Nearly two hours after NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley launched into space on a private rocket, they were also the first to pilot a spacecraft using only touch controls.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon avoids the familiar maze of manual buttons and switches found on older ships like the Space Shuttle or Apollo command modules. Instead, Crew Dragon pilots only have three large touchpads in front of them and a few spare buttons at the bottom. So for the brief time they have to manually control the spacecraft, they do so via a video game-style interface located on these screens. However, the voice communication of the crew with the ground, possibly for the purpose of increased reliability, was carried out using a fairly large wired microphone.
Behnken and Hurley ran a short test of the interface two hours after the successful launch, when SpaceX had it manually operated by Crew Dragon to make sure everything worked. The company broadcast live footage of the test, and although it was only a few taps away, it was surprising that the astronauts were changing the trajectory of their spacecraft using the same technology that smartphone users use to tweet, Instagram, browse email, and so on.
It is also noteworthy that the user interface is indeed extremely similar to the online flight simulator that SpaceX . At the time, the company pointed out that the simulator's interface has the same controls that NASA astronauts use to manually pilot the SpaceX Dragon 2 spacecraft.
Testing of the new interface appears to have been successful, although Bob Behnken noticed that the thermal camera image of the Earth briefly disappeared while Doug Hurley was piloting the spacecraft. SpaceX acknowledged the flickering and later told the astronauts that it was normal—the cameras had just turned on and hadn't reached "thermal equilibrium" yet. And, as the announcers said on the air, the flight test was "the last serious task" for the astronauts before docking, except for dinner. It may also be noted that Hurley, in the last frames of the above video, used a small working tablet to photograph the ship's touch screen controls.
Most of the Crew Dragon's maneuvers are supposed to be automatic, so if everything goes according to plan, the astronauts won't have to resort to manual control again during the mission. And while this new method of controlling the ship doesn't look all that impressive or look like interfaces from sci-fi movies, SpaceX's Crew Dragon touchscreens are definitely a big step forward.
Source: 3dnews.ru