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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> Further, even if successful reentry were possible, the shuttle could not be landed entirely from the ground—there was no way for Mission Control to have extended the shuttle's landing gear or the air probes necessary to judge velocity once in the atmosphere. Those functions (as well as starting the shuttle's auxiliary power unit) could only be invoked by physically throwing switches in the cockpit during approach and landing.

It is a mystery to me why it was designed this way. I'd design it so that if the crew were disabled, it could be brought back by mission control.

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The reasoned assumption is that if a space crew is disabled, it's because they are dead. The article is interesting because it treats the possibility that a rescue was feasible as if it were viable. It wasn't.

The addition of the cable is more a reflection of the Shuttle Program's changing mission profiles. Remote control makes sense when docking and undocking from the ISS. It makes sense as a way to test unmanned flight operations to service it. But it was still a cable, not an iPhone app.

Once Columbia was far enough from the launch pad that the crew survival systems added in the wake of Challenger could be used, they were "dead men walking". Though we might want to point to Apollo 13 as a reason for hope, it's not a good analogy. It's run what ya' brung: There are no tow trucks in space. Remote control would not have changed that.

The design paradigm that led to the space shuttle is probably an evolutionary dead end. Space craft design looks more like 'nix or biological viruses than Windows or walruses. The fact that the engineering solution that allowed remote control was boosting additional grams in the form of a 28 foot cable rather than upgrades to modular avionics points to the inflexibility of the shuttle design -- Columbia in particular was the oldest in a line of one-off handbuilt airframes.

I thought it was done to legitimise crew requirement - just so one could say "No, the shuttle cannot fly without humans on board" Nasa was threatened by expendable launchers from military and there were fears it would put human space launches on hold

I recall reading that the reason the landing gear had to be lowered manually was because once deployed there was no way to retract it. Reentry with the landing gear lowered would result in a loss of crew and vehicle.

Basically, if anything went wrong and it was deployed at the wrong time it was game over. In the grand scheme of things it was probably fairly prudent to reduce it to a big red button instead of something that could be operated remotely or automatically versus having the ability to remotely land the shuttle in the event all the crew was incapacitated.

For the life I of me I can't find the reference at the moment... I was on a wiki binge on the shuttle program about a week ago and just can't remember whereabouts I saw this.

The shuttle was marketed to all people as capable of all things, leading to some peculiar .mil requirements, and the fairly reasonable cold war fear was the .ru would "borrow" a shuttle of ours and take a look at the spooky payload. Now this would really piss the DoD off if there were american military personnel on board, but if the taxi between a space station and the ground happened to have no humans but did have some spooky NSA satellite on board they could wiggle in some kind of salvage claim.

Maybe the .ru couldn't get away with it politically, but maybe Libya in the bad old days or something... Also I don't know if even the most optimistic "everything for everyone" marketing went this far outside Larry Niven sci fi books, but I could totally imagine if we sold F16 to Pakistan maybe they'd buy a shuttle if it was economic and then India would try to steal it from the ground. Or use a re-entering shuttle as a weapon, 9/11 WTC style.

Its not far fetched. The Iranians stole one of our spooky drones a couple years ago by broadcasting very strong GPS signals and the drone designers not using the authenticated stream making this hack possible.

If you sell something as "do everything for everyone" then you're going to end up with weird "legacy" requirements.

And add more cost and complexity to an already costly and complex piece of equipment.

Fact is, when the crew are disabled, 99.99% [1] of the time, so is the entire shuttle, i.e. catastrophically "disabled".

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/?Page=4

IIRC it was done deliberately because the astronauts demanded that the shuttle not be able to fly without them. I always assumed this was a job protection scheme, though more charitably I guess it could have been to make sure that NASA was always equally focused on getting the astronauts home as on getting their expensive hardware back.

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