold my orientation correct for docking.
I’m really digging the touchscreen interfaces. They’re very responsive, and their general design aesthetic seems similar to Tesla (no surprise there). Even though I can’t see too many of the details, I enjoy seeing Bob and Doug poking around, popping up menus, changing view modes, etc. I’ve love it if SpaceX could do a full online simulator, with all the notifications, telemetry displays, earth maps, etc.
All in all the mission has been amazing so far. Looks like a very smooth ride. Looking forward to SpaceX capturing the flag.
Also, in case anyone’s wondering about the value of touchscreens vs. physical controls:
Apollo 11 was almost stuck on the moon because they snapped off the circuit breaker switch for the ascent engine (probably while wedging open the hatch door, which was stuck due to residual interior pressure).
They managed to stick a pen in the hole and flip it on that way, so they lucked out. If the switch had broken in some other way, maybe leaving debris in the hole, the astronauts would have died on the moon. Touchscreens are stronger, have no bits to catch on suits or equipment, and are redundant. Basically everything in space happens slowly and deliberately, so there’s almost no value to the advantages of physical controls in terms of operating them without looking or depending on muscle memory.
Awesome Launch, beautiful! Between Bob and Doug Launching from CC and eaglelets launching on live cam at ETSU I’m feeling pretty emotional today.
Bet those guys are thinking, “Thank GOD I got off that planet!”
There’s no question that, for the vast majority of controls, you want screens rather than physical controls. Never do it in hardware/materially if you can do it in software/virtually. It just gives you so much more flexibility and expandability. Fighter jet controls have also been going towards glass if you look at the F-35 cockpit: https://www.google.com/search?q=f-35+cockpit&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwi0yZ7DydzpAhXEWDABHeeBBT0Q2-cCegQIABAA&oq=f-35+cockpit&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIECAAQQzICCAAyAggAMgIIADICCAAyAggAMgYIABAHEB4yBggAEAcQHjIGCAAQBxAeMgYIABAHEB5Q_jZYvTtg_DxoAHAAeACAAagBiAHnBJIBAzAuNJgBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1n&sclient=img&ei=59XSXvS5DsSxwbkP54OW6AM&bih=967&biw=1594&rlz=1C1SQJL_enCA829CA829#imgrc=I5ZsUO8ElqM3YM
It does make me wonder in which situations you do want physical controls. Anything where you want immediate control seems like it would require physical controls. Aside from that, there might be other cases. A comparison to car design may also be enlightening. If Apple launches a car, it’ll be 1 wheel, 1 screen, 1 color and you have to send it back to the factory to change the oil.
One curious thing about humans is that we’re able to treat a vehicle or other machine as an extension of our bodies. The major controls of a car, airplane, computer, piano, or even milling machine fade into the background with enough practice, and it starts to feel like the machine is simply a part of you.
Those types of controls will want to stay physical, because as I see it they depend on the natural flexibility of our brains in reconfiguring our physical outputs. I don’t know if this property is unique to humans or we’re simply the best at it, but I think our advanced tool use reflects a repurposing of brain structures evolved to deal with injury, etc. The flexibility needed to deal with the loss of a few fingers gets used to treat a hammer or aileron as an advanced limb.
But stuff that doesn’t need to operate as an extension of the body? Virtual all the way. And for a largely autonomous spacecraft, that’s almost everything.
First known violation of Betteridge’s law of headlines:
Aviation Week, Mar 29, 2004: Can Tiny SpaceX Rock Boeing?
Answer: Yes. (granted, SpaceX is no longer tiny)
Rumor has it that “Just Read the Instructions” has departed Port Canaveral for the next Starlink flight, possibly as early as Tuesday.
Take off, in the great blue sky, take off, it’s a beauty way to go!
Touchscreens are a fine replacement for physical controls that are either on, or off. The light switches in my apartment are like that, and I assume the switch on Apollo 11 was too.
But I don’t want to use ‘L’ and ‘R’ buttons to steer my car. And I found the control in that docking simulator to be rather frustrating. What are we supposed to do when 2 pushes are not enough, and 3 are too many?
I don’t think that is a problem with touchscreens, per se, but of the magnitude of the increment/decrement a single button touch imparts. A joystick would have the same issue.
I was amazed at how uncrowded the cabin was. The astronauts didn’t look like they’d been popped into a hole like a spark plug in an engine. You could see their feet! And their legs. No chance of bumping into anything by accident.
See my post above. Controls which act as an extension of the body should stay physical. Others, not so much. Astronauts don’t so much pilot the Dragon as much as just give it a set of instructions.
Just a minor limitation of that particular game. For one, it should have had an autonomous “zero rotation” button. It could also have had a scale factor button: something that changes a single click from 1 m/s, to 10 cm/s, to 1 cm/s. Probably the real thing has more options.
The physical thrusters are digital: they’re only on or off. So the way to control the applied impulse is by changing the amount of time they’re on, so there is a lower limit. I suspect it’s pretty small but in fact there is a lower limit as to how much impulse can be applied (the time it takes the valve to switch on and off).
Spacecraft typically have a deadband, so as to not force the thrusters to fire continuously trying to maintain a perfect orientation. That is, they’re given a bit of slack so that they can drift one way, then only when the difference exceeds the limit do they get a push the other way. IIRC, this was actually an issue on the recent Boeing mission–they used up a lot more propellant than they hoped for because they got stuck in a no-deadband state.
Bob and Doug have named their capsule Endeavour, after the space shuttle they last both flew.
From a usability standpojnt, touch screens are hit and miss. Physical buttons and switches provide tactile feedback and offer ‘Affordances’ which give us an intuitive sense of how to use them. They may be easier to use in high vibration environments. And of course, you can still use them if the display fails. Glass cockpit engineers constantly fight between the flexibility of touchscreens and usability.
For example, most people really prefer physical controls in a car. I can reach for, feel, and turn my AC temp knob without taking my eyes off the road. If AC temp is controlled through a touch screen, then unless it is designed exceedingly well I will have to take my eyes off the road to use it.
As another example, I am currently typing on my iPad, I hate it, and make constant errors. I probably type twice as fast on a physical keyboard with maybe 10% of the errors. Tactile feedback and affordances make all the difference in the world.
Part of the problem is the godawful state of interaction design. I would like to find the UI designers for my Ford entertainment system and send them to a special hell where every attempt to stop the torture requires them to navigate through half a dozen slowly loading screens while trying to drive, and where any missed button press on the screen forces them to start over. Even in aviation you see crazy things like landing gear switches that move sideways insteqd of up and down. People with planes like that sometimes find themselves having to use a LOT of power to taxi off the runway…
Give a UI ‘designer’ with that level of skill a touchscreen to work with, and they’ll often turn out an unusable mess. At least SpaceX/Tesla seem to do good touchscreen design, but I would still prefer physical buttons and knobs for at least the primary flight functions, and put the auxiliary stuff and information display on the screen.