How about a tour of the developing Orion capsules' prototype interior, courtesy of Design News magazine? If you'll recall, the Orion capsule had its maiden voyage last December and is currently in the running to be the ultimate vehicle which will carry man to Mars (assuming it gets chosen over the competing designs).
There's an interesting thread of ideas in the comments too. The idea is that space flight ends up being less like a test pilot's flights - a few hours in a new plane to work out kinks - and more like submarine missions. A test pilot can often punch out; pull the handle and exit the plane. A submariner will generally be on a mission for months in a very hostile environment, and they generally can't punch out. Submariners either resolve their problems or go down with the ship - sometimes suddenly and with no time to figure things out. Astronauts, as we've seen too often in the last 30 years, also go down with their ship suddenly, with no time to do anything about it.
Go read...
-- Glass cockpits with the infinitely reconfigurable options software engineers have can generate so many options the controls become less usable... --
ReplyDeleteThis is both true and preventable. Having spent many hours over NATOPS manuals that instruct American military pilots in how to use their cockpit displays, I can assure you of that latter claim. However, it requires a specific mindset that not all software designers share, and a clear, well drawn set of requirements that focuses exclusively on the mission, which forbids the addition of "bells and whistles" irrelevant to it.
In military engineering, the sovereign remedy is standing a violator up against the wall and shooting him, pour encourager les autres. Sadly, this practice has fallen into disfavor, which goes a long way to explaining the B-2, the F-22, and the F-35.
Unfortunately, "industry scuttlebutt" is that it also goes a long way toward explaining Airbus (Flight 447) and some others.
ReplyDeleteSo they say...
I cut my teeth on panels that were not only all analog, but also almost totally mechanical. Standard gauge configuration was a horizontal needle to display "normal", allowing very fast eye sweeps across the panel. A needle not within a couple degrees of horizontal earned a more detailed look.
ReplyDeleteGot to look at a partially glass cockpit in a friend's toy a while back, the result of a major maintenance cycle and extensive upgrade, and despite it being "the wave of the future," can't say I like it much. Lots more info in much greater detail and faster response than gauges, but harder to read and easier to get lost in. To my mind it makes it very easy to violate the First Rule which is "fly the plane."