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Comment by theanirudh | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how they manage not to have accidental taps on the touch screen during liftoff and or re-entry. As I understand there are a lot of G's and violent vibrations and I would assume it's hard to keep a steady hand?

(Atleast this is my understanding from watching Apollo documentaries/movies etc.)

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Liftoff and re-entry are completely automated. The astronauts are passengers and don't interact with the craft during these maneuvers. This was the case even for Apollo.

The Crew Dragon seats also have physical arm-rest controls. Those arm-rest controls are what the astronauts use under acceleration, and IIRC they're primarily comms controls.

I doubt anything on screen can affect flight during lift-off or re-entry. Anything it might had damn well better be locked-out anyway. Lift off's automated and I'd think any significant failure of that automation would be a cue to abort (physical control for that); as for re-entry, by the time you're deep enough in atmosphere that things are vibrating you're really just falling with style, and there's no "flying" to do nor anything to control.

Watching the launch, I noticed they seem to have finger rests below the screens. I wonder if this is the reason.

The screen compensates, and they train with vibrations in mind.

and they also don't have anything to do during launch except maybe abort with the physical handle.

Impressive, especially considering some of the touch targets are pretty small.

They probably aren't bothering with using non critical buttons on a launch that is automated anyway

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